Education, Occupation, and You: Vishal Kapoor at SJSU

Earlier this week, Jim Hogan hosted the next evening at San Jose State University on Preparing for the Cognitive Era, with Vishal Kapoor. If you work at or deal with Cadence, and his name seems familiar, that's because he worked at Cadence from 2003 to 2012 in several senior positions. Most recently, he is the founder of Three-Legged Stool, which is a consulting firm that works with organizations in the concept, introduction, and growth stages of their lifecycle with a philosophy of people first (ahead of product and market). They are focused on education, healthcare, eduction, and non-profits.

If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading my post SJSU School of Cognitive Science before you read this one. It sets the context of what Jim and SJSU are doing, and why.

Industry 1.0 to Industry 4.0

As a reminder, the four industrial revolutions that get us to IR 4 today are:

1. Mechanical (late 1700s), based on steam and water power
2. Electrical (late 1800s), based on mass production and use of electricity
3. Electronics (pick your date, but in the sixties, when some people were at Woodstock, others were inventing the integrated circuit), based on electronics and software to further automate production
4. And cognitive (now and tomorrow), based on the use of cyber-physical systems

Technology Today

Vishal is worried that devices capture our behavior and so the big internet companies know (approximately) what we are each like. They are monetizing it and generating about $½T just from knowing roughly how we are.

A quote from Albert Einstein (from the 1950s):

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity

We need to move more towards what Vishal calls "a T-shaped education." This is shown in the above picture: a broad understanding of all the things happening in the world around us, but then very deep in one discipline, deep in at least one system. When Vishal was a kid, his father asked him "Are you going to be a doctor or an engineer?" and the basic assumption was that whatever job you chose would be around forever, or at least your whole working life. But the pace of change is accelerating.

• Agricultural revolution
  • 8000 years
• Industrial revolution
  • 120 years
• Light bulb
  • 90 years
• Moon landing
  • 22 years
• World wide web
  • 9 years
•  Human genome sequenced
  • 4 years
• iPhone

Some people are worried about Ray Kurzweil's singularity, that computers will surpass human brainpower in 2023, and equivalent to all brains combined in 2045. Vishal is more circumspect and thinks it is more than just "computer power equal to the brain" but also the nuances between the processing cycles that we don't understand. I am also not that worried, since I don't see any technology on the horizon that allows us to build brains that are better than the ones in our heads, and while Moore's Law may still not be dead, it is certainly coughing up blood. The free ride of computers getting faster and cheaper every year is over (or will be soon), and the singularity requires some economic consideration. Of course, when I say "I don't see any technology on the horizon", it's not as if anyone foresaw the integrated circuit in 1950, or the automobile in 1850, or the steam engine in 1750. So who knows what we are missing now that is about to change the future dramatically.

Inequality

The wealthiest 20 people in the US, who could all fit in a single Gulfstream G650 jet, now own more wealth than half of the entire US population. It is the even worse on the world scale. The wealthiest eight people own as much as half the world.

Unfortunately, it is not a rising tide lifting all boats, but the millionaires yachts the most. The US median wealth decreased 20% from 1983 to 2013 from $78,000 to $64,000. Black and latino wealth went down and white went up (I assume this means per capita).

One statistic that is surprising, but I have heard before, is that in 1984, 37% of computer science graduates were women, now it has halved and it is only 18%. I don't necessarily think that this is a crisis. During that period, women have risen to be about 60% of all bachelor degrees. In masters degrees and PhDs in most subjects, it is even more skewed in their favor. I don't think it is a crisis if they choose not to study computer science, any more than I think that the lack of men in sociology or psychology is a cause for concern.

Vishal has good things to say about B Corporations (benefit corporations). Of course, they hit all the obvious buttons. They include companies like Ben & Jerry's and Patagonia. Ben & Jerry's (I believe) is part of Unilever, so I'm not sure how that works. Patagonia has some great products but they are about twice the price of equivalent products from REI (which is a cooperative and not that cheap either). To me, it's a bit like saying the the vegetables at Whole Foods (now part of Amazon, of course) are better than Walmart. I'm not sure it's even true—Walmart is the biggest vendor of organic food in the country—but they are certainly more expensive.

Vishal wrapped up with another Einstein quote (he admits he's an Einstein fanboy):

Strive not to be a success but rather be of value

My Thoughts

When Jim announced this evening a month ago, I was expecting something that was more of a look at how technology is likely to affect the big picture of employment over the coming decades. Clearly over the last decades, muscle has been replaced by machines. Now, repetitive tasks requiring brainpower are being replaced: automated call centers, automated analysis of legal documents, X-ray analysis better than human doctors, and so on. At one point in the evening, Vishal said:

we live here in silicon valley and think autonomous cars are no big deal. But there are lots of people who don't have the money to put gas in their existing car

So he is worried about generic inequality. I thought he was going to get to the fact that about 5% (numbers seem to vary all over the place) of working people are drivers of one sort or another, and another couple of percent work in businesses that will go away (or reduce) when cars don't crash much, nor contain internal combustion engines with their hundreds of moving parts that require regular service. I think that there is a big problem with what I've seen called the "zero marginal product worker". People who will be unable to add enough value to a company to be employable, because a machine can do anything they can do for less. I don't just mean people who dropped out of high school, it can also include people who used to read X-rays or paralegals. Maybe bloggers. Even the archetypal bottom-of-the-pile job of flipping burgers or taking orders for McDonald's are starting to be replaced by machines.

In the 19th and early 20th century, we reduced the manpower needed for agriculture (or improved productivity, which is the same thing) and everyone moved into manufacturing. Then we improved the productivity of manufacturing, and people moved into the service sector. Now services are getting increasingly automated. Economists assume people will move into something else. But, if so, I'm not sure what that is.

The usual "solution" is to talk about more education. However, I've taught introductory programming classes at Edinburgh University to incoming masters students. Some of them just don't get it, and they were people who had self-selected to do a masters degree in computer engineering. I simply don't believe that most laid-off coalminers or even paralegals are capable of learning programming to a level where they are hirable. I think that that is the big problem facing society, not whether a few more 18-year old girls should pick computer programming instead of biology for their major. That is a first-world problem, especially when most graduates are women and maybe we should be worrying about the men in every other subject.

In the Q&A, a couple of people were talking about the "five monopolies" (I think that is Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft) and how the Sherman act should be used to deal with them. "When I think of corporations," Vishal (I think) said, "I think of small businesses and startups. They need freedom and protection. The  monopolies can be dealt with the way the Sherman act was used against AT&T. The monopolies will be dealt with if there is political will." That's a big "if" for a start, and the history of these big anti-trust cases against technology companies tend to have a poor track record. For a start, they take too long. By the time the IBM case was dropped, Microsoft and the PC were already king. Google knocked Microsoft down, although not out, and Linux took all the servers. Facebook is competing with Google for the real customers, the advertisers (we are just the product for sale). AT&T's monopoly wire-line service was made irrelevant by mobile.

One problem is that a lot of technologies are natural monopolies. When I returned to the US from France, I lived in Los Gatos, which had GTE phone service. So, on paper, they competed with Pacific Bell. In practice, they didn't compete since neither company was going to go to the expense of putting a second phone wire into every (or even any) house, and they were natural monopolies as a result. If Facebook were split up into FacebookAtoM and FacebookNtoZ, I don't see how that make anyone's life any better.

The Next Evening in the Series

On December 4, Jim will reprise (and augment) a panel session that he ran at DAC in Austin in June. Unlike this latest evening, which was society and culture, the next one will be more technical (and hardware-ish). Jim's panel will consist of:

• Raik Brinkmann, CEO (and founder) of OneSpin
• James Gambale, ex patent counsel at Qualcomm
• Chris Rowen, CEO of Cognite Ventures (and the founder of Tensilica)
• Drew Wingard, CTO and founder of Sonics

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