What risks scare or terrify us?

Since I am also a believer that natural is not necessarily better, this article was nothing new. However, the point about how different people rate different risks made me wonder, what do I regard as risky?

The first was obvious, the highest perceived risk for Nuclear Power by most people, has very low risk for me. I would be happy to live next to a nuclear power plant as I expect that the quality of life around it will not deteriorate. The likelihood of an accident is negligible. Furthermore, and this is just a hope, that should there be an accident, it would be fast and furious :)

Then there is the risk of driving or even walking down the road. I do both but always wishing for a safer option. I would love to see auto-driven vehicles take over. I would love to see only electric carts within towns and no private vehicles. This is a hope that it will happen one day, though not likely in my lifetime.

Now the risk which terrifies me. Manipulating the human brain using technology. The only personal experiences of the damage people can do to each other are related to property disputes between brothers and sisters. The passion, viciousness and self-destructiveness defies logic. Hence, it makes it easy to extrapolate to events like riots and even genocide.

I can easily imagine bots learning to create and spreading ever more effective messages which will be spread using messengers like Whatsapp. The utility of messengers is so great that they will be around like cars and roads. I don't see how the messages can be stopped except, of course, by an even worse solution like 1984.

Postscript: Saw this about the spectacle of Chidambarm's arrest just after writing about my fears

fyup - What's the fuss other than the awkward abbreviation

My experiences with conventional higher education have been disillusioning. The Delhi University's Four Year program was at least an effort to be different even though it did not address the centralized examination system which, in my opinion, is the single most important cause of lack of learning and waste of time.

Education in US forced me to study various subjects across disciplines though I would have opted out of them at that age. I was definite that I would spend my life at a university teaching and researching physics and nothing else mattered! Fortunately, it wasn't to be.

However, there is little doubt in my mind that the most useful courses for me have been philosophy (ethics), psychology (especially behavioural) , social sciences (e.g having to read Nathaniel West's A Cool Million in a capitalist society).

Had I succeeded in the corporate world, I may have even found the Physical Education course I took(Golf) useful, which incidentally brought down my GPA.

The whole discussion seems to be entangled and procedural. I did not find it interesting except that there seems to be a feeling that foundation courses and exiting after 2 years are of no use at all.

Our society is accustomed to hiring over-qualified people just because they are available cheaply. However, what are the skills needed for most service sector job, e.g. retail, sales people, customer facing staff in any organization, general call centre employees, etc.

• Communication skills
• Ability to deal with people (psychology)
• Functional mathematics
• Ability to work with computers
• functional literacy  - keyboard usage, GUI interfaces, browsing skills, understand error messages, etc.
• NOT programming skills.

What else are the foundation courses?

However, can any university prepare us for the robotic future?

If the debate focused on education for the future in a world where software eats all jobs, that would be enlightening! Optimistic, Inequality, Plausible and likely, Pessimistic, and Bleak fiction by Marshall Brain.

Robots will take jobs, Inequality will grow & Rich will inherit more

I read A billion shades of grey in the Indian Express a couple of days ago and the next day came read Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs.


Reading the two makes it obvious that the Economist article is wishful in thinking that

But governments should focus not on redistributing income but on generating more of it by reforming retirement and education.

Seems odd given that their analysis also states:

Wealthy old people will accumulate more savings, which will weaken demand. Inequality will increase and a growing share of wealth will eventually be transferred to the next generation via inheritance, entrenching the division between winners and losers still further.

One would expect that some way of fairly increasing inheritance tax seems to be obvious option.

If more people are educated better, it is far more likely that even programmers will earn minimum wage and a smaller proportion of them will be employed. 

It is interesting that discussions around what the kind of an economic system we will have - After Technology Destroys Capitalism is becoming common.

Robots will do the work but who will own them?

In the good old days, the Noblemen had a great time. Their serfs and slaves did the work while they appreciated the good things of life.

We won't need slaves. Robots will do just fine. There is just one little hitch. Will we be the owners of the robots. Not likely if we look at these statistics.

So, I suppose without any job or the wealth generated by the robots, we can spend our time creating content for youtube or facebook and, even better, consuming the content.

This brings up a contradiction. These sites need enough of us to click on ads and SPEND money. Unfortunately, most of us may not have any!

So, is the future bright with robots removing the drudgery or bleak with most of us surviving on dole - even if we are very well educated.