If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch. Ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other. That's why 'average is over.'
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of adapting one’s skills to complement technology for better job prospects.
Tyler Cowen's quote suggests that in today's job market, the ability to work alongside technology, particularly computers, is crucial. Those who have skills that enhance or complement technological capabilities will likely see better opportunities and rewards, while those whose skills do not align with technological advancements risk becoming obsolete. This reflects a growing divide in the workforce, highlighting that simply being average is no longer sufficient in an increasingly automated world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a workshop on career development and adapting to new technologies.
The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?
Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.
Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.
There are big lines between those who play video games and those who do not. For those who don't, video games are irrelevant. They think all video games must be too difficult.
We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.
The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.
Ironically, the main task of chess software companies today is to find ways to make the program weaker, not stronger, and to provide enough options that any user can pick from different levels and the machine will try to make enough mistakes to give him a chance.
The cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.
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