Automation, bots, algos… replace human brain power
OK, we get it. We saw the havoc that the financial crisis, the bailouts, QE, and ZRIP wreaked on jobs. We saw the effect on jobs and the general economy when the corporate focus shifted even more to deploying the nearly free capital to buy back shares and engage in financial engineering – and enrich the elite of Wall Street and corporate America in the process – rather than investing in labor and training.
We got that the jobs scenario in America will never be the same again. Things have changed. We moved on. Learned to cope with it. We adjusted the statistics, removed people from the official labor force, and thereby brought the unemployment rate in line where we can feel comfortable with it. Life goes on, as they say.
But now there’s a whole new problem, and an ancient one, one that is getting worse by the day, one that we as society cannot deal with easily by simply removing people from the labor force – though that will likely be part of the solution. The problem isn’t really a problem. It’s a solution to a problem. We’re proud of it. It speaks of the greatness of the human mind and is testament to its true genius: automation.
Automation used to be an effort to build machines to replace inefficient and weak human muscles. But now it’s increasingly becoming a replacement for human brains.
It’s already happening, but no one is ready for it.
Automation is inevitable, the hard-hitting video below points that. It’s a tool to create abundance with little effort – but “we need to start thinking now as to what to do when large sections of the population become unemployable due to no fault of their own.”
The stock market in many ways is no longer a human endeavor. “It’s mostly bots, that taught themselves to trade stocks, trading stocks with other bots that taught themselves.”
These bots rule. News media carry stories that were written by these bots – or algos, as we like to call them – and they’re read by bots that then trade with other bots and enter and cancel orders in a fraction of a second to drive stocks one way or the other. And other bots can write more stories about bot trading with other bots, and about stories that other bots had written, so that more bots can react to them instantaneously [This Chart Shows How You Get Screwed in the Stock Market].
Which makes me think: Is that why the mainstream media are stumbling so badly? Because humans don’t want to read stories written by bots for bots?
Even professional jobs such as lawyers are being taken over by bots. Not their rare courtroom appearances, or their roles in negotiations with other humans, but their daily grunt work, which is much of what lawyers do, such as preparing reams of documents. And then there’s discovery: “It’s already no longer a human job in many law firms.” Bots are sifting through millions of emails and memos and documents in a fraction of the time that an army of humans pulling all-nighters used to spend on it. These bots are much cheaper, don’t need pizza after midnight, and work much more accurately.
And doctors. IBM is positioning its Dr. Watson for that. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It only needs to be better than humans. And that’s pretty easy to do, given human limitations. Human doctors can only learn through their own efforts and experiences. But doctor bots can instantly learn from the entire body of research out there, from anything and everything in the entire medical data base, and from all the other doctor bots. While “not all human doctors will go away, the need for them will be less.”
And the highly paid coders of the current tech bubble? Other coders are designing bots that replace those coders who haven’t been replaced already by bots. And the cashiers at the grocery store, now being replaced by self-checkout machines? Or bank tellers, the remaining few? And the millions of jobs up and down the scale?
What are they going to do, these lawyers and doctors and coders and “many bright perfectly capable humans” who are no longer needed and have become “unemployable” due to no fault of their own? What is society going to do?
There is no way to back off from automating what the human muscle and brain used to do. It has been tried before, but automation has always won – and it will always win. Automation is inevitable. But the consequences are becoming increasing mindboggling.
And here is the CEO of a startup who delineates the prevailing attitude in today’s business world, and one of the most harrowing problems for millions of unemployed job seekers: you must have a job to get a job. And there is a system in place with convenient low-cost tools to lock the unemployed out. Read…. Startup CEO (Unwittingly) Explains Biggest Problem in America’s Unemployment Crisis
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Something the bots will find it difficult to imitate is greed. In fact it is the greed that is the root of many business skills, to identify opportunities where menial labours see only crisis, to think beyond the nine to five day job to earn a wage. I am myself a research and development officer at a telecommunication firm and an investor. But as I go around my daily life, every single day I can identify a few true business opportunities-where I feel I could provide a low cost solutions to some existing problems to specific individuals. I just wish I had the time to work out the market and the statistics. Anyway, my point is if you have that skill, and the guts to start a business, automation is your friend.
Greed is driving the stock exchange bots already. It’s only a matter of goal definition in their algorithm.
TBS, yahoo, HP SEARS the list goes on of companies announcing massive layoffs. The media refuses to say a word about this .”Market off the lows” Has become the most irritating saying the biz netwrks have come up with. Nobody can say anymore that the markets have just fallen so many points from the open. Such a sad sad despicable world we now have become to all live in
In 1915, there were 15 million horses in the US. By 1950, even though the human population had expanded exponentially, there were only 1 million horses, a result of the automobile and automation. What will the .01%, who make the rules, do with 9 billion (and growing) unnecessary humans on this planet ?
Look on the bright side: employer health insurance will be replaced with extended warranties.
LOL
Why didn’t I think of that? Extended warranties are a huge profit possibility. Just ask car dealers and Best Buy.
The working day is too long and needs to be reduced substantially. In the early part of the nineteenth century the 12 hour day was common, being eventually replaced by the 10 hour day then the 8 hour day which has been in effect for far too long. Let’s urge a reduction to six hours, maybe even four and do so on a global scale.
The replacement of intellectual workers with bots might explain some strange developments and occurrences.
In law, Citizens’ United and its progeny that have provided corporations with the rights of humans would appear not to be what rational humans would do. Why would humans increase the rights of corporations while their own rights are being diminished?
In coding, the website for the Affordable Care Act could not seem to be made to function correctly for a protracted period in spite all the money and resources that was invested in it. A human coder told me that the bots were just writing new code on a platform of preexisting bad code instead of correcting or discarding the underlying errors.
In medicine, patients like Joan Rivers die during minor operations at out-patient facilities because of the failure to provide CPR at the facility. A bot in charge of the operation doesn’t do CPR.
In trading, previously active individuals refrain from trading rather than compete with bots. Rational humans would not buy the junk stock or pay the nutty prices that has driven the markets higher recently without much of a pull back. Occasionally, if a human thinks he understands the bots’ programs, e.g., GTAT, he/she still had better tread cautiously. When the bots are wrong they do not lose their own money.
As automation grows people will need to have a minimum income supplied by the govt. This topic was big in the 70’s when computers first appeared in large numbers. They knew then that population would need to be reduced to conserve resources and incomes would have to be guaranteed to people with no available work. Read Alvin Toffler’s books they were all best sellers back then.
When the the food (money) runs out, the population drops. It has to. Darwin says so.
The real underlying negative consequence of all this botting and robotization is that when humans, who are the ultimate consumers of the production from the new normalization of the work place, have no income, not only do they get hungry, angry and restless but there really is no reason to produce with no customers.
So there then needs to be a new distribution paradigm.
And this idea is so anti Capitalism and anti Ann Rand and anti feudalism, anti Corporatism .. it is anti everything we know and feel is right.
The world of technical capability is evolving at a dizzying pace yet human attitudes and psychics are not. Will we have a bot that cleans the floors and mows the grass and takes the weeds out of the gardens? Will we live in a virtual Paradise with no worries?
Who among us has the intellect and charisma to lead us to this new Nirvana? Will any of us even go willingly? What are the alternatives? War against the machines? OR will it be the plot of Continuum or the Matrix?
We are entering a scifi movie with no apparent ending and a completely unknown plot.
It is not hard to see that all the govt assistance will increase over time as automation reduces employment even more. The govt doesn’t run out of money or haven’t you noticed, they increase the debt limit and keep printing.
Hmmm. Wolf? The topic of jobs replacement with robot or artificial intelligence automation is a misleading one. It is easy to be seduced by the arguments of the inevitable finality of job replacement automation. However, I would like to counter the assertion here that – “employment is doomed”!
Ok. Initially, it would seem as though that this has to be true because all the major companies in finance and economics, transport, manufacturing and the retail industry are automating their labour force. However, I would ask you and the readers here to consider the following:
(I invite all readers here to contribute by highlighting any flaws in my reasoning).
The majority of companies who have and are, or will, automate their work force are doing it for some of these reasons:
1. Trade Unions create inconvenient crises and obstacles to corporate and private companies providing reliable and efficient production facilities, a good reputation, and competitive costs.
2. Government bureaucracy and excess regulation forces companies to find alternative means to reduce the cost burdens of legal compliance and to remain competitive with crony corporations.
3. Government employee legislation and taxation burdens increase business costs and their financial liabilities for the future. Corporations cannot compete against lower foreign labor costs, increased pension liabilities (due to inflation and taxation), higher health care costs, and unrealistic minimum wage requirements.
4. Public corporations quarterly reports: They have to keep their profit margins rising in order to maintain a higher stock market price and to pay their shareholders better dividends.
5. Import tariffs provide cheap manufactured goods and products where the national industries cannot compete against.
I conclude that it is no accident these things are happening: When it is Government, and Government policies, which are main cause of the decimation of the work place and its subsequent automation; which we see happening in every sector of the work environment.
Then, there are Public companies: – Driven by the madness of ever increasing profits and revenues, will always continually squeeze their workers ,when the options of corporate takeovers and the possibilities of private company buyouts are gone.
Also, I have another thought to be considered: It is the positive effects that this automation decimation of the working environment is going to have on the populace. Where the disenfranchised, skilled or educated poor, will start up their own communities, create their own debt-free money, and provide their own businesses and create their own economy based on principles on which the Government and public corporations cannot compete: and that is on equality: – Honest money; fair and unbreakable contracts; open source projects; private and secure transactions; freedom of innovation – without copyright and patent restrictions; autonomous, self regulation – based on common principles their communities share; and true, open, capitalist trading markets,
The basic flaw in your theses is that there will be a division of haves and have nots in an automated society. I think that as automation takes hold the market will change because the cost of production will be small and the productivity of labor will also be small. The majority of productive capacity will come from the machines, and therefore, be more shareable/available/cheaper. This leads to a population that doesn’t have to work or invest to survive, all basics are available. In this world income/credits will be allocated because it is cheaper and people will add value to what’s important to them.
OK, Wolf, I’ll take a crack at it.
1. “Trade Unions create inconvenient crises and obstacles …” This was true before Ronald Regan broke the Air Traffic Controllers’ Union. Today the unions are weak and ineffectual.
2. ” Government bureaucracy and excess regulation forces companies to find alternative means to reduce the cost burdens of legal compliance …” Today’s corporations may face excessive bureaucracy, but they are getting a free ride on financial, tax and regulatory regulations. Its just greed. There will never be enough.
3. Of course “(c)orporations cannot compete against lower foreign labor costs, increased pension liabilities …, higher health care costs, and unrealistic(?) minimum wage requirements.” These are the same corporations that depend on the “rich” American consumers to provide demand for their products. Reducing Americans to the level of third world country consumers will destroy that demand.
4. “Public corporations quarterly reports” do serve the interests of wall street and other investors. They even serve my interests as an investor. But if they are contributing to the destruction of the middle class, they are a headwind not a tailwind.
5. It seems disingenuous for giant corporations to complain about insignificant things as tarriffs or trade barriers when we have promoted and continue to promote international trade treaties that have and will override all national laws and regulations.
I do not view “Government, and Government policies (as the) main cause of the decimation of the work place and its subsequent automation. I think it is mainly greed. The ultra rich have more money than they or their descendants can ever use and still they want more at everyone else’s expense. A very rich friend said to me its not a question of having enough. The important thing is the gap. The gap between you and everyone else must be kept as large as possible, otherwise you lose status.
“I would like to counter the assertion here that – “employment is doomed”!”
“When it is Government, and Government policies, which are main cause of the decimation of the work place and its subsequent automation”
Where is your counter argument? As I read your reply, it just documents the reasons why this trend is occurring.
To me, it matters little whether it is government or greed that is fueling the trend. What matters is that it is a trend and I still don’t see how the fact that people without jobs are not good customers. So factories, etc. can produce at high speed and low costs because of robotization and the financial world and even education can function on bots programed by other bots but with out consumers of these, there is no loop.. Not to mention the lack of a feed back loop or a reason to get out of bed.
I can see it now, self driving cars, tractors, forklifts, trains…. etc… and robots take the grain all the way thru the chain to make food to consume. OR your 3D printer creates your breakfast, lunch and dinner and ….. What does this world need humans for?
That seems like where we are going.
I thought I had offered an alternative to the doom and gloom of inevitable automation – towards the end of my statement, by saying:
” It is the positive effects that this automation decimation of the working environment is going to have on the populace. Where the disenfranchised, skilled or educated poor, will start up their own communities, create their own debt-free money, and provide their own businesses and create their own economy based on principles on which the Government and public corporations cannot compete: and that is on equality: – Honest money; fair and unbreakable contracts; open source projects; private and secure transactions; freedom of innovation – without copyright and patent restrictions; autonomous, self regulation – based on common principles their communities share; and true, open, capitalist trading markets,”
To summarise all this, I believe that people will disenfranchise themselves from government and established society to form their own communities which represent themselves and their higher, moral values, and their needs.
Hey Dead,
Sounds like Utopia or Nirvana and not the real world where man beheads others for some senseless religious communal-ism. I think the Hippies of the 1980’s thought that your vision was possible and that lasted less than a decade before most of them sold out.
TPTB will never allow anyone to opt out. They would rather kill you than allow you to have Life, Liberty and Pursue your own happiness and forget the non fiat money system.. Maybe when you are one of the few left standing (not probable) you can convince your fellow survivors that shells need to be backed by gold to have any real value.
Money is about faith in a system and that faith is being assaulted by more than just greed. It is being assaulted by robotization and bots and Citizens United where everything is so overly complex that No One can possibly see or articulate the BIG picture.
Again, We are living in Bizarroland where up is down and left is right and things are spinning out of control. Probably circling the drain.
You are assuming that every single thing can be roboticised. I have worked in manufacturing automation since the 1960’s. There are many simple jobs in factories that are still done by humans, tho the engineers would love to automate them. A fully roboticised car plant still needs to be shut down one
shift in every three so that humans can service the robots. Personally I suspect that there is some sort of a thermodynamic limit to automation, We get a bit closer every year but never arrive. We need a new Sadi Carnot to define it, just like he did for heat engine efficiency.
Richard,
Doesn’t matter if everything can be robotized or not. The problem is that the population continues to expand and the kind of jobs that support families isn’t. The ability to produce quickly and cheaply is expanding yet the cost of the finished production isn’t getting cheaper. There is a growing gap between those who control the machinery of production and those who would purchase the products.
So what is happening is that production isn’t growing yet the debt is. This serves the Banksters who need expanding debt for their models to work but the expanding debt isn’t going into expanding production. It is going into stock repurchasing and income for those who control the machinery.
Off the subject of robotization, which is also slowly going on but this pattern of borrow for repurchase to keep P/E ratios down has a negative deflationary consequence. As more debt means that the cost of production has increased while the actual sales decrease. So prices can’t go up because there is shrinking demand because not enough people make enough money to purchase all these efficiently made products. So a company has to sell more or lower the number of shares outstanding. More debt, lowering demand, lowering prices, higher costs…. When I carry this out, it means eventually the company collapses, no matter what its stock value was at the peak.
In the mean time, everyone is just trying to survive and hope and pray that the paradigm changes.
Sad reality is that many of the once decent wage jobs may be gone for good. I was unemployed for 1 year and underemployed as 1-man consultancy for 1 year. It was the most painful time of my life and I can’t fathom being long term unemployed in 40s/50s…
Work expands to fill time available.
As us peasants spend less and less time on producing goods because the machines can produce more and more, us peasants are spending more and more time doing things which are less than essential.
Like telephone sales services. In the olden days, no company could afford to employ 200 or 2000 people just to go ringing around all day pestering people, there was too much other to be done. Now, with all that cheap labour available, they can afford these professional pesterers.
I know, telephone sales will also be automated, and then the big companies will think of something even more stupid to make use of all that cheap labour.
I read a couple of small e-books about 4-5 years ago that I can’t lay my hands on again despite Google’s help.
The author identifies the problem outlined in the article and in Part 1 defines a small minority (rule makers) governing the unwashed majority through penning them into enclaves controlled/patrolled by Robots. In this part the defining point of Robot accelaration is vision for the Robots. He depicts the rule makers as myopic and controlling whereby they enjoy the fruits of automation only for themselves and use it to control the rest.
In Part 2 he shows a different society started by a couple of techno philanthropists who can see that there is no longer any need for humans to work and instead uses the automation to share the benefits between the populace. In this part the defining point is the ability of science to take all ‘waste’ matter and re-engineer it using nano technology into new materials. Once that is achieved then all ‘work’ is done by Robots including the vast majority of scientific development and humans are left to enjoy themselves. In this Part he introduces the concept of implanting a chip between the brain and the vertebrae which he calls ‘Vertebrain’ which then allows the brain to ‘imagine’ an existence independent of the physical toil of living e.g. eating, sleeping, washing etc which is controlled by the chip. Thus each person can ‘live’ in their own imaginery space and do whatever they want without any interference from anyone else.
I can see the possibility of the Part 2 scenario given unlimited resources as all resources are re-usable. However sadly I predict that we are more likely to inherit Part 1 scenario.
P.S. If anyone else knows about these books and can provide me with a link then I would be very grateful. Thanks in advance.
Nexar, I found it in my spam filter. Sorry!
Thanks Wolf.
The supermarket checkout example illustrates the role reversal you omitted: now humans work for the machines, not the other way around, as it’s now the customers who are forced to do the work of bagging and laying all their items on the scales/readers for the bots, the paid employees eliminated and the consumer doing their work. The bots are employed only to do the work the Corporation doesn’t trust their customers to do themselves.
Wolf I posted a comment here which seems to have disappeared. Was there a reason why it was taken down? I don’t particularly mind but would like to know the ‘guidelines’ within which I should be working.
I was just relating a couple of ‘stories’ that I read that had relevance to the article.
Please let me know what it is that was wrong with my comment.
Thanks.
I felt that the 2 stories told of 2 possible end games to the scenario posted in the Article and hence worthy of discussion or at least note.
Nexar, I don’t know what happened to your comment. Could you repost it?
That said, I found this under the “Calm before the Storm in the Gold Market” post. it seemed a little incongruous.
http://wolfstreet.com/2014/10/08/the-calm-before-the-storm-in-the-gold-market/
Is this is one of your stories? If you find the second one, please repost it here as well.
Quote:
Julian the Apostate
October 9, 2014 at 2:08 pm (edit)
A story
When the Arab Spring broke out the young did not notice until Mubarak shut down the Internet in Egypt.
Suddenly several of them turned to me, a technically challenged 59 year old, one of them said, astonished,
Egypt shut down the Internet! They can’t do that, can they? I responded Its a machine, young man. OF COURSE it has an off switch. Caveat Emptor, children
I do not wish to continue beating dead horse.
Many here express the view that the world’s capitalist democracies are not capable of satisfactorily resolving the related problems of long term unemployment, underemployment, and the unrelenting destruction of the middle class. I concur.
The western democracies have had many years to provide a satisfactory resolution and have failed. Instead, by tending to the ever increasing needs of the crony capitalists they have exacerbated the destruction of the world’s middle classes.
I can see no reason to think that will change.
Voluntary disenfranchisement will not achieve anything. The right to vote is not relevant here. Our political representatives will not offer a satisfactory resolution if we threaten to withhold our votes now.
They were not swayed because 90% of their constituents opposed the bailout proposed by Hank Paulson in 2008. There have been no further bank bailout votes in Congress even though subsequent bailouts have been continuous, much larger and have benefitted foreign interests too.
By handing the responsibility of bailouts to the Federal Reserve and other central banks lawmakers can pretend that they are not involved. It is by design that voters are kept out of the loop, otherwise they might think they have rights .
NY Geezer, I just posted your comment on the front page so that more people get a chance to read it. Cheers!
I recommend “The Midas Plague”, Frederick Pohl, 1954.
This problem was identified and solved a long, long time ago ….
the problem isn’t automation. the problem isn’t human work being replaced by machines. the problem is that our *existing* system doesn’t automatically distribute the benefits gained — on the contrary, it asymetrically concentrates the work which is to be done to one group, gives the benefits to a second group, and leaves a third group unemployed.
just like the Luddites — they weren’t dumb. it isn’t the mills they were trying to destroy, it was the broken system.
I’m glad to see someone discussing this as this is a problem I’ve thought about frequently. The jobs are gone, simply put. Whereas it might have taken 12 or 16 hours out of someone’s day millenia past to procure the basic necessities of living, now it perhaps takes 4 hours per day per person. The choices are to redefine what work is (say placing a value on women’s free work like childbearing and rearing and caring for the elderly) and securing a basic standard of living. Or you can bomb everybody back into the stone age or otherwise force everyone to grow their own food and abandon fiat currency. Ruling classes need to hold the illusion of enough jobs for everybody out to the people (wasn’t that part of the reason for making the Federal Reserve in 1913? Enough jobs for everyone?). It creates a situation where the ruling class is throwing pennies in the streets and watching the plebs fight among themselves over it, all while keeping the status quo in place. At some point we need to ask what the value of each of us is as human beings, independent of our “price” as economic units…
When a group of people only talk to each other, as in the police or the elite but not limited to them only, they tend to reinforce each other. It is the crowd mentality or group think. Once a society gets itself into this circling the drain kind of thinking, it takes a rogue wave, a tsunami or a 10 sigma event to shake loose the connections and form a new paradigm.
I think this group of intellectuals has the hope that we can help somehow start the change that is needed without the tsunami washing away much of our infrastructure and I personally hope they are correct. It would defy logic and history but what choice do we have except to just accept what we don’t want to happen.
It’s absolutely necessary for us humans to interact and convene together. We are social people. Regarding the police I had an odd thought–when I lived in Thailand I can think of two times (In predominantly western, English speaking neighborhoods) where we caused a noise disturbance (i.e. in both cases we were having a party that went too late with some loud guests). In one instance I can remember a next door neighbor calling out her window “Be Quiet!” quite loudly…probably to me, since I tend to speak loudly when I’m drinking and I was in an animated discussion at that moment. We retreated inside and I took my inside voice with me. On the other occasion our two remaining party guests were in an argument about something–a German man came from next door and talked to us about how he was trying to sleep–we offered him a beer and he took it, but went home shortly after because his wife was sleeping. It occurred to me later that the American way in those situations was to call the police…which invites an armed stranger into a situation where they are not needed, to say the least. It made me feel sad for Americans in general that they feel so disconnected from their own neighbors that calling the police for a loud drunk in the next door back yard is the first choice of action.
I hope open source changes it all…but it will not change on it’s own. You see something say something needs to be turned around. How about you hear something check it (for reports of Ebola, say, why not check the people and sources online). How about you see something record it and post it, making it transparent. How about you encounter injustice and you come forward and speak out. This stuff has never come easy…
Hello Bob,
It seems as though sharper eyes and minds than us have observed the same things in respect to the two white people who “recovered” from ebola. In their scientific observation of these two cases, they noted what was different about their treatment from all the others was, these two had “blood transfusions” before being treated with an experimental drug. They were then arguing if the Gubbermint knows more about the disease than it portrays in order to affect such a quick outcome; and if the drug company behind their recovery, is using this “slight of hand” to quickly market and sell a drug for billions, which they know will not work.
If you doubt my own observations then if you can examine for yourself an incident of an aids patient who was healed in a Canadian hospital by having a blood transfusion. if I remember it correctly, they removed hid blood and then heat treated it before returning it back to his body.
There was massive news media coverage of this incident, but what was even more interesting was how the doctors and hospital department who were behind this treatment were immediately closed down.
I therefore conjecture that the two former ebola cases mentioned above, had their blood treated inexactly the same way!
We started talking abut Billions in the 90’s.
I’ll hate myself five minutes from now, but someone just had to go and mention the Ebola virus. I’ve spent my entire life working for the US government and until that fateful day in 1958 when I reported for work I had never heard Americans referred to as the herd. I’ll admit we’re a bit careless with the keys to Ft. Knox, but in my opinion, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re of wildebeest mentality. I assumed this opinion was not wide spread, just that of a tired, burnt-out guy with way too much responsibility. Not so, it was indeed widespread. I found no joy in reading classified documents about US secret human experimentation, or if you prefer, guinea pig projects. A country that will infects human subjects with cancer cells, Syphilis, and releases clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia to determine how efficiently they could disperse chemical agents, would most likely have no problem with infecting them with the Ebola virus.
I don’t admire or dislike theorists, I fear them, but how can 4,000 people die and the two whites brought back to our shores be cured within days of arriving? One is even donating blood. I’d not be surprised to learn that we were in need of humans to test a new Ebola virus drug on and these poor souls in West Africa end up with the job. Then something went wrong and instead of a new billion dollar stock, millions could die, and the cost could easily exceed a billion dollars. Does anyone know when we stopped talking millions and jumped to billions?