Author Archives: Diane Coyle

What will the robots do for us?

Posted on by

The social and economic aspects of new technologies have been my abiding interest for years, naturally from the perspective of my training as an economist.[amazon_link id=”0262018624″ target=”_blank” ] Robot Futures [/amazon_link]by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh has the same interest from the perspective of a Professor of Robotics, and director of the Community Robotics, Education, Technology and Empowerment Lab at Carnegie Mellon. It’s an eye-opening book (and a short, clearly written one).

[amazon_image id=”0262018624″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Robot Futures[/amazon_image]

There are two key messages I took from the book. First, we’ve already gone a long way towards weaving robots into everyday life without realising it. The advances in the physical manifestations of robots (which Prof Nourbakhsh divides into perception, cognition and action) will before long join up with recent innovations online, in the pooling of information including from social media. The issues we’re grappling with such as online privacy and identity will move off the screen onto the pavement. We might soon meet robots on the street who know everything about us. Already due to smartphones, he writes: “Nothing is transient because everything can be captured and shared. Expectations of privacy have to shift….. As robots decide automatically just what to record and publish, so our sense of internet identity will have to change. We humans will no longer be the only species that records events and publishes them online…. When you run into a well-connected robot, it will be unclear from first impressions whether the robot knows everything about your day….”

Or, to take another example, prosthetics and robotics are merging already; how far should that merger go? Science fiction ([amazon_link id=”0586057242″ target=”_blank” ]I, Robot[/amazon_link] and on) is stepping into life, and there are countless emotional, ethical and other issues.

The second message is about the economic and political issues, and is that unless there is a public debate about advances in robotics, their development will be commercial. As the book puts it, the early adopters are business and the military. Prof Nourbakhsh writes: “I have served on funding boards and I have seen technical content dwarf social impact in the eyes of nearly all the reviewers in the room. This needs to change; broader impact must become an authentic criterion for funding.” His lab specializes in socially focused robotics development, but I don’t imagine there are many others, or much social science thinking about the issues yet. There needs to be – it will be upon us soon.

The book has a useful summary of the state of robotics research, which has been uneven. Batteries/energy are still a big hurdle. It opened my eyes to the diversity of machines gathered under the term, including industrial robots, those innovative joints restoring movement to injured or disabled people, drones, household devices and so on. It touches on the ethics of how robots should be treated: “Never before have we had the chance to dehumanize socially agile non-humans. If this happens, then we face the odd technological side-effect that, as we dehumanize our relationships with robots, so we may incidentally dehumanize our relationships with people.”

In short, a lot of food for thought in 130 pages (albeit somewhat steeply priced).

These robots are nice but dim…

The economics of open access publishing

Posted on by

Nature has a long and interesting article about the costs of open access scientific journals, exploring both the difference in publication costs between different journals, and the allocation of costs between funders/institutions employing scientists, researchers publishing papers, and subscribers. It’s well worth reading for the figures on costs and charges alone – I’d not seen them gathered together before. Coincidentally, I also met up this week with a friend who publishes journals for one of the big publishers (not Elsevier).

The open access case is intuitive: research is funded publicly by taxpayers, so it should be free to read. The Nature article shows that the charges open access science journals make to researchers vary widely, as do the cost bases and profit margins of the different journals. The publication fees are also the only revenue stream, in most cases. Not surprisingly, existing journal publishers see it differently, arguing that they provide other services – peer review, editorial judgement, curation, marketing and the delivery of attention to articles, hosting technology, and no doubt more. There are counter-arguments to some of these points. For example, peer review and editorial work is normally done by other researchers, who are not paid for these tasks – again, taxpayers fund the work via their financing of academic salaries.

It’s clear that journal publishers were, like other traditional media providers, slow to adapt their offer to the online world and one or two well-known ones have tried to hang on to excessive monopoly profits. But the average profit margins cited by Nature for the scientific journals don’t seem outlandish, and it is very likely that some traditional journals are hampered by a higher cost base than newer online journals, hence a partial reason for high subscription charges.

Still, there does seem to me to be a need for clarity about the bundle of services being discussed in this debate. It is not just a question of providing an online platform for researchers to report on their work, the bit that is taxpayer funded. If academics only needed to get their work out there, they could publish it on their own websites – as many do. But journals obviously do play an important role in organising peer review to give research a kite mark, in selecting and curating papers, and in marketing to draw attention to research. The importance of editorial objectivity in these services makes me tilt slightly towards preferring the old-fashioned subscription model, especially now non-academics like me can legitimately access research via JSTOR. If only the old model hadn’t been discredited by the greedy minority of publishers hiking subscription charges so much, or lumbered with its inherited high cost base.

It’s probably too late, even though there are, ironically, signs that the subscription model may be starting to function for other online publications. The new RCUK open access policy came into effect this month, & states: “Free and open access to publicly-funded research offers significant social and economic benefits. The Government, in line with its overarching commitment to transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that such research should be freely accessible. As major bodies charged with investing public money in research, the Research Councils take very seriously their responsibilities in making the outputs from this research publicly available – not just to other researchers, but also to potential users in business, charitable and public sectors, and to the general public.” RCUK will in future fund eligible research institutes and universities to pay submission fees to open access journals.

My friend is bitter about the Government casually torpedoing the commercial business model, and predicts that academic journals of the future will increasingly be hosted and part-funded by universities, research funders and learned societies, as the business is becoming decreasingly attractive for commercial publishers. I’m not sure the future landscape for the publication of academic research is at all predictable.

Demography as destiny?

Posted on by

There was an intriguing short letter in the Financial Times this morning, urging that more attention be paid to the problem of a low birth rate and the adverse demography of an ageing society.  The writer evidently believes the welfare system should be encouraging people to have more children, rather than penalising them for large families. He cites a 1947 book, [amazon_link id=”B00195GT00″ target=”_blank” ]The Population of Britain[/amazon_link] by Eva Hubback.

[amazon_image id=”B00195GT00″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Population of Great Britain[/amazon_image]

Looking her up, Wikpipedia tells me Eva Hubback was a suffragist, head of economics at Newnham and Girton during the First World War, and advocate of birth control and eugenics. However, her book clearly advocates the national benefits of population growth. This is an intriguing combination of beliefs, very much of its time.

It has long seemed to me that economics doesn’t pay enough attention to demography. Obviously, people studying pensions and the fiscal implications do put the ageing trend at centre stage, and relative demographic trends crop up in work on international migration. But demography is surely fundamental for growth as well. One question is whether an older (on average) population will be as productive and innovative as a younger one. And if so, what does this imply for, say, predictions of Chinese economic power?

Another is simply the numbers game. Endogenous growth models imply that the growth rate is increasing in population, at an accelerating rate because of their increasing returns feature. Ideas live in people’s heads, and the combinatorial arithmetic makes more people generate many more ideas. This is something modern economists (although clearly not Eva Hubback) seem to gloss over with mild embarrassment.

The best book I’ve read including demography, although in a broader context than economic growth, was Emmanuel Todd’s 2001 [amazon_link id=”1845290585″ target=”_blank” ]After the Empire[/amazon_link]. He was looking ahead to the multipolar world. But I’d be interested to hear other recommendations.

[amazon_image id=”1845290585″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]After the Empire[/amazon_image]

Machines and foreigners

Posted on by

I’ve been reading in the area of overlap between labour market analysis, theory of the firm and trade theory. Well, to be strictly accurate, at the edges of those three areas of economics closest to each other, for their isn’t all that much overlap. David Autor comes closest in his recent work on inequality, technology and globalization. Richard Baldwin and others have come at it from the other side with their work on trade in tasks, bringing trade theory closer to theories of production. There’s more on the overlap between technology and the labour market of course. Standout books for me are Claudia Goldin and Ian Katz, [amazon_link id=”0674035305″ target=”_blank” ]The Race Between Education and Technology[/amazon_link], and Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, [amazon_link id=”0691124027″ target=”_blank” ]The New Division of Labour[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0674035305″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Race between Education and Technology[/amazon_image]

In addition there has been the whole recent ‘the robots are eating our jobs‘ riff – but I’m more convinced than ever that this is over-simplified. For one thing, you just can’t think properly about the robots without adding offshoring and trade into the mix. Just as a shift in the ease of trade is similar to an advance in technology in its economic effects, a big increase in the potential for using foreign workers for some functions is similar to using more technology.

I’ll be writing something up eventually and will post it when I do.

Reading about Thatcherism

Posted on by

Charles Moore’s forthcoming [amazon_link id=”0140279563″ target=”_blank” ]The Life of Margaret Thatcher[/amazon_link] will no doubt be fascinating. I’m not an avid reader political biographies and memoirs, although there are a few absolutely outstanding ones – such as Alan Clarke’s [amazon_link id=”1857991427″ target=”_blank” ]Diaries[/amazon_link], Chris Mullins’ first volume about life as a junior minister, [amazon_link id=”1846682304″ target=”_blank” ]A View From the Foothills[/amazon_link]. But so many dull ones too, such as the [amazon_link id=”0224016830″ target=”_blank” ]Crossman Diaries[/amazon_link] I had to read at university.

When it comes to reading about the Iron Lady, the earlier biography I did read and admire was Hugo Young’s [amazon_link id=”0330328417″ target=”_blank” ]One of Us[/amazon_link] – published in 1989 so before the end of her political career. It’s a brilliant book that makes credible the (often implausible) claim that journalism can be the first draft of history. Looking through it again this morning, my first thought was that the great achievement of Thatcherism was actually getting something – anything – to happen: sclerosis and ungovernability are two sides of the same coin.

[amazon_image id=”0330328417″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]One of Us: Life of Margaret Thatcher[/amazon_image]

But the outstanding book about the Thatcher government is Nigel Lawson’s [amazon_link id=”0552137278″ target=”_blank” ]The View From Number 11[/amazon_link], which sets out the economic thinking of Thatcherism (its essence), discusses how Westminster and Whitehall worked at the time & the tactics of bringing about change, and is completely gripping about the disastrous tensions that set in between Prime Minister and Chancellor.

[amazon_image id=”0593022181″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The View from No.11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical[/amazon_image]