Notes on Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Part 1: welcome to the hyper meritocracy

1 work and wages in iWorld

Diminished job opportunities

Imbalance in tech growth between industries

Key question: are you good at working with intelligent machines

Are u competing against a computer or is it helping u compete

Intelligent machine analysis getting good

Voice analysis to help with negotiations

2 big earners and losers

What is scarce: quality land and natural resources, ip, quality labor with unique skills

Not scarce: unskilled labor, capital (money in bank earning no return)

Drones create jobs; requires 168 ppl to keep drone running for 24 hrs

Labor that can augment new tech will earn well

Marketing as seminal sector in new economy

Making ppl feel better helps sell more

Competition for attention of high earners

Top earners from Internet and hedge fund sectors

Knowing how to spot and recruit those who are good at working with mechanized intelligence

The better the world gets at measuring value, the more competitive it will become (hyper meritocracy)

Acquihiring

Engineers worth 500K-1M

Managers play important role in coordinating complex processes

One bad employee can ruin big complex system

Women more conscientious and reliable so will get more critical and personal service jobs where importance on reliability

Monomaniacal commitment and extreme level of skill will still go more to men

Important skills: exactness of execution over accumulation of brute force, consistent coordination over time, morale to motivate production and coordination

Capital surrounding a worker is up

Easier to destroy than create

Picky, snobbish, elitist

Consulting, law, and finance are best careers

Consulting because long supply chains complex and good for consultants to optimize

Law because lots of new regulation and litigation

Finance because promise of bailouts promotes risk

Smart but underspecialized ppl need to learn things so these are good places to do it

Young contributed to Internet industry without training because was immature industry

Sometimes the general intelligence used for consulting does provide value to overspecialized businesses

3 why are so many ppl out of work

At first machine hardly adds anything beyond what human does

Then machine gets ok but needs help of expert humans to work optimally

Then machine works well and only needs low skilled humans for help

Finally machine works best by itself and surpasses humans and humans move on to help machines in industries less far along

Machines as complements to humans and not replacements

Almost symbiotic relationship

Not about having computer mimic human brain better

Computers can excel at chess because of regularized environment but still lag human in things like poker which involves psychology, reading ppl, bluffing

Effective man machine teams of future

Fewer Americans trying to work

Male real wages falling over long run

Great Recession

A lot of workers were overplayed relative to their skills

Many zero marginal product workers who u would never hire even for 0 wage

3/4 of youth not accepted to serve in military even

Per labor hour productivity

Fewer jobs left in the middle and lower wage ones mostly overseas

Regulations and benefits increasing the cost of hiring so don't want to do it for low wage workers

Higher min wage and more employee litigation hurting hiring

Freelancers in generation limbo

Many starting own businesses because can't get jobs

Micro jobs

Personal Service jobs

Part 2 what games are teaching us

Ch 4 new work old game

Gaming industry bigger than Hollywood

Learning from how humans play chess and interact with machines

Window into how high earners will work with machines

Machine games

Watching 2 computers play against each other

Ugly counterintuitive computer moves beat grandmasters

Humans learning from computers on moves and strategy

Computers may guide social and financial decisions one day but will create stress when nonintuitive advice given and many won't like it

Gains will go to those who can manage the stress

Machines telling us how to date and do business in real time

Working with machines

Freestyle chess (human plus machine) is model for high earner of future

Ch 5 our freestyle future

Freestyle chess allows consulting computer, books, calling ppl, anything

But time limit is tight

Best players don't have high individual ratings but are good at aggregating advice from many chess engines

Human role very little during game but very big in preparation in between

Problem with grandmasters: not enough trust in the machines

Machines r us

Deep opening book

Human can prepare surprise innovations before performance or interview and then pull them out when useful and have advantage

skill: human memory of computer generated advice

Freestyle masters

Medical diagnosis based on human and AI working together

Doctors doesn't have to be as skilled

Needs to be good at knowing weaknesses of machines and how best to work with then

Most frequently used doctor in world is google

Ppl type in symptoms, check results, and then decide if should see doctor

Making freestyle work

Don't need more education

Need better skills in working with machines

Troubleshooting

Lessons

Human computer teams are the best teams

The person working the smart machine doesn't need to be an expert at the task at hand

Below some level of skill adding a man to the man machine process will make it less effective than the machine alone

Knowing one's limits is more important than it used to be

Zero marginal product worker is one who makes the outcome worse than if it was just the machine alone

A valuable worker has the potential of improving on the product of just the machine alone

The productive worker and the machine are stronger complements than before

Chapter 6 white your intuition isn't helping you get a job

Online dating services present matches that don't match intuition

eHarmony can nudge us from our indecisiveness and to question our own biases

Machines have no fear of unfamiliar

Decision making

Computer chess has contempt aversion: avoiding draws and seeking out unfamiliar complications

Unintuitive piece placements

Signs of improvement

Humans can learn and develop new talents

Intelligence level increasing

Future of intuition

Human strengths and weaknesses predictable

Be skeptical of the elegant and intuitive theory

It's harder to get out of your own head than u think

Revel in messiness

We can learn

7 the new office: regular stupid and frustrating

Telephone help menus getting a lot smarter and a lot stupider at the same time

Digital and physical environment

GPS

Driving direction errors due to real world street issues

Will world become more regularized and stupid so it's friendlier for machines?

Grocery self checkout

Machine assessments

Machines and workers assessing workers

Yelp reviews for all

Lawyer evaluations by machines

Duds will try to avoid ratings by machine

Doctors rating patients and filtering for most compliant

Customer reputation in stores

Our legitimate fears

8 why the Turing game doesn't matter

The long run

Better to create machines that complement human intelligence and not try to mimic it

Man Machine convergence

Turing test not interesting for man machine teams

Imitation not right standard

Autistics might fail Turing test

Many ppl cheating by using robots

Opposite was mechanical Turk

Identifying cheating based on similarity To machine not accurate

Human skills specializing in areas where machines aren't good

Memory and search

Google crutch

Lose mental skills

Science of memory gone

Was trying to make memories searchable

Doesn't mean we become stupider

Have better background info for decisions

Become better at searching for answers

Become more spontaneously creative

The machines place

Humans reticent to accept personal advice from machines or like the music they compose

Part 3 the new world of work

Ch 9 the new geography

Outsourcing and foreign competition not the culprit

Tech plays bigger role in compensation shifts than foreign trade

Immigration not culprit

Outsourcing and immigration

Hiring in USA getting more expensive due to regs so entrepreneurs outsourcing more

Lowers wages but brings cheaper goods

A global geographic trend

Well educated high earners will move to regions with best firms

Regions of europe on the periphery will be just for retirees and tourists and will cease being productive

The good of foreigners

10 relearning education

Competitive education through moocs, blogs, ted, apps

Learning games

Gaming tech already figured out how to educate best

New higher ed models

Hypermeritocracy: can learn from anywhere but only most talented and disciplined will rise ahead

Face to face teaching

Many tasks replaced by computer

Now specializes in teaching psychology behind skills, motivating, teaching how to best use computer, being role model

Makes chess instruction FaceTime skills harder to outsource because more about the person skills

Professors will just be motivators and coaches like for athletics and therapy

11 the end of average science

Increase in incomprehension

Problems becoming more complex

Contributions becoming more specialized

Machines will become own researchers

Specialization

Lone contributions harder to maintain

But machine intelligence also creating new opportunities

Bureaucracy and regulation killing science

Impossible problems

Breakthroughs by middle aged more than young but they are less willing to defy status quo

Machine science

Human feeding computer to do its research and then interpreting it

Less intelligible theories when machines create them

Whither economics

Data crunching instead of theoretical intuition

Power and qualify of data will grow faster than our models

Journal articles will become machine readable inputs for further machine research

Computer still bad at data gathering

12 a new social contract

Bigger gap between rich and poor

But cheap fun and education for masses

More fending for yourself

Self motivation predicting upward mobility

Meritocracy

The fiscal crunch

Zoning and new healthcare laws will drop wages and cause ppl to move out to cheaper states like to Texas

Ppl want more cash in their pocket so prefer to live cheaply

Build shantytowns to house old and poor by their choice

Living off the grid in own trailer

Budgets will get tighter

Medical rationing will increase

Ppl with good self control and motivation will live longer

Politics of the future

Older population and more conservative

More like Florida

Economically left behind will be more conservative