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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (47828)	12/20/2005 5:26:51 PM
From: regli	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

>There is only one hope for our future -- continuous productivity improvement. All else is just carving up the pie.< I agree with your statement. However, fewer and fewer productive contributions cannot be automated. In formal process modeling, the development team, after several iterations, arrives at a so-called logical model that includes process definitions for the complete system, irregardless if it is man or machine that contributes to the expected result. The next step involves the drawing of so-called "man-machine boundaries". As the term implies, for each process the determination is made as to how it will be implemented, either the process can be automated or a human will have to perform it because present technology is not sophisticated enough or an automated implementation would be too costly. This ROI calculation needs to be performed in view of the expected lifecycle of the proposed system. However, these automation boundaries shift every week, every months, etc. When I started in this business, it was considered ridiculous to develop a computer system that could effectively compete in chess. Computers were simply too slow and didn’t have enough memory. If a chess game were a process in this model, it would have been on the outside. How things have changed in 30 years, or for that matter in the last 10! findarticles.com Deep Blue was an exercise for IBM to prove a point. In fact, they didn't even use artificial intelligence; they simply used the skills of a computer to their advantage to beat THE best player in the game. "When people play chess they use intuition, they reason with analogy from past experiences, they apply all sorts of human techniques -- things you would call intelligence. Deep Blue does something completely different and yet comes up with a similar result." In the productive process, very rarely is creativity required. Usually the process is well defined by a serious of policies and procedures. They might be complex but implementation becomes almost trivial though potentially time consuming given today's computing power. We human's, because of limited memory and reasoning speed, often have to resort to intuition which impedes quality and productivity because the result cannot be accurately predicted. I used the chess example to illustrate a process that wouldn't equate to a low wage, low productivity economy process as chess is an extremely sophisticated game where players get paid a lot of money. However, if chess were a productive process then even today's best player wouldn't be paid a dime as he would lose every game against a by now cheap computer. What this illustrates is that it takes an increasingly unique skill set to remain outside the automation boundary and therefore be rewarded well. Once the computer can solve a problem, the commoditization of the process is on its way. If we equate Moore's law to a doubling of the intelligence capacity by machines every 12 to 24 months, there is some serious competition on the way for increasingly demanding jobs and services. en.wikipedia.org Let the carving up of the pie begin.