Morning Must-Read: Peter Thiel: Robots Are Our Saviours, Not the Enemy
The extremely sharp but differently-thinking Peter Thiel:
Peter Theil: Robots Are Our Saviours, Not the Enemy: “Americans today dream less often of feats that computers will help us to accomplish…
…[and] more and more we have nightmares about computers taking away our jobs…. Fear of replacement is not new…. But… unlike fellow humans of different nationalities, computers are not substitutes for American labour. Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions…. Computers… excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human…. [At] PayPal… we were losing upwards of $10m a month to credit card fraud…. We tried to solve the problem by writing software…. But… after an hour or two, the thieves would catch on and change their tactics to fool our algorithms. Human analysts, however, were not easily fooled…. So we rewrote the software… the computer would flag the most suspicious transactions, and human operators would make the final judgment. This kind of man-machine symbiosis enabled PayPal to stay in business…. Computers do not eat…. The alternative to working with computers… is [a world] in which wages decline and prices rise as the whole world competes both to work and to spend. We are our own greatest enemies. Our most important allies are the machines that enable us to do new things…