George Rebane
The report of the latest employment numbers underlines our deep and abiding national innumeracy. So-called balanced reports of ‘on this hand, but on the other hand’ completely miss the amassing evidence for the systemic labor problem in these pre-Singularity years. Here there is no ‘on the other hand’ – the creation of 163,000 jobs in July is not positive in any sense as the unemployment rate notched up to 8.3%. No one seems to understand the real news is that another approximately 70,000 new people were added to the chronically unemployed rolls, in addition to more people coming out of the woodwork to look for jobs and finding none. Keep in mind that every year about 4.3M young people exit (not necessarily graduate) our educational system. Almost all of them enter the workforce which now numbers about 156M, and of which only about 63% are working. Today there are over 40M Americans un- and underemployed, and that number is climbing inexorably.
In ‘New People, New Jobs’ I summarized three areas of technology that could help job creation in developed countries with legions of under-educated and dated-skills workers. But the bugaboo of the Great Doubling is still there with the taunting refrain ‘anything you can do, we can do cheaper’. While pandering his supporters with other fairy tales, part of Obama’s stimulus monies to improve US infrastructure are going to Chinese companies like this one reported by ABC that is building highways and bridges in Texas, California, and other states.
And now there is a new initiative to use advanced algorithmics to farm out even more jobs overseas, and there create any new jobs that come along. The field is called crowd-sourcing, in which a complex task is broken up into hundreds (thousands?) of simple ‘micro tasks’ which are then farmed out all over the world and managed by an intelligent control algorithm. The algo divides the task up, parcels it out to human workers (with redundancy), checks and integrates results, parcels out more bite-sized tasks, until the job is done and the results output.
New start-ups like Crowdflower and CrowdSource are building software to operate on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online odd-job system. Worldwide workers are paid a pittance for their efforts depending on in which country they live. Even US workers in such efforts can get paid only $1-2 an hour. Such workers are really not employees of any company, but simply log on and start following instructions for pay. More here from MIT Technology Review which proclaims “foreign recruits are the newest cogs in the new crowdsourcing machine”.
Finally, if you’re all done with this frustrating veil of tears and ready to contemplate something more permanent, or at least long lasting, then consider the increasing interest in the study of human immortality (think ‘mind uploading’) and its related area, the hereafter – do not confuse the ‘hereafter’ with ‘immortality’. The John Templeton Foundation is the latest source for funding such work, having given $5M to UC Riverside’s philosopher John Fischer “to undertake a rigorous examination of a wide range of issues related to immortality.” (more here)
Among the questions also to be considered are – “Is immortality potentially worthwhile or not? Would existence in an afterlife be repetitive or boring? Does death give meaning to life? Could we still have virtues like courage if we knew we couldn’t die? What can we learn about the meaning of our lives by thinking about immortality?”
I’ll take a cut at the first question; make me immortal and I promise to provide a thoughtful and definitive answer.
rebanesruminations.com 
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