White Collars Turn Blue (1996)
mit.edu
mit.edu
Krugman was asked to predict the state of the world in 2096, and and most of his vision is happening right now.
And then there are things he didn't mention, but which have (or will shortly) become technically feasible. I think any of these are potentially more world-shifting than, say, the decline of the American suburb:
- Real-time neuron-level simulation of human brains (~10 years to go)
- Design of artificial proteins
- Machine vision good enough to drive cars/trucks
Personally, 2096 looks further away the closer we get to it.
Here's a copy of the transcript, which is also well worth a read http://sites.google.com/site/strosskrugmantranscript/
Sample Charlie Stross: It’s going to be one of these things where there is going to be a sudden step change. ... When the automatic self-driving vehicles get sufficiently good that they are less likely to be in a collision than a human driver, your premium will go up if you insist on driving manually. Yeah, that’s going to go up steeply a few years later. I think we may be seeing the end of human beings allowed to drive the public highways within 30 years
Krugman once wrote an academic paper on interstellar trade, Stross is famous on his way to notorious for far-out concepts, and they both seem to have this vaguely pessimistic view of the future.
Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, Stross mumbles something about "Eric Drexler's pixie dust". I guess that's a cool attitude to cop if you're a science fiction writer. Nanotechnology is so obviously too good to be true that it isn't interesting and so must be hokum. But the actual research that's now getting published -- in Science and Nature, no less -- promises that we'll probably see radical change sooner rather than later.
No one in the scientific community talks about it in those terms, of course. That would be... un-serious, and in a research field that was saturated with nutjobs before it formally came into existence, that's a kiss of death.
Drexler posts the article citations on his blog, though:
Here's a Map of China, assembled from a fabric of interlinked single strands of DNA: http://metamodern.com/2009/08/06/asia-and-the-elements-of-in...
DNA Origami for nanoscale 3D structures: http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-n...
DNA Origami Box (with locking hinged lid and DNA sequence "key") http://metamodern.com/2009/05/10/a-dna-origami-box/
A big-picture post: http://metamodern.com/2008/11/10/modular-molecular-composite...
Software tools for protein design continue to improve: http://www.nanorex.com
etc, etc.
The problem is lazy authors who don't think things through, not the reseach they've built cloud castles atop.
I was studying in Israel during 1997-98, in a school where almost all the students were twentysomethings from the US or UK. At one point, one of the students came in with a cellphone on his belt, and he got teased for it, because carrying around a cell phone was a stereotypically Israeli thing to do. He'd gone native, so to speak.
Flash forward five years, maybe less, and of course I and my wife have cellphones. Who, in the US, doesn't?
The analogous situation with health insurance, of course, is even more deeply skewed. Insurance companies love having healthy young people on their plans because they almost never have to pay out - young healthy people overpay by quite a bit on health insurance.
Actually, there is. It just isn't simple. If you charge each person a bit more than their expected loss and you get that right, you'll have spread the risk and made a bit of money.
The problem comes when you don't charge each person appropriately.
Right, and if it starts 10 years from now that's consistent with Stross's "30 years from now". In time-scale, if not in exact outcome.
Soaring resource prices - he makes no mention of the currency explosion that led to inflated prices. Or that right now oil demand is back to 2005 levels. But in the long term his is obviously right because finite resources are finite. How's that an amazing prediction?
The environment as property. Is he talking about plain old private property? Or pollution regulations, or cap and trade? Those things were all on the table in 1996. And today Obama is still having a lot of trouble with even symbolic cap and trade.
The rebirth of the big city - Urbanization is not a new trend, and despite what happened to Detroit, it was never in recess, certainly not outside of America.
The devaluation of higher education - This simply has not come true at all. I hope the ivy league bubble bursts at someone point, but I think we're still decades away from that.
The celebrity economy. - Andy Warhol said it better.
This is going to happen sooner rather than later. University education at this point is simply a trend - something that everyone does. You can see this not in the sciences as much as in the standard arts programs that 70% of the graduate population possess. The cost of these programs keep climbing, and the average wage does not.
Eventually, the tipping point will be reached and there will be more people in the middle class that cannot afford university without the promise of the high paying job that it gives - which it doesn't if a degree is commonplace.
Even better, European countries often fund their universities to almost 100%. When tax revenue drops off, these funds will eventually be cut. You can see this happening in Canada today.
Not many people are going to pay $70K for a four year program to become a career receptionist. Even less when it's perfectly clear that a high school educated trades apprentice can make a lot more.
I think this makes it less likely to burst. Sure a prestigious university might lose its prestige if it lets in too many commoners. But a persistent trend is more likely to make a required universal ritual.
The cost of these programs keep climbing, and the average wage does not.
The cost keeps climbing because people are willing to pay it. When the costs stop climbing that's not the same as a collapse or even a change in the general trend of needing to have a college degree.
Even better, European countries often fund their universities to almost 100%. When tax revenue drops off, these funds will eventually be cut. You can see this happening in Canada today.
Tax revenues drop in every recession, government programs are cut, rarely eliminated and I doubt universities will be the first to go anyway.
Look at California, it's probably going to cut the funding to it's public university system, but it won't eliminate it, far from it.
The bottom line is college is already in many ways more like a land cruise then a serious and challenging endeavor. And the non-academic activities which happen in college often have a greater impact on your lifetime earnings then the classes you take. Plus society loves universal rituals and traditions.
While ever rising tuition rates have to stop at some point, college education is not going away any time soon.
Hyperbole, but amazing in the sense that it's very different from the kinds of things "everyone" was saying in 1996. What he said are very much the things "everyone" is saying now.
So, maybe or maybe not great prediction of what will be happening 100 years from 1996. But an excellent prediction of the 2009 zeitgeist.
A lot is also made of the outsourcing of "knowledge workers"; hardly a new phenomenon, even in 1996. And it will almost certainly still exist in 2096. But the inequities in living standards and expectations that makes outsourcing practical currently is steadily being eradicated by the gradual improvement in economic conditions which outsourcing itself helps to make possible. In some sense, the condition is probably self-throttling. The presumptive end of all this is a high-entropy state, where there is no strong "potential difference" between economies to make outsourcing worthwhile: it would eventually become pointless for everyone. I don't imagine we'll reach that point by 2096, though :-)
In effect, it is an arbitrage opportunity where you have a large number of well educated people with a low standard of living, combined with cost of living differences compared to western countries.
Certainly, over the next 100 years such arbitrage opportunities should abate, as people around the world with valued skills have similar standards and costs of living, and thus demand similar wages. We seem to be seeing the beginnings of that process already.
Suburban-based newspapers will shrink but stick around and remain profitable once they hit the right size due to having a monopoly. In cities, however, there will be a dozen outlets each going after different tribes of metropolitans with some overlap, similar to how a place like Chicago once had dozens of papers each serving different immigrant communities.
Piracy is your friend.