1:49PM - Technical Elites and their Discontents
"In order to undercut the artistocrats, the professional classes created a mythology in which their superior education, technical rationality, and mastery of policy and legalism gave them a unique ability to manage modern societies. The pragmatic businessman, scientist, and inventor, in other words, was superior to the irrational and coddled prince. In reality, this myth masked the true weakness of the professional's position: he lacked the legitimacy of noble birth yet also lacked true solidarity with the downtrodden masses.
[..] There is a built-in complex of insecurity and resentment that stems from both the bourgeois fetish of education as well as the particular problem of where and how the professional derives social legitimacy.
[..] The reason why the mythology succeeded was that there was much underlying truth to it. Specialized education, technical rationality, and expertise was needed to control the industrial economy.
[..] However, the kind of rational spectacle seen in the machine economy did not easily transfer over to other areas of society. And the kind of hyper-quantitative measurement utilized to dispense outcomes in the domain of machine economics also did not scale up that well either. Over time, as the professional class became larger and larger, more internally divided, and less tied to its technical roots its legitimacy and power steadily declined.
[..] Meanwhile, those within the circle had internalized an ideology that cast those outside of it as irrational peons and disreputable rabble. To make matters worse, the dynamics of an economy rooted around the exchange of information was also destroying the economic lifeblood of professionals and animalizing them into a precarious existence marked by a Lord of the Flies-like competition for the precious few remaining guarantees of an economically secure and culturally meaningful life.
[..] While I suspect that current predictions of the coming age of artificial intelligence and other advanced automation technologies will likely be very, very off I do think that some kind of severe political and social dislocation is inevitable. This will likely produce a new class of elites, many of which will claim competence at the art of managing automation much like their ancestors did in the 19th and 20th centuries."
https://aelkus.github.io/posts-output/2017-01-01-hayes/
2:09PM - Kondratiev 2017
"The theory that capitalism at the technology frontier operates in higher- and lower-growth cycles was originally developed nearly a century ago by the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev, who, for his efforts to explain capitalism’s seemingly inexorable ability to renew itself, was executed by Stalin in 1938.
Kondratiev’s theory postulates that over the past 250 years or so, capitalism has evolved through a series of forty- to sixty-year cycles, based on what the leading industrial sectors were for countries at the technology frontier. According to Kondratiev’s theory, each of these “K-waves” follows a similar cycle.
First, a new breakthrough technology or set of technologies is invented and rolled out broadly. What defines these technologies is that they are “platform” technologies (what economists call “General Purpose Technologies”) that not only dramatically enhance worker productivity, but also enable the creation of new businesses and whole new categories of employment previously unimagined.
After about twenty or thirty years, however, most of the gains associated with the new technology have been realized and productivity growth begins to slow. With technological differentiation no longer enabling business growth as effectively, businesses respond by creating various regulatory barriers to competition, or by moving production to lower-cost sites away from the sites of the technological frontier. For the sites on the technological frontier, this is a time of dearth. As always, it is the lower orders who suffer most, and thus what begins as technological senescence develops into economic stagnation and, if not addressed by political elites, eventually builds into a crisis of political legitimacy.
[..] This is a crucial point, and one that Kondratiev himself did not sufficiently appreciate: In order for countries to thrive, technology is not enough; rather it is the assemblage of technology and institutions that is critical. States that fail to reconfigure their political and economic institutions to accommodate and exploit the new technologies risk ceding their countries’ spot on the technology frontier to nimbler competitors.
From this perspective, what was critical to the British economy’s ability to reap the productivity benefits associated with the second technological wave of railroads and steel were institutional reforms, including the abolition in 1846 of tariffs on grain imports, which lowered the cost of food for the growing class of industrial laborers. In other words, as railroads and steamships technologically enabled the creation of transnational grain markets, institutional reform allowed Britain to translate that technological potential into improved productivity across the industrial landscape.
[..] Whereas companies like Oracle and Microsoft, whose business software drastically increased the economic productivity of their users, typified the first phase of the infotech revolution, the emblematic software company founded since 2000 has been Facebook, a media company that, although not without its virtues, has also been an unsurpassed anti-productivity machine in the history of technology.
[..] Unless we get both a new K-wave going on the basis of new platform technologies and rework our political order, our politics are likely to remain poisonous. So the question is, what are the prospects for a similar renewal?
[..] For example, the locomotive was invented in 1804, but railroads only emerged as a K-wave platform for growth in the 1830s–40s; likewise, the automobile was invented in the 1880s, but only emerged as a true K-wave driver after World War II; and computers were invented in the 1940s, but only began to drive our current K-wave in the 1980s."
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/09/12/technoglobalism-and-its-discontents/
2:29PM - Modern Warfare: lessons from Ukraine
"Russia uses electronic warfare for four primary roles:
– Denying communications: There are regions in Donbass where no electromagnetic communications—including radio, cellphone and television—work.
– Defeating unmanned aerial systems: Electronic warfare is the single largest killer of Ukrainian systems by jamming either the controller or GPS signals.
– Defeating artillery and mortars: Russian electronic warfare pre-detonates or duds incoming artillery and mortar rounds that have electronic fusing.
– Targeting command and control nodes: Russian electronic warfare can detect all electromagnetic emissions, including those from radios, Blue Force Tracker, Wi-Fi and cellphones, which can then be pinpointed with unmanned aerial systems and targeted with massed artillery.
To compete in an electronic warfare environment, the Army must become proficient on analog systems again, remove all unnecessary electromagnetic emitters such as personal cellphones; route antennas as far from operations centers as possible; conduct “a day without radios or computers” during training missions; and quickly field its own organic electronic warfare systems.
[..] Ukrainian units have observed up to eight Russian UAV overflights per day, and the constant awareness of being observed and targeted is often a traumatic experience that instills fear and inhibits movement, particularly in daylight.
[..] Data from the Ukraine conflict show that artillery is producing approximately 80 percent of all casualties.
[..] Russia operates the world’s largest and densest mobile air defense network in the Donbass region. The combination of integrated and networked self-propelled air defense systems and manportable air defense systems virtually shot the Ukrainian air force out of its own sky.
Ukrainian helicopters were reduced to flying 3 to 5 meters above ground or treetop level to avoid the larger surface-to-air missiles from the self-propelled systems, but ambush teams of two to five manportable air defense systems, cued by the integrated air defense network, shot them down."
http://www.thepotomacfoundation.org/russias-new-generation-warfare-2/