New York Times tech writer John Markoff discusses user engagement metrics for Microsoft's empathetic conversational chatbot Xiaoice in China.
Assertion Contradicted
Markoff: US productivity growth has been zero or negative since 2008
“Since 2008, you know, where you, The modern theory is capital's replacing labor. You should see that kind of productivity growth. We've seen no productivity growth. We've even seen negative productivity.”
Assertion Supported
Markoff: Transistor costs have stopped falling for non-Intel semiconductor companies
“For most of the industry the cost of transistors has stopped falling. And so as you scale, this is everybody but Intel in the industry says this. You, if you talk to Broadcom, if you talk to Qualcomm, all of the customers of the foundries say, you know, going …”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Markoff predicts semiconductor scaling will permanently stop at 5 nanometers
“I believe, you know, based on talking to all the wise men I've been able to talk to in Silicon Valley, that there are three more turns of the crank. We go from 14 to 10 to seven to five. The industry can see its way to five.”
Assertion Contradicted
Markoff: Offshore call center jobs are returning to US data centers as software
“Because of falling cost of telecommunication, many of those jobs were outsourced to the Philippines and India. And now you have this Freakonomics reverse thing happening where those jobs are coming back to run in U.S. Data centers as software, not as U.S. Work…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Markoff: AI historically overpromises and underperforms repeatedly
“AI as a field has failed many times. Really quite remarkable how it over promises and underperforms over a long time”
Insight
Markoff: The AI community prioritizes replicating human capabilities to eliminate labor
“I think that the AI community has a set of values that, that are about building systems that basically replicate human capabilities. That's their value set. And oftentimes, you know, in a, in an economic system where you can take labor out of the equation, tha…”