Blog:2013-01-27: Modeling Automation's Implications
This week I stumbled into Moshe Vardi's article in the 2012 October issue of The Atlantic entitled: The Consequences of Machine Intelligence through IEEE's weekly email. The article strongly referenced Bill Joy's 2000 rebel yell article in Wired magazine about technology's nightmare scenarios and its call to relinquishment of technology. I was excited to see another renowned Computer Scientist piping up about the how soon accelerating automation will result in dramatic changes to us all. Along the way I updated the sections on technological unemployment, Luddism and post-scarcity society, and entered another more recent The Atlantic article entitle "The End of Labor" by a Noah Smith and also entered the 2011 article in The Economist on neo-Luddism. A couple of days later bobbing up-and-down in the ocean while waiting for my turn at a scuba diving class exercise, it occurred to me that I might be able to contribute to the process by starting a peer-reviewed workshop on the topic. The forum would result in better researched publications and attract more researchers to the area. Should the workshop be collocated or stand-alone? For now the exercise helped me to shortlist some names for the future workshop series: Moshe Y. Vardi, Mike Sauter, John Markoff, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Noah Smith, Susan Fleck, and Martin Ford.
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