The information explosion and unemployment

Even before the Internet the volume of knowledge generated by humankind was growing exponentially and in the West this has been happening since the Renaissance. The Internet (and its associated software, such as the World Wide Web) is one product of the spirit of enquiry and innovation which has driven this growth.

In fact the Internet actually accelerates growth by allowing academics and innovators worldwide to exchange data and ideas, leading to the cross fertilisations and fusions which breed new knowledge.

 The Internet has not only led to greater quantities of information and better access to it.. Applications such as Wikipedia  have also proved a powerful way of refining and updating knowledge.

Off-setting this beneficial use of computers, packet switching and data networks, has been the swamping of online users with more information than they can possibly digest.  Doctors, lawyers, academics, engineers, researchers, civil servants, lawyers, adminstrators, accountants, executives and managers can all be so overloaded with emails, reports, patents, articles and books that they cannot develop the insight, judgement and human interaction needed to do their core work.

Home based surfers like me also have to look through a lot of Google output to get to what they want, all the time being distracted by pop up notices inviting us to buy, run, install, download, update, sign up, change browsers or respond to a survey. Computer crashing and frustratingly slow responses are, in my experience, becoming increasingly frequent, even as the hardware evolves, as anti-virus scans, hastily developed software and at least apparent overloading of channel capacity with junk and trivia grow ever more common.

Could this problem of information overload be turned into a partial solution to unemployment?

Computers with clever programming by clever people, are good at shunting data around, slicing it up, mining it and putting it into boxes. But to allow us to make real use of information perhaps we need people able to focus human judgement and imaginative insight onto the data streams and knit them into shape. The human brain working in conjunction with search engines such as Google (itself a product of the brain)  should be able to filter down and rationalise the stream of search results directed at the user. Organisations such as Google could employ home-based, articulate people to do this in response to certain frequently occurring searches– one might call them knowledge workers. Lots of them would be needed.

Companies and institutions could  also employ professional knowledge workers, many of them working full time on site,  to provide academics, scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, administrators and finance workers with something more useful than reams of raw information or bibliographic references. Knowing the needs of their clients they could sift, prioritise and pre-digest the output of search engines and compile tailored reports.

I am vaguely aware that some moves along these lines are already happening but there is not yet much evidence of it.

Overall, the idea is to provide islands of insight and structured information in an ocean of data. This could give us all more time to think and would create purposeful employment for many. And if IT growth could be more measured and made to give us a better user experience, all the better.

 Is anybody listening?

John

Author 2077 AD

Wenzhou and Christians in China

One of the magazines I read regularly is Prospect. In the March issue Jack Straw, an ex-minister from the Labour government in the UK, reviews a book called Civilisation: the West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson.

In the review it emerges that there is a large Protestant community in Wenzhou, just south of Shanghai, in the Zhejiang region. I find the size and prosperity of such a place in the midst of a large officially atheist country rather surprising, although I had heard previously that Christianity was growing vigorously in China.

So here are a few facts which might interest you:

• Wenzhou, with a population of 8 million, is reputed to be the most enterprising city in China

• There is a community based around 1,339 state-approved churches (although I’ve seen higher figures cited elsewhere).

•  This and other religious communities in China, ‘double both as credit networks and supply chains of creditworthy, trustworthy fellow believers.’

The Chinese government are very much concerned about corruption and potential instability, especially in the event that economic growth falters. The powers that be may be holding off in their customery persecution of religion because they have some interest in letting such Christ-centred networks prosper and perhaps do for China what the Protestant business and innovation networks did for the USA and parts of Europe. In fact a recent BBC report suggests the Chinese government is actually partially financing new churches and Christian social work (e.g. care for the elderly).

History is full of the totally unexpected. There are now more Christians (around 100 million in all) than members of the Communist Party (70 million). It will be interesting to see if the current rate of growth continues.

John

Author, 2077 AD

Has road traffic in the West peaked?

Transport planners assume economic growth and car use go together; an assumption which is certainly true for the developing world.  And because the latter accounts for most of the world population the overall link between prosperity and car use looks likely to continue, unless some unforeseen factor, like an environmental or fuel crisis, sets in. China, e.g., is forecast to have more cars on the road than the USA by 2030 (Economic Policy, 2008).

Over the last six months or so, speaking to fellow drivers in the UK, there seems to be anecdotal evidence that the roads have become noticeably less busy. I also read a couple of news items which seemed to support this. A temporary blip in the upward trend?

Then I came across an article by James Crabtree in the May issue of Prospect which suggests a long term decline in private automobile use not only in the UK but in much of the west could have started.

This article reports that at the end of 2010 Lee Schipper (University of California, Berkeley) and Adam Millard-Ball  (Stanford, California) finished a study of traffic in 8 countries, including the UK. It was entitled ‘Are we reaching peak travel?’  It found that from 2003 the long established correlation between prosperity and travel broke down abruptly, with the mileage per vehicle falling. Schipper and Millard-Ball guessed this was due to congestion and rising fuel costs.

A study by Phil Goodwin et al at Oxford University suggests a more radical trend, at least in the UK. Government travel surveys show that from around 1995 the growth in  miles travelled per car had begun first to slow and then to reverse. The number of trips per car is also falling.

The number of young people driving in the UK is declining quite steeply. The percentage of 17-20 year olds with driving licenses fell from 48 to 36% between the early 1990s and 2007.

Renault, BMW, Audi and other companies are taking this seriously, apparently, as they plan how to sell transport technology to the coming generation.

Maybe young people are more interested in surfing the web and communicating through social networks than living the lifestyles of their parents while paying enormous insurance premiums, fuel charges and interest on car loans. It could also be connected with the steeply rising numbers of university students in the UK.

Whether this is the start of a long term trend we cannot be certain but western governments and the motor industry need to stop assuming ever rising use of the private car as a foregone conclusion.

John

Author, 2077 AD