Thursday, December 26, 2013

Humans rebel against web bots

First up is Larry again, with an article in the NBER talking about robots replacing humans:
I believe in a much more anecdotal way than Dale Jorgenson, who has quantified it to an extraordinary degree, that the defining feature of economic growth in this era is the set of changes that are associated with information technology.
We got stagnititis from the bots.
Brad points us to The Second Machine Age
Now comes the second machine age. Computers and one digital advances are doing for mental power… what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power… to blow past previous limitations…. Whether or not the new machine age bends the curve as dramatically as Watt’s steam engine, it is a very big deal indeed…
Now we have Yglesias jumping in with the war between a Google bot and a group of humans called Rap Genius, Yglesias wants to free the bots from corporate control:
 Having a lot of traffic is great. The more the better. But when a huge share of your traffic comes from one particular source, it's really not your traffic. If it's all search, then it's Google's traffic. If it's all Facebook likes, then it's Facebook's traffic. 

I think these folks are jumping ahead to problem set three while we are working on problem set two. So far, the bots have been productive for us, this is not the stagnititis, we still have to deal with the California BlackHole, the biggest issue of the last thirty years. 
 
About the bots

My opinion has been articulated, bots will always appear slightly more intelligent than the human it talks to. These two articles are an example, the bot tells me that DeLong and Summers communicate behind the scenes, because the bot finds them both, it discovers a semantic similarity between them. My search bot evidently keeps behind the scene links between these humans anti-bots, it snoops on them for me.

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