Washington will pick up the check
Semiconductor firms are about to get showered with cash thanks to a new bill, The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022—CHIPS standing for, cleverly, The CREATING HELPFUL INCENTIVES TO PRODUCE SEMICONDUCTORS Act. Because it involved free money for capitalists, 17 Republicans (out of 50) voted for it despite their habit of voting against almost anything supported by Democrats except money for the Pentagon. Biden is scheduled to sign it on Tuesday, August 9. It’s a $280 billion package designed to encourage semiconductor manufacturing and research in the US. Pundits and generals have… Read More
No robo
You can hardly look at Twitter without reading something about the impending AI revolution: robots are coming for your job. I’m a skeptic. By that I don’t mean to argue that IT and AI and all the other abbreviations and acronyms aren’t changing our world profoundly. They are. Tech affects everything—work, play, love, politics, art, all of it. But the maximalist version, where robots, equipped with artificial intelligence, are going to replace human workers, is way over done. No doubt they will replace some. But not all. Back in 1987, ancient history… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): April 26, 2018 Corey Pein, author of Live Work Work Work Die, on the dark side of the Silicon Valley • an anonymous sex worker on the legal dangers of SESTA/FOSTA
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: April 6, 2017 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of Inventing the Future, on getting beyond folk politics to a world where robots work more and people (supported by a basic income) work less Here’s an Indiegogo site to raise money for a documentary about the book.
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (date is link to shows): January 19, 2017 Yasha Levine on the politics of encryption • Elayne Tobin on celebrity (bibliography here)
The productivity slowdown: Is structural stagnation our fate?
In my widely overlooked book, After the New Economy, I initially took a very skeptical line towards the productivity acceleration of the late 1990s. I dismissed it as temporary and bubble-like, and an artifact of very imperfect measurement. When I wrote a new afterword for the paperback edition, though, I recanted my skepticism: the acceleration seemed to be going on long enough that, as painful as it was to admit, the bourgeois functionaries were right. Robert Solow’s famous 1987 quip, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” had finally been repealed…. Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 