{"id":1401,"date":"2015-03-03T08:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-03-03T15:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/?p=1401"},"modified":"2015-03-02T14:02:06","modified_gmt":"2015-03-02T21:02:06","slug":"spreadsheets-jeopardy-and-automation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2015\/03\/03\/spreadsheets-jeopardy-and-automation\/","title":{"rendered":"Spreadsheets, Jeopardy, and Automation"},"content":{"rendered":"

At first blush, Jeopardy and spreadsheets might seem like they don’t have a lot in common. However, together they illustrate the quantum leap economic\u00a0automation is poised to take. NPR’s Planet Money recently ran a great episode<\/a>\u00a0on the genesis of computer spreadsheets. In a nutshell, before computer spreadsheets accounting clerks kept giant paper spreadsheets by hand. This was a laborious, error-prone system. Once computer spreadsheets arrived on the market, those clerical positions began to evaporate. However, non-clerical accounting positions expanded rapidly. The computer spreadsheet also allowed\u00a0the financial sector to grow rapidly. So there was a loss of jobs due to automation, but it was accompanied by the creation of new opportunities. Economists sometimes refer to this phenomenon as “creative destruction.”<\/p>\n

Recently, IBM’s Watson supercomputer handily defeated Jeopardy star Ken Jennings at his own game. Although this might seem… ahem… trivial, I think that it exemplifies a trend\u00a0vastly different from the type of automation we’ve seen in the past. Consider the advent of spreadsheets. That\u00a0automation harnessed\u00a0computers do best: plain computation and rote repetition. However,\u00a0modern\u00a0automation ventures into sovereignly human territory. As Jennings discusses in a recent\u00a0TED Talk<\/a>, he did not expect Watson to succeed at Jeopardy. The\u00a0questions are presented in (often obfuscated) natural language; even understanding those questions is a complex task. Watson’s feat also required it to make sense of information\u00a0sources designed for human consumption for\u00a0answers to those\u00a0questions. Modern automation promises much more than clever question-answering gameshow-winning algorithms. I was surprised to find that teaching computers ethical reasoning<\/a>, the\u00a0epitome of a uniquely human skill, is an active area of research. The effects of modern automation have yet to play out. However, the mere prospect of modern automation raises important questions. Will automation ever fully supplant, rather than augment, human labor? Will we continue to see the same creative destruction we’ve seen in the past? And what will that mean for our economy and social order?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At first blush, Jeopardy and spreadsheets might seem like they don’t have a lot in common. However, together they illustrate the quantum leap economic\u00a0automation is poised to take. NPR’s Planet Money recently ran a great episode\u00a0on the genesis of computer spreadsheets. In a nutshell, before computer spreadsheets accounting clerks kept giant paper spreadsheets by hand. This was a laborious, error-prone system. Once computer spreadsheets arrived on the market, those clerical positions began to evaporate. However, non-clerical accounting positions expanded rapidly. The computer spreadsheet also allowed\u00a0the financial sector to grow rapidly. So there was a loss of jobs due to automation, Continue reading Spreadsheets, Jeopardy, and Automation<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":388,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/388"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1401"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1404,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions\/1404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}