The document discusses how the second machine age is unfolding due to digitization and advances in technology. To succeed in this new age, students need to develop skills in ideation, pattern recognition, and complex communication. While technology is increasing economic bounty, it is also exacerbating inequality in wealth, income, and mobility. Winner-take-all markets reward relative over absolute performance, contributing to this growing inequality unless addressed.
Z Score,T Score, Percential Rank and Box Plot Graph
The Second Machine Age
1. The second machine age is unfolding right now.
We are at an inflection point in the history of our economies and
societies because of digitization.
It’s an inflection point in the right direction
bounty instead of scarcity,
freedom instead of constraint
but one that brings with it some difficult challenges & choices
To become valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age our
students need to develop the following skills:
ideation,
large-frame pattern recognition, and
complex communication
The Second Machine Age:
2. Bounty is the increase in
volume,
variety, and
quality &
the decrease in cost of the many offerings brought on by modern
technological progress.
It’s the best economic news in the world today
Spread, however, is not so great:
it’s ever bigger differences among people in economic
success—in wealth, income, mobility, and other important
measures.
Spread has been increasing in recent years.
This is a troubling development for many reasons, and one
that it appears will accelerate in the second machine age
unless we intervene.
Bounty and Spread
3. Winner-take-all markets are where the
compensation was mainly determined by relative
performance,
Whereas in traditional markets, revenues more
closely tracked absolute performance.
Eg:
Best, hardest-working construction worker = 1000
bricks/day; - get’s top dollar
Another doing 900 bricks/day may get 90% of this
income – this is an economy base on absolute
performance
Spread – winner takes all:
4. vs Relative Performance:
Software programmer
writes a slightly better mapping application
It might completely dominate a market,
Programmer/Company is global & becomes ‘superstar’
There would likely be little, if any, demand for the tenth-
best mapping application (90% as good?), even it got the
job done almost as well.
5. Results from shifts in the technology for production and
distribution, particularly these three changes:
a) the digitization of more and more information, goods,
and services,
b) the vast improvements in telecommunications and, to
a lesser extent, transportation, &
c) the increased importance of networks and standards.
“… while the economic bounty from technology is real, it
is not sufficient to compensate for the huge increases
in spread.”
Winner Takes All:
6. This new US tool assesses critical thinking, written
communication, problem solving, and analytical reasoning
It involves a number of tasks including a performance task
with some background reading then 90 mins to write essay
to extract info & write a view or recommendation
45% of US College students showed no improvement over 2
years of uni;
35% had none over 4 years!
The average improvement was quite small.
Some though did very well – these students – studied alone,
read and wrote a lot more, and had more demanding
teachers
Collegiate Learning Assessment:
7. Today, the cognitive skills of college graduates:
—including not only STEM disciplines,
but also humanities, arts, and social sciences
—are often complements to low-cost data and
cheap computer power.
This helps them command a premium wage.
8. Google chief economist Hal Varian – career advice:
seek to be an indispensable complement to
something that’s getting cheap
and plentiful.
Examples include:
data scientists,
writers of mobile phone apps, and
genetic counsellors
Ability to interpret and use data:
9. Zara store managers do a lot of visual pattern
recognition, and engage in complex communication
with customers,
and use all of this information for two purposes:
to order existing clothes using a broad frame of
inputs, and
to engage in ideation by telling headquarters what
kinds of new clothes would be popular in their
location.
A good example - Zara:
10. Nasa - ability to forecast solar flares
solar particle events (SPE’s)
No method available after 35 years!
Placed challenge on Innocentive
A clearing house for scientific problems
Anyone can work on the problems
Solved by Bruce Cragin
retired radio frequency engineer
SPEs now predicted 8 hrs in advance with 85%
accuracy, and 24 hrs in advance with 75% accuracy
Artificial AI - Crowdsourcing:
11. Bobby Fischer (13) made a pair of remarkably creative
moves against grandmaster Donald Byrne.
First he sacrificed his knight, seemingly for no gain,
and then exposed his queen to capture.
Thought insane, yet won the game. Today run-of-the-
mill Chess program does the same.
AI is Coming:
12. 2011- Sebastian Thrun, a top artificial intelligence
researcher (and one of the main people behind Google’s
driverless car)
Over 160,000 students signed up for the course. Tens of
thousands of them completed all exercises, exams, and
other requirements, and some of them did quite well.
The top performer in the course at Stanford, in fact, was
only the 411th best among all the online students.
As Thrun put it, “We just found over 400 people in the
world who outperformed the top Stanford student.
New ways of Learning
13. So:
ideation,
large-frame pattern recognition, and
the most complex forms of communication
are cognitive areas where people still seem to have
the advantage, and also seem likely to hold on to it
for some time to come.
Editor's Notes
To understand the distinction, suppose the best, hardest-working construction worker could lay one thousand bricks in a day
while the tenth-best laid nine hundred bricks per day. In a well-functioning market, pay would
reflect this difference proportionately, whether it could be attributed to more efficiency and
skill, or simply to more hours of work. In a traditional market, someone who is 90 percent as
skilled or works 90 percent as hard creates 90 percent as much value and thus can earn 90
percent as much money. That’s absolute performance.
The startup operates through a web-based platform that is similar to the design of Airbnb, connecting developers with teachers, endorsing a collaboration between both the two, taking coding in schools to the next level.
small difference in skill or effort or luck can lead to a thousand-fold or million-fold difference in
earnings. There were a lot of traffic apps in the marketplace in 2013, but Google only judged
one, Waze, worth buying for over one billion dollars.
Nearly half of Americans are financially fragile – a sizable fraction of ‘middle-class’ Americans – ‘find $2k in 30 days!
“… while the economic bounty from technology is real, it is not sufficient to compensate for the huge increases in spread.”
Also problem of decreasing social mobility (stuck where you are born)
NASA experienced this effect as it was trying to improve its ability to forecast solar flares, or
eruptions on the sun’s surface. Accuracy and plenty of advance warning are both important
here, since solar particle events (or SPEs, as flares are properly known) can bring harmful levels
of radiation to unshielded gear and people in space. Despite thirty-five years of research and
data on SPEs, however, NASA acknowledged that it had “no method available to predict the
onset, intensity or duration of a solar particle event.”21
The agency eventually posted its data and a description of the challenge of predicting SPEs
on Innocentive, an online clearinghouse for scientific problems. Innocentive is ‘noncredentialist’;
people don’t have to be PhDs or work in labs in order to browse the problems,
download data, or upload a solution. Anyone can work on problems from any discipline;
physicists, for example, are not excluded from digging in on biology problems.
As it turned out, the person with the insight and expertise needed to improve SPE prediction
was not part of any recognizable astrophysics community. He was Bruce Cragin, a retired radio
frequency engineer living in a small town in New Hampshire. Cragin said that, “Though I hadn’t
worked in the area of solar physics as such, I had thought a lot about the theory of magnetic
reconnection.”22 This was evidently the right theory for the job, because Cragin’s approach
enabled prediction of SPEs eight hours in advance with 85 percent accuracy, and twenty-four
hours in advance with 75 percent accuracy. His recombination of theory and data earned him a
thirty-thousand-dollar reward from the space agency.
In recent years, many organizations have adopted
In 1956, 13 yr old, child prodigy Bobby Fischer made a pair of remarkably creative moves against grandmaster Donald Byrne.
First he sacrificed his knight, seemingly for no gain, and then exposed his queen to capture.
On the surface, these moves seemed insane, but several moves later, Fischer used these moves to win the game.
His creativity was hailed at the time as the mark of genius.
Yet today if you program that same position into a run-of-the-mill chess program, it will immediately suggest exactly the moves that Fischer played. It’s not because the computer has memorized the
Fischer–Byrne game, but rather because it searches far enough ahead to see that these moves really do pay off.
Sometimes, one man’s creativity is another machine’s brute-force analysis