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.
We want to reinvent the phone. What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones. We want to let you use contacts like never before - sync your iPhone with your PC or mac.
We don't pay a whole lot of attention to the Internet until people have played the game - then we pay a lot of attention to whether people liked it. We read through it and see it, but we don't take it into consideration. ... [The Internet] is not going to dictate the direction of where the game goes.
Technological man can't believe in anything that can't be measured, taped, or put into a computer.
There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.
Quantum computation is a distinctively new way of harnessing nature. It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.
The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.
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