The third great wave

The basic premise of the article (that there are three distinct industrial revolutions with &quot;fallow&quot; periods dividing them) seems to me to be very easy to poke holes in. It&#x27;s not as if some fundamental force of innovation switched on in 1760 and then faded away in 1830, only to reappear forty years later, as the graph in the article implies. Historians of globalization have been thinking about this stuff in a different way for quite some time now (for instance, Jan de Vries and his concept of a 17th and early 18th century &quot;Industrious Revolution&quot; is quite influential and has a lot of merit in my opinion).<p>It also isn&#x27;t clear to me why the author(s) consider the automation of the 19th and 20th centuries, which they allow to have demolished entire industries and ways of life, to have been less threatening than the present wave of automation. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that the people who write and read the Economist were those who benefited from the disruptions of the 19th and 20th centuries--and are now in a position to rationalize away their negatives--than with any qualitative shift in how innovation or automation is taking place.

The one thing a magazine like The Economist won&#x27;t dwell on is the wars that these sorts of disruptions have triggered in the past.<p>Wars like the French and American revolutions were fueled by an upheaval in weaponry and technology that rendered arrangements like feudalism obsolete. Primitive phalanx and cavalry style engagements could not suppress ordinary commoners anymore, if they had enough muskets and gun powder.<p>With wars like the American Civil War and both World Wars, we saw total war emerge. Mass production, mechanized logistics and air power were added to the mix and effectively destroyed all traces of overt slavery and royalist monarchy, wherever heavy weapons technologies saw wide implementation.<p>So what&#x27;s next? Full Spectrum War sounds ominous, but even that seem like it&#x27;s probably just Total War&#x27;s pocket watch dressed up as a calculator wrist watch...

Humanity used to be optimistic about this moment, didn&#x27;t it?<p>In 1900 people hoped their work would be replaced by robots. Today people fear their work will be replaced by robots.<p>Hmm.

A lot of people are talking about &quot;basic income&quot; as a solution. Just give everyone a fixed amount of money each month, without means-testing. Then maybe the machines can make the world a utopia for everyone, instead of having a few people at the top who own everything while the masses are desperate.<p>Personally I think we should pay for it, initially, with a carbon fee, and kill two birds with one stone.

At some point you get a small amount of very rich people with a large pile of very cheap stuff that they cannot sell as nobody else has any money and even if they did, the marginal cost of producing the stuff is less than the cost of running a market to sell it in.

A better breakdown of economic waves &#x2F; technological transitions comes from Robert Ayres, see his &quot;Technological Transformations and Long Waves&quot;, February 1989:<p><a href="http://webarchive.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/RR-89-001.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webarchive.iiasa.ac.at&#x2F;Admin&#x2F;PUB&#x2F;Documents&#x2F;RR-89-001....</a><p>Ayres defines <i>five</i> technological transformations. The period of most significant change came with the third, spanning roughly 1870-1890 (with further refinement of major inventions since). I&#x27;d argue that the rate of transformation has slowed since.<p>1. ~1775: cotton textiles, iron, and steam.<p>2. ~1825: railroads and steamships, telegraph.<p>3. 1870-1890: steel, coal-tar chemistry &amp; dyes, petroleum, sewing machines &amp; bicycles, internal combustion engines, electrical light &amp; power, telephone, automobiles, photography &amp; cinema.<p>4. 1930-1950: Petrochemicals, synthetics, plastics, pharmaceuticals, communications -- radio, TV, microwaves, solid-state electronics &amp; computers, aircraft &amp; transportation.<p>5. 1975-present: Ill-defined. Slowing innovation, growing economy, declining industrial activity in the US, growing prevalence of computers.<p>Note that Ayres was writing in 1989, immediately prior to the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web. Though these have revolutionalized <i>information access</i> and communications, their overall influence on everyday life has been less profound.

This is a poor article about an important subject. A more useful way to look at it is to make lists of jobs humans can do, and those which machines can do better. Over time, the second column grows. The first column, not so much.<p>What&#x27;s different this time is that computers are so general purpose, and so cheap. If a computer can do it at all, it can do it more cheaply than a human.

I&#x27;m not really on board with either the doomsayers or their reassuring don&#x27;t-be-a-luddite adversaries.<p>OTOH, It think statements like <i>&quot;capitalism itself may be under threat&quot;</i> are not necessarily nonsensical. Our world is changing incredibly fast. People in their 30s went to school without computers. People in their 40s started work without computers. People in their teens have grown up using the internet as a semi-integrated part of their brain.<p>That&#x27;s slightly hyperbolic I suppose, but it isn&#x27;t nonsensical. The impact of technology on labour markets is profound in a way that genuinely challenges primary cultural institutions, like the concept of <i>your profession</i>. If you are a social media manager in 2014 what will you be doing in 2044?<p>Who TF knows where cultural institutions need to go to keep up with the changing realities of this world. Capitalism, representative democracy, education, family. These are all institutions that will need to find a way to survive.

Ah... wave of industrliazation. I was hoping to read something about Fishbone :-) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska#Third_wave_ska" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ska#Third_wave_ska</a>

&gt; Moore’s law is now approaching the end of its working life.<p>That has been said many times before...

Apologies for asking a question unrelated to the message of the article, but I&#x27;m a bit confused by the use of &#x27;discomfited&#x27; in the first sentence. From my understanding, &#x27;discomforted&#x27; seems more accurate, and is a more commonly used word anyways.<p>Do I misunderstand the difference between discomfit and discomfort, or did they use the wrong word?<p>EDIT: I suppose it might just be a matter of wanting to come across sophisticated. At a later point the article uses &#x27;insoluble&#x27; where &#x27;unsolvable&#x27; would&#x27;ve been perfectly fine and probably easier to understand for most people.