HAL VARIAN: Hi, I'm Hal Varian.
I'm the chief economist here at Google.
It's a great pleasure to introduce
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
I've known Erik for so long, I can spell his name.
[LAUGHTER]
It's really quite an achievement.
I haven't known Andy that long.
One F or two Fs?
ANDREW MCAFEE: See?
We'll get there.
HAL VARIAN: Well, we'll get there.
Someday I'll learn it, but I read their book,
and now I understand all this effort
that I put into spelling-- it's not worth anything anymore.
Two Ss, one F, all this stuff-- I just type a couple letters,
and then some automatic machine completes the spelling.
So this is just the first and simplest instance
of what we're all going to encounter, according
to the authors, so they're going to spend the next 45 or 50
minutes telling us about what other jobs computers are going
to take.
Thank you.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Thank you, Hal.
It's a pleasure, and according to our calculations,
you will be the last person to be replaced by a robot.
Oh, you did make one mistake in that intro, which
is, we're not going to speak for 40 or 50 minutes.
The reason we're here is, we want
to hear a bit from you about all the amazing things that you're
doing, and the questions that you have,
so Andy and I going to try and speak
for maybe for 15 or 20 minutes, and then do Q&A,
and we'll answer whatever questions you
have about the research we've been doing at MIT,
and the other companies we've visited,
and the people we've interacted with, and will
hopefully will be a very lively dialogue that way.
We realize that the best way to learn about these issues
is not to retreat to our offices at MIT,
and close the doors and windows, but to get out and interact,
and hopefully it'll be something that'll be beneficial to you,
as well.
Now, the reason we wrote this book
was, in part, out of our own confusion
about a number of trends that were going on,
and they came from different groups
that we've been talking to.
We visited a lot of companies, like Google and technology
companies in the Valley.
We also spent a lot of time with technologists at the Media Lab
and CSAIL, the computer science and the iLab
at MIT and elsewhere, and heard about the wondrous things
that technology could do.
We had a better experience riding in the driverless car
than Hal did.
And we came away from that with a lot
of the infectious enthusiasm and optimism
that a lot of technologists have about being
able to solve all sorts of problems with technology.
But we also spent a lot of time with other groups,
in particular economists.
I was just at the American Economic Association meetings
in Philadelphia, and it reminded me why the economists are often
called the dismal science, because they weren't nearly as
optimistic as our technology friends.
They pointed out some stats there weren't so encouraging.
Median income has basically stagnated since the 1990s.
The employment population ratio has fallen dramatically,
and hasn't improved, although, as you may have heard,
unemployment has gotten somewhat better.
That's mainly because more people have dropped out
of the labor force, not so much because people are hiring.
And there's a whole set of other statistics
that aren't as encouraging, and so you
contrast not just the rapid innovation, but also
some of the encouraging economic stats,
like the fact that we have hit, last month, the record wealth
in the United States-- $77 trillion record GDP, record
productivity, but yet these numbers on median income
and employment, and it struck Andy and I
as kind of a paradox, arguably the great paradox of our era.
Tracing the numbers back a bit, we
found that these numbers weren't always so decoupled--
that through most of the 20th century,
and from what we can tell, the 19th century as well,
although the data aren't quite as good,
these numbers all rose in rose in tandem together.
Productivity, employment, median income--
they were relatively tightly coupled, but then
starting about 15 years ago, they became decoupled,
with productivity and wealth and aggregate continuing
to grow significantly, but the other numbers
tailing off, or stagnating, or even falling some.
And this accounted for these different perspectives
that the technologist or the techno-optimist
had when they look at one part of the story,
versus some of the economists, who
were looking at another part of the story.
And we wanted to try and reconcile
how that could be true.
I mean, was one group right or wrong?
And, in fact, they were both right,
but they were looking at different parts of it,
and furthermore, most interestingly, we
think that both aspects of this-- both
the record productivity and wealth,
and the stagnating median income--
actually have a common cause, and that
is the fact that technology has been racing ahead,
but many people have not been keeping up with that.
There's kind of a dirty secret in economics
that not many people recognize, because it
hasn't been so important before, and that
is that while technology can grow the economic pie,
and really is what some economists jokingly say
is the only free lunch that we believe in,
there is no economic law that says that everyone's
going to benefit from those technological gains.
It's entirely possible that some people will be made worse off.
You've heard of the buggy whip manufacturers that
were put out of business when Henry Ford introduced
the automobile.
Well, sure, there are some people
who may be made worse off.
It turns out that the size of that group
can be almost arbitrarily large.
It could be 50% or more of people
who don't share in those benefits,
and the data suggests that in the past 10,
15 years, that's been the pattern that's been emerging
is that technology has been making the pie bigger,
but most of those benefits have been
accruing to a relatively small group.
Maybe 60 to 70% of them have been accruing to about 1%
of the people in the past decade or so,
and a lot of that, while there are many forces at work,
a lot of it has to do with the nature of technology.
To give you an example, consider a simple application
like tax preparation.
So TurboTax can do your taxes.
Many of you probably use TurboTax.
I do.
It's a simple piece of software that has codified that process,
and reduced it to a basic set of steps-- digitized it--
and once it's become digitized, guess what?
You can make a copy of it.
You could make 10 copies of it.
You could make 100 million copies of it,
and the marginal cost of that is very, very low.
Anything that's digital can be reproduced at nearly zero cost.
What's more, each copy is virtually
identical to the original, and it
could be transmitted almost instantaneously
anywhere on the planet.
As Hal writes in his book, "Information Rules," which
you should all read if you haven't already,
these characteristics of free, perfect, and instant
are not common for most other goods and services,
to say the least, and they lead to sometimes some
unusual economics.
Some of those economics are what we call,
winner take all markets, because if someone has made
a tax-preparation program, you don't necessarily want to go
out and buy the hundredth-best or the thousandth-best
or the 10,000th-best program.
You want to buy probably the best one you can find.
Maybe there's some room for a small amount
of differentiation, if people have slightly different kinds
of needs, and so a very small group-- maybe one--
will win the dominant share of the market.
Sticking with tax preparation, that
means that the people at Intuit have done very, very well.
There are some billionaires there now.
All of us, as consumers, have done well, because for $39
we can get tax preparation, and we
have a lot of consumer surplus and benefits-- ease of use--
that we wouldn't have had otherwise.
But there are a bunch of people in the tax-preparation
business, at H&R Block and elsewhere,
that may have had a college education,
may have had some skills that they've
invested a long time in, and now they're not really
adding a lot of value anymore.
What they do isn't really all that useful
to most of the rest of us, and as a result,
the ranks of people who say their job is tax preparation
has fallen dramatically over the past five or six years.
And it's, of course, not because taxes
have gotten so much easier.
It's because technology can now do that job.
Now, that's just one example, but it's, in many ways,
a microcosm of what's happening in many other industries, where
you can codify more and more processes,
and reduce them into a digital form, and then replicate them.
Marc Andreessen has famously said
that software is eating the world,
and he's got a point that this digitization is
at the core of more and more industries--
not just the traditional software industries,
but, of course, music and media, manufacturing, finance,
retailing.
In fact, it's hard to think of an industry that's
not affected, with the possible exception of our industry,
education, which I think is next in line
for that kind of revolution, and that
means that the same kind of not just
technology, but the same kind of economics
is coming to more and more industries.
A number of economists, including our colleague, David
Autor, and others at MIT have a look
at what's happened to what they call the skill content of jobs.
You take the overall occupations in the economy,
and look at the underlying skills required to do them,
what you find is that those jobs that
involve routine information-processing tasks,
like, for instance, tax preparation, but also travel
agents, bookkeepers, secretaries-- those jobs have
been the ones that have shrunk the most over the past decade,
because automation has affected those tasks the most.
Now, in doing the research for this book,
Andy and I spent time visiting companies like Google,
and we came to the conclusion that it
wasn't just that machines were getting
good at routine information-processing tasks,
but they're getting good at a broader and broader set
of tasks.
I think Andy may be talking about some
of those in a little while, but there's a whole wider
set of applications, and really, in some ways, amazing things
that machines can do now, many of which
I think people in this room are probably inventing
and discovering, and that means that as
disruptive as the past 10 years were-- and it was
a very disruptive decade-- we think that the next decade is
going to be even more disruptive, as it's going
to create even more wealth, even more productivity, even more
possibilities, but also, it's going
to change the skill content of more jobs.
It's going to mean that more people will
find that the existing tasks they're doing
aren't adding value to the economy in the same way
that they were before, because they find themselves competing
with machines, and you don't want
to be competing with a $39 piece of software if you're human.
Not many people want to work for those kinds of wages.
So in the end, do we come away with this analysis
as optimists, or are we pessimists?
Andy and I don't put ourselves in either the utopian category
or the stagnationist category.
We call ourselves mindful optimists,
because we believe that we can address
the challenges and the opportunities created
by these new technologies, but that there's
no technological determinism that's
going to automatically lead to one future or another.
The book is called "The Second Machine Age,"
but we learn a lot by looking at the first machine age, which
was the Industrial Revolution, and in the Industrial
Revolution, there were some new technologies,
some wondrous new technologies that came along that bent
the curve of human history, that took us from a relatively
stagnant previous several millennia,
in terms of living standards, population,
and many other metrics, towards an explosion of productivity
and increased living standards.
And those technologies primarily automated physical tasks--
automated our muscles, like the steam engine,
and later, technologies like the internal combustion engine.
The second machine age is much more
about automating cognitive tasks, mental work,
and we think it's going to have equally profound implications.
While, when you automate make muscle tasks,
it actually increases the demand for control systems,
or cognitive tasks, and in that sense,
humans tend to be complements for the automated power
systems.
It's not so clear that automating cognitive tasks
and augmenting cognitive tasks is going to be complementary,
versus a substitute, for human labor.
And as we work through the implications
of the second machine age, we need
to think about how we can make the kinds of adjustments
we made in the first machine age,
so that we don't just get the increased
wealth and productivity, but also the kind of shared
prosperity that we had through most of the past 200 years.
So with that, let me turn it over to Andy, who's
going to flesh some of that out, and then we
want to turn to all of you for some questions and comments,
and have a robust discussion about this.
ANDREW MCAFEE: Yeah, and thank you, Erik.
As Erik says, the main thing we want to do is talk with you
all, so I don't want to take up too much time.
I want to do two things.
I want to talk about where this book came from,
what its origin was, and then what
its goals became, as we were writing it,
because if anyone tells you they know what they're
trying to accomplish exactly with the book
when they start writing it, they have just lied to you.
So I want to talk about what our goals became, as we fleshed out
this book that became "The Second Machine Age."
I think if honestly if there were
one day where I had this eureka moment,
and where I realized that we needed to go, first of all,
get a lot smarter ourselves, and then start
writing and publicizing it to the world,
it would be in the fall of 2010, when I'm reading the "New York
Times" online, and there is a story about the fact
that this company developed a car that was driving itselves
on American roads in traffic, with no human intervention
whatsoever.
And I spit my coffee at that point for a very specific
reason-- this was not supposed to happen.
You all were not supposed to do this.
Shame on you.
But but more broadly, the self-driving car
was supposed to remain firmly in the realm of science fiction,
and not over in the realm of reality.
We knew this because a couple of colleagues of ours
had written a fantastic book six years earlier,
in 2004, explaining, to our complete satisfaction,
why this driving a car was going to remain over
on the human side of the balance sheet,
and not over on the digital side.
And they made a very convincing argument
that the pattern-matching work that
had to go on-- high-stakes pattern-matching
to drive a car.
If you get it wrong, you're going to hurt somebody.
The amount of information you had
to take in, the different sensory channels you had
to incorporate, the formal and the informal rules
of the road that you had to be aware of-- this
was a daunting task.
We humans are kind of good at it.
Technology was lousy at it, and that
was the way it was going to remain,
and Erik and I both read the book.
We taught it in our courses, we believed it,
and then you all screwed up the equation
by basically building a car that did this kind of stuff.
And then over and over again, we saw these examples
of science fiction becoming reality,
and a quote from Hemingway kept echoing in my head.
He has a wonderful quote about how a man goes broke.
He says it's gradually and then suddenly.
And we kept on seeing these examples of really incremental,
really kind of boring progress, turning into holy cow,
we're done, eureka, this mission is accomplished.
How many people have heard of the problem
in robotics of SLAM?
I just want to see how geeky this audience is.
Oh, fantastic.
I know something more than a group at Google.
I'm going to go home happy today.
SLAM is another thing that we humans do really easily.
Everyone, point to the staircase.
Duh.
All of us could locate where we are in the room
right now, because we engage in what's
called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping.
All of us know where the staircase is in the room.
All of us know where the doors and the hallways are.
We know where we are in that room.
It turns out it's fiendishly difficult, astonishingly
difficult, to give a robot that kind of capability, as well.
There is a review of the literature on SLAM
that was published, I believe, in 2008 that said,
we've made essentially no headway,
and we can't see what's going to change going forward.
This is one of the holy grails of the robotics discipline.
A colleague of ours named John Leonard, back at MIT,
last year, or no more than a couple years ago,
essentially solved SLAM for a medium-sized room-- I'm not
making this up-- by waving a Kinect around.
So he took $150 of consumer equipment,
and basically solved this long-standing challenge
in robotics.
So over and over again, we kept on seeing
these really nasty, thorny problems just being blown away
by smart geeks working with incredibly powerful computers
and oceans of data, and that was really the motivation
to write the book-- for, first of all, for me and Erik
to understand this world, and then to communicate it.
And then two other goals-- the second thing
I want to talk about is the goals that
appeared as we're writing the book-- two other goals became
apparent.
The first was that we felt like we
had to do battle with two forces out there,
and Erik has talked about them.
One is the force of, there's nothing new here.
There's nothing to see here.
Move on.
Technology has the same role in the economy
that it's always had in the economy.
It's not going to lead to any bigger or different disruptions
than has gone on before.
I just don't believe that, and I felt
was important to try to stake out that turf,
and defend the claim that honestly, this
is some kind of new regime.
This as a second machine age here.
The second one is kind of the opposite of the nothing
to see here.
It's the nothing to worry about here, because everything
is going to be hunky-dory because
of technological progress.
We need some utopians out there who say, oh, you and your silly
worries about jobs and wages and workers and all that.
We're creating a world that's going
to be so munificent that essentially, everything's
going to be free.
No one's going to have a job.
We can all just do Maker Faire all the time,
and things are going to be fantastic.
So what are you boring, Northeast, academic people
worried about?
Just come hang out at Food Camp for long enough,
and you're going to walk away just totally optimistic
about the state of the world.
We don't buy that, either.
There are some real challenges coming up
because of this technological progress, and to ignore them
is a pretty bad idea.
As Erik said, right now it's pretty clear
that there's some polarization and some hollowing out going on
in the middle class of America, because the stereotypical,
median, American worker does not have a college education.
Fewer than 40% of us do, and is not doing manual labor.
They're doing low-level, fairly routine knowledge work.
As with most of us know, that is squarely
in the sights of this wave of progress that we're seeing,
but that wave doesn't stop there.
Most of us would not call a doctor a median worker.
Most of us would not call medical diagnosis
a routine information-processing task,
but what Watson is doing-- since it's won "Jeopardy,"
it needs a new job-- it has gone to medical school,
and I'm pretty convinced that if it is not today
the world's best diagnostician, it will be fairly quickly.
So these disruptions in the labor force
are not going to be confined to that fairly low-wage, fairly
average worker.
They're going to go both up-- up in the age, the wage,
and the skill, and the education distribution--
and then downward, as well, because we're doing things
like learning how to pick fruit automatically, which is not
a prestigious job, but certainly a human one now, too.
And then our last goal was to try
to offer some prescriptions about what to do,
and I want to be pretty clear.
Our prescriptions are not out there
in the singularity future kind of time frame.
Ray Kurzweil has the 2045 turf staked out pretty well.
We don't want to go encroach on that.
We don't know if we're going to get
to his version of the future.
One of the funniest things that ever happened to me, as we were
writing this book-- I was on stage with a very
prominent roboticist, who I don't think I'll name,
and he got asked a question about the singularity.
And he gave a response that I thought
was incredibly rude, until I thought
that was incredibly accurate.
He said, look, Ray Kurzweil is going to die.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
So we don't want to be out there in the 2045 time framework.
What Erik and I are talking about in the book,
and our recommendations, focus on time frames a lot,
a lot closer in than that, and I can bucket them
into two time phases-- things we could and should do tomorrow,
the immediate stuff, and then the slightly longer-term stuff.
The immediate stuff is what you would
learn if you pick any Econ 101 textbook off the shelf.
I don't care if it was written by Greg Mankiw, who
advises Republican candidates, or Paul Krugman, who's
a pretty well-known liberal economist.
Their Econ 101 textbook would tell a government
to do a small set of things, and to do them very,
very well-- to do education, to foster entrepreneurship
in an environment, to double down and make
sure you've got world-class infrastructure,
and to have a fairly welcoming immigration policy,
and to invest in original research.
This is uncontroversial among economists.
We think it's exactly the right the immediate-term playbook
to restart economic growth, and therefore, restart job and wage
growth, as well.
Looking out slightly longer term,
the crazy, radical ideas that we have in the book
are things like-- how many of us have heard of the Earned Income
Tax Credit?
Good.
This is basically a negative income tax for people
lower down on the wage and income distribution.
It rewards a dollar of work with more than $1
via the income-tax system.
Great idea.
Let's subsidize labor, especially
at the entry points of the workforce,
as heavily as we can.
Milton Friedman, that notorious socialist,
advocated for a negative income tax a lot.
We think that's a fantastic idea,
so we believe there are more than tweaks-- interventions
you can do in things like the tax code that
will go a long way toward putting people back to work.
Farther out, again, we are not singulartarians.
We're not talking about the economy of 50 years from now.
For what it's worth, I think it's a science-fiction economy.
I think it's, we're at the holodeck.
I think we're in some crazy place,
because you all are going to keep
doing what you do for the next 50 years.
It's going to take us into a world that I can't envision.
What I do know, though, is it could take us
into a more utopian, kind of a cool, "Star Trek,"
explore new worlds.
The phrase we use when we're not talking to geeks
is a digital Athens for that world, where the citizens have
this enlightened discourse all the time,
and instead of being supported by human slaves,
they're supported by a big army of machines
that do the hard, dirty, heavy lifting in an economy.
There are dystopian strains, as well,
and if we continue to polarize the economy,
if we provide no opportunities, if mobility continues
to go down-- those are outcomes that I think push us
in more of a dystopian direction.
The broadest point I think that we make when we write the book
is that the choices that we all make, starting now,
are going to determine which of those two paths
we create when we head down, going forward.
I think that's probably a good place to shut up.
Let's turn this open, and see what people want to talk about.
You've had your hand up for a little while.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I was just wondering--
you were talking about negative income taxes,
and one thing that comes to my mind
is the patent-protection system, where it essentially
grants government-sanctioned monopoly to the person doing
the R&D. If technology improves, would you advocate
some sort of reduction in the patent window,
because that would increase competition, and then share?
ANDREW MCAFEE: Yeah, this is an amazingly controversial area
of work among our colleagues-- IP log and IP regimes,
in general.
The stuff that makes the most sense to me,
and I want to hear what Erik says,
are that we've probably gone too far
with some categories of IP protection.
It's not clear to me that software patents
are doing more good than harm.
We might want to revisit that.
Companies like yours buy these companies mainly
as a war chest for patents, and then you
go rattle the saber against some other company,
and then you have some kind of agreement.
That's not value-added activity.
Amazingly enough, there's a cartoon
made by Disney called "Steamboat Willie"
that is still under copyright.
I think it was made in the 1920s.
It's the precursor to Mickey Mouse, which
Disney wants to hold onto tenaciously.
I'm not sure what purpose is served by that.
So I'm a huge fan of property, in general,
but I think our property protections might
have gone a bit too far in the IP world.
Does that make sense?
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Yeah, I think you got it exactly right,
and I would just elaborate by saying
that the purpose of intellectual property, according
to the Constitution, and for that matter,
according to economists, which, in this case, happen to agree,
is to foster the creative arts, to foster R&D,
and I think, in many cases, we've
lost sight of that with a regime.
It's been taken over by lobbyists.
The copyright of Mickey Mouse, and the fact
it's been extended and re-extended--
there's the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act--
that basically retroactively extended copyrights.
It's hard to come up with any rationale
how that would increase the incentive of people in 1920
to make more inventions by giving more
wealth to the people who own those copyrights today.
So that's a perfect-- and then software patents
is another one where, when you build on previous innovations,
then patents can discourage innovation,
rather than providing incentives,
because they basically take away the returns from the people who
are building the new stuff, and giving it back
to people who have built the pre-existing stuff.
So for all those reasons, there's
some serious re-thinking that needs to be done,
or actually, returning to the old thinking that
needs to be done.
AUDIENCE: What do you think are the greatest risks
to your predictions about rising unemployment and falling
median income and hollowing out of the middle class
and so forth?
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Well, just to be clear,
we're not necessarily predicting that.
We see that as something that's happened in the past few years,
and as Andy said at the end, and I
tried to say at the end, as well, the outcomes are going
to be very much dependent on our choices, and when you say,
what are the risks, do you mean in terms
of risks of us getting it wrong, or risks that if that happens,
what will be the downside?
There's two interpretations of the word, risk.
Which one do you like us to address?
AUDIENCE: What are the factors most
likely to prevent those things happening?
ANDREW MCAFEE: What can we do if we don't like the trajectories?
What can we do?
AUDIENCE: Well, it's partly that kind of proactive what can we
do, but it might also be, trends play out
in a way very different--
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah--
AUDIENCE: --than you would assume.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: --and we would like to see that happen.
I mean, we can learn a little bit from the first machine age,
because that was also a time of great disruption.
It was almost exactly 200 years ago this year-- actually,
it was-- that the Luddites started
smashing the looms in the machines in England
because they saw them as taking away jobs.
And they had a point that there were
a lot of people-- weavers-- who were losing their jobs,
but at the end, new jobs were created by the economy,
and you could argue, and it'd be a fact, that technology
has always been destroying jobs, and it's always
been creating jobs, and over time, historically we've
created as many new jobs as we've eliminated.
Now, those trends have become decoupled in the past 15 years.
If you look historically, one of the reasons
that we did create new jobs was because we, as individuals,
as entrepreneurs, and as governments, we
made a whole series of choices, which
helped maintain shared prosperity.
Just to give you a couple of examples--
it's been called America's best idea--
is universal, mandatory education, and that
helped bring a bunch of people who
used to be farmers, and give them a set of skills that made
them suitable for a whole set of other types of jobs
and occupations, and America led the world
in pushing that, and not coincidentally,
led the world in shared prosperity and living
standards.
But it wasn't just some government action.
It was also a bunch of entrepreneurs
that helped invent and discover the new industries.
90% of Americans used to work in agriculture.
Now it's less than 2%.
That difference didn't join the ranks of unemployed,
thankfully.
They were employed in totally new industries
that people like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
and Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented that people back
then probably could never have even conceived of,
so it's very much the role of entrepreneurs
to help identify what those new industries are.
The data say that right now, we aren't doing it as fast
as we used to.
We'd like to see more entrepreneurship
to help speed up the creative destruction, especially
the creative side.
Surprisingly, when we looked at the data,
we found that in the 2000s, there
were fewer new enterprises and job creation
than there were in the '90s or the '80s,
so we think of this as being a very entrepreneurial era,
but actually, the data suggests that in some ways, it's not.
If we could speed that up, if we could, in some sense,
crowdsource this question of where will
the jobs come from, which is historically
how we've solved the problem, we think
we'd be hopeful that we could improve on that situation.
But we have to say that in fairness, we are not completely
sure that the future is going to play out
just the way the past did.
It's been said-- I heard this from Hal Varian--
that history doesn't repeat itself,
but sometimes it rhymes.
I'm not sure where you got that from, but--
ANDREW MCAFEE: Hal Varian looks a lot like Mark Twain, I think.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Yeah, yeah, I think maybe
that's where he got it from.
So maybe we will be able to replicate
some of the successes, but I'm sure it's
going to require some different-- we can't just
double down on doing the exact same thing we did before.
We're going to have to have some different kinds of policies,
and that's why we wanted to start this conversation was
to help identify what those new changes are
going to need to be.
ANDREW MCAFEE: I like your question a lot.
I think the main thing that might make the future play out
differently than I am envisioning right now
is if Erik and I made the classic geek mistake, when
we were writing the book, of becoming too
enamored of the technologies we were looking at,
and projecting them too far in the future,
and thinking that their impact is actually
going to be bigger than they are.
I don't think we've made that mistake, but if we have,
then economic growth will have some really different
consequences, and the employment impact of technology
will be less than I am currently thinking it is.
That'd be kind of a good mistake to make.
AUDIENCE: So a little more than a year ago,
Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed in which
he observed that a lot of the new technologies
are going to start putting more wealth in the hands of people
that have capital start with-- people that can afford
the robot army that then takes away manufacturing jobs.
So I'm wondering what kind of economic restructuring
do you need to go through to be able to deal
with that new paradigm?
It almost happened before, like you've
mentioned, in the first machine age,
but it seems like it's going to be on a lot larger scale
this time.
ANDREW MCAFEE: The great phrase that Krugman used was
"robots and robber barons," right,
are going to get all the benefits of the world
that we're creating, and he thinks
that's a pretty bad outcome.
We do, too.
What can we do to make sure that doesn't happen?
Again, we're going to sound a little bit like broken records.
What we don't want to do, what we're really, really careful--
what we're sure we don't want to do
is storm the barricades of capitalism,
and fundamentally rethink the economic contract right now,
in 2014.
Most of it's working pretty well.
The biggest problem that you identify,
and that we spend time on, is it might get harder and harder
to make a living from your labor,
as opposed to from your capital.
If that's really what's going on, let's remove the barriers.
Let's try to upscale our labor.
Let's remove any tax or whatever distortions to doing that,
and let's see how that goes before we start thinking
about getting rid of capitalism or demonizing
capitalists or things like that.
AUDIENCE: So if you assume that there's
something called structural unemployment, which,
for my purpose of my question, means someone whose
potential benefits of being employed
are less than the costs of employing them.
I guess my question is, do you think that exists?
Do you think there's a population that
fits that category?
How large do you think it is today,
and what do you think is going to happen
to that number over the next coming decades?
ANDREW MCAFEE: Sir?
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Sure.
There are a number of ways that you
can get-- the answer is yes, I can
see there is some structural unemployment,
and there are a number of ways you can get to that,
and some of them are very discouraging.
If you look to-- in the 1930s, when much of agriculture-- when
tractors were introduced, mechanizing
a lot of agriculture, Joe Stiglitz and others have
pointed out that took tens of millions
of people who used to work on farms,
and threw them into the labor force,
and it caused a macroeconomic, or helped
contribute to a macroeconomic recession, or the Great
Depression, and it took a decade or more for many of them
to be reskilled, and for new industries
to crop up to hire them.
And you can easily see that that kind of mechanism
could happen today, not with farmers, because there aren't
any of them left, hardly-- there's only 2%
of the population and falling-- but
in, say, routine information-processing tasks.
And one of the things that concerns me is that by the time
you find new skills and new jobs for those people to do,
what if the technology has changed again?
What if you have another disruption,
and then you're in this constant pattern of trying to catch up
with what's going on before?
And if the pace of technology speeds up,
then you could see that not only would you
have structural unemployment, but it
could get more and more severe over time.
One of the ways this manifests itself is not
just through unemployment, but also through inequality.
If you're a true free-market economist,
you say, well, markets will always clear.
I mean, you just have let them clear, and at some level,
that's what the math says.
That's true, but the wage at which they clear,
the price at which they clear, could be arbitrarily low.
It could be $5 an hour.
It could be $0.05 an hour.
It could be five-hundreth of a cent an hour.
And I think most of us would agree that at least two
of those numbers, and probably all three of them,
aren't ones we feel very comfortable as seeing
as the clearing wage for labor.
AUDIENCE: It could be negative.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Well, if you figure
the cost of hiring somebody-- like right now, if you look
at-- somebody gave me a horse, and said here,
you can have a horse, and you can use it to ride to work
and whatever else you want to do with it,
I'd say, thanks, but no thanks.
I really, even if I got for free, it wouldn't be worth it.
And so you're certainly right that an input of production,
once you cover the other costs associated with it,
even 0 might be too high a price.
ANDREW MCAFEE: But the question that Erik and I have wrestled
with the hardest, as we wrote this book-- we've had not just
bantering, but honest arguments and disagreements about it--
is, are we heading into an area where
the average worker is a horse?
In other words, I couldn't walk up to a factory or a warehouse
or an office park with a horse and say, hey,
you can have this horse for a tenth of a penny a day.
Put it to work.
They'd say, get lost.
I have no use for that input in my system of production
anymore.
We're not headed there tomorrow or next year
or next five years, even with this ridiculous technological
progress.
The question I honestly don't know the answer to
is, are some of us heading into horse territory in the economy
that we're creating?
Most of the really smart economists
that we talk to find that a fairly ridiculous proposition.
I was talking earlier this week with a guy who's
got a Nobel Prize, and I said, does your intuition
tell you that if we play our cards right--
and that's not a given, obviously,
with the polarization in Washington
and everything-- if we play our cards right,
though, that we can be back to a full-employment economy
after this nasty transition maybe lasting 20 years?
And he said very confidently, oh, yeah, absolutely.
We can get back to a full-employment economy.
I just find myself less confident than that.
And again, I want to stress, it's your fault.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: There's no doubt that technology is contributing
to the hollowing out of the middle class,
but there's another effect, which is technologically
related, and I'm not sure if you're
talking about it directly or indirectly,
but just the fact that communication barriers have
come down, and so now a lot of knowledge work that
used to be done in America can now be done elsewhere,
which is good for other countries,
but just not so great for this one.
So how do those two variables interact,
and what will the trend be?
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Well, you're right.
I think that there are two big trends that
are affecting the economy today--
globalization and technology.
I mean, there are some other, smaller trends,
in terms of cultural changes, unionization,
but just focusing on those two big ones,
I agree entirely that globalization is,
in a large part, enabled by some advances in technology,
especially communications technologies,
also some transportation technologies.
But of the two, we think that the technology one is
the one with more legs, and the one that's accelerating,
and if you look at a lot of kinds
of jobs that have been offshored historically, now many of them
are coming back to the United States.
Which low-wage country do you think
Apple, on their 30th anniversary,
is making their Mac Pro computers?
MALE SPEAKER: USA.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: USA.
They're making them in Austin, Texas,
not because the wages are so low in Texas--
maybe we should say, not just because they're
so low in Texas-- but not because of the wages there,
but because there's hardly any labor required anymore.
They're bringing them back here, and that's
happening for a lot of knowledge work, as well.
Larry Summers pointed out to us once
when we were talking about this that if you
look at manufacturing employment in China,
how has that changed in the past 15, 20 years,
as manufacturing has grown in China?
It's actually fallen.
There are 20 million fewer people
working in manufacturing now than there were 20 years ago,
so manufacturing employment is leaving both the United States
and China, not going to Vietnam, but going to robots.
And so, in many ways, our view is that if anything,
offshoring is just a weigh station
on the road to automation, and some
of these low-wage countries are even more
in the bulls-eye of automation in this second machine
age than American or Western European or Japanese workers,
because the more routine the tasks are that you're doing,
the easier it is for someone to write a piece of software,
or a robot or a program to do that.
And if your competitive advantage is, hey,
we'll do it for cheaper, well, I don't
think that's a very strong barrier to entry,
compared to what's happening with the pace
of technological change.
ANDREW MCAFEE: And you asked specifically
about knowledge work.
I came across this really interesting series of stories
in the press awhile back, because
some different reporters noticed it,
and then they were calling up their insurance company
or their credit card company or their bank.
They seem to be interacting with this perfectly accented
American voice that was giving them somewhat canned
responses, with the same sentences or sentence fragments
over and over again.
And so they pushed on that, and they
noticed that they think there are two different strains going
on right now.
One is where there's a Filipino listening to what they're
saying, because English skills are pretty good there,
and then pressing a button for which
American-accented response they're
supposed to spit back on the fly.
The slightly more advanced version of that
is there's an algorithm listening to what the person is
saying, and the algorithm hits the button
for which pre-recorded human voice should be given back
to the person.
Step three of that progression, I believe, is--
we have all seen the movie "Her"--
is Scarlett Johansson's synthetic voice is just going
to give us a response back.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: That's the future we're all hoping for.
ANDREW MCAFEE: Yeah, exactly, can't get here soon enough.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW MCAFEE: But it's not science fiction stretched
anymore to imagine a completely synthetic interaction
like that.
Again, for knowledge work, we think
that offshoring is a weigh station
on the way to automation.
AUDIENCE: How much do you think this
is a US issue, versus a global issue?
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Well, it's certainly a global issue.
I mean, if you look at the-- I mean,
a lot of the trends we gave were using US numbers, frankly,
because we are the most familiar with them,
and some of the best data is available here,
but if you look at the OECD, the Organization of Economic
Cooperation and Development, the most developed countries,
you see a very similar pattern.
For instance, the hollowing out of routine jobs
has happened in virtually every one of those industries,
according to research by my colleague, David Autor,
and others.
The inequality has grown in all those countries.
It has grown in Sweden, Germany, France, Japan.
There's only two or three countries
where it hasn't grown-- Greece and, I think, one other one,
and there's just some weird things
going on in those countries that probably aren't typical.
And as we just said, when you look at the developing nations,
you see, I think arguably, that they
may be even more in the bulls-eye,
and I think this could be a real concern, because historically,
having low wages and taking some of those kinds of jobs
in textiles and other areas has been a path to development
to get out of that underdeveloped state.
You for awhile do those really low-wage jobs,
and then, as you work your way up the ladder,
you start joining the broader economy.
If that path is cut off, it could be very troubling.
Those countries that haven't made the transition
may be stuck for a long time on the other side of the ledger.
ANDREW MCAFEE: There was a nice piece
of work done by a couple of University of Chicago
economists just recently that looked at the returns
to capital versus labor in many countries around the world,
and they found the pattern was really similar, almost
without exception.
The share of total GDP that was getting paid out in labor
was heading south country after country after country
around the world.
We can think of an explanation for that
doesn't involve technology.
And in fact, they said the explanation is explicitly
information technology.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Right, and I think
that that's a very important point to emphasize,
is because there are people who say well, it's
because of what their Congress did,
or what the guys in Wall Street did, or whatever,
and I'm sure there have been a lot of bad things done
in Washington and Wall Street and elsewhere,
but the fact that this pattern is so pervasive and so global
suggests to us, or is additional evidence to us,
that there are some more fundamental economic forces
and technological forces at work.
AUDIENCE: I think once you have big problems like health,
and legal system politics become automated,
like having a differential diagnosis done
by a machine or a phone app, and it
tells you exactly what's happening,
you probably have more trust of a better
diagnosis than the best doctor out there,
and for this layer of very high-paid cognitive type
of skills, there is a lot of infrastructure built
to protect this system, and a lot of politics and lobbyists
that want to make sure that it stays.
And can we create a baseline for,
let's say, before we go that route, there
needs to be a unanimous approval on what can go-- not to serve
a particular interest of a certain group, but rather,
humanity at large?
ANDREW MCAFEE: So no is the short answer to that.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: After that polite way of [INAUDIBLE].
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
ANDREW MCAFEE: Yeah, it was a lovely question.
I'm going to dismissive answer.
No, we certainly can't change our political structure
that deeply, so we have to have a plebiscite
before every instance of technological change
and lobbying protect-- we're not going to get there.
But you bring up a really important point,
which is that-- I won't speak for Erik--
I think that the main impediment to a lot of the stuff,
the great stuff, that we're going to see
is exactly the barriers that you identify--
our regulatory barriers that are there to protect incumbents,
as opposed to protecting consumers-- they primarily
have that effect-- are lobbying groups or all
the forces of inertia that are trying
to keep stuff from happening.
When you look at the-- some of Uber's recent troubles
are self-inflicted.
Let's be really clear about that.
Some of the other ones have been brought
on by exactly the forces you identify.
Did you all hear that France is making
Uber wait a minimum of 15 minutes
before the car can show up purely to protect their taxis.
This is insane, but we're going to see all kinds of stuff
like that go on.
Stupid question time-- how many of
us have heard of Tim O'Reilly?
Heh heh.
Dumb, right?
Tim has a beautiful way to phrase it,
and it's something that I carry around.
He says, look, with our policy and our regulatory decisions,
we have two choices.
We can protect the past from the future,
or we can protect the future from the past.
For heaven's sake, let's protect the future from the past.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Right, and that's
not to say that there aren't policies that we should adopt,
but I 100% agree with Andy that there's a natural reaction
to either smash the machines, the Luddite approach,
or to freeze the existing occupations and jobs the way
they are through a whole set of occupational licensing
and another incumbent protection acts.
And while those seem like natural ways
to prevent some of the bad outcomes,
ultimately we think they're going
to be more destructive than beneficial.
The way that the economy has thrived in the past
has been what does Joseph Schumpeter called
creative destruction, and the answer
is not to try to slow down the new ideas
and the new technologies.
It's to speed up our adaptation, and the government
can help in many ways by, for instance, I mentioned earlier,
universal public education was one idea, and raising the skill
levels.
Encouraging, boosting, and speeding entrepreneurship--
not slowing it down.
Doing things with tax policy, doing things
with R&D. So there are lots of things
you can do to help with the preconditions
to smooth and speed the transition,
but freezing in the historical structure
is certainly going to do more harm than good.
AUDIENCE: Hi, so companies like Apple
make money by building fancy gadgets to sell to consumers,
and companies like Google make money by allowing advertisers
to advertise their fancy gadgets to consumers, and all of this
requires that the consumers are there, and they have jobs,
and they have--
MALE SPEAKER 2: Money.
AUDIENCE: --money.
So in a sense, we have an interest
in making sure that this situation you talked
about where workers turn into horses doesn't actually happen.
Are there any economic models which talk about this,
and say that there might be some kind of tipping
point where it all gets into a horrible, negative feedback
loop, and?
ANDREW MCAFEE: We can we can summarize the situation
you're describing, in an apocryphal story
about Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, who
was the head of the auto workers' union.
There's a story about the two of them
going through a very highly automated, brand new plant
that Ford had built, and they were
kind of joshing with each other.
I'm sure they hated each other deeply,
but they were kind of joshing with each other,
and Henry Ford points to one of his new pieces of equipment,
and he says, hey, Walter, how are you
going to get those robots to pay union dues?
And Reuther says, hey, Henry, how are you
going to get them to buy cars?
So this is exactly the problem but that you're identifying.
If people are out of work, if their wages are going down,
aggregate demand in the economy goes down,
we know that's a really bad thing to have happen,
and what I don't know is how soon is this coming?
How bad will it be?
But any reluctance to spend is going
to cause the economy and overall demand
to head in the wrong direction, and that reluctance to spend
can be based in reality, or it can
be based on Keynes' famous animal spirits.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Right, and the example
I gave earlier about what happened in the Great
Depression-- Joe Stiglitz described that
as being one of the contributing factors to that fall in demand,
and so it's going to potentially have macroeconomic effects, as
well as these distributional effects.
AUDIENCE: I wanted to ask you something
personal and specific.
ANDREW MCAFEE: And I see we're just about out of time.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Last week there was a lengthy article
in the "Economist" about the future of jobs,
and it liberally quoted from you--
ANDREW MCAFEE: Not liberally enough, I'll tell you that.
AUDIENCE: --in your upcoming book, and so
I wanted to ask you if you are a parent, or want to be a parent,
what would you advise your children
to do who are going to enter the workforce in the next two
decades?
What careers and what kind of education opportunities
should they pursue, because the classic types of things
that maybe we have told them in the past-- go become a lawyer,
go become an accountant, go become a doctor.
This is a ticket to professionalism, upper middle
class lifestyle, and the odds of you becoming unemployed
are very low, and I don't feel that that
is going to be the case going forward anymore,
and so I want to put that on you,
and if you had to advise your own son
or daughter, what would you say?
ANDREW MCAFEE: Let's have the parent answer first.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: It's a good question, and it's a tough one,
but there are still some categories
that machines are not very good at,
and we are hesitate to-- we almost never say never
because of what we've seen in terms of advances--
but things that involve significant amounts
of creativity, invention, entrepreneurship.
Those have not been affected at all.
In fact, they've been augmented.
They've become more valuable.
Interpersonal interactions and skills-- machines so far
are still not very good, although we've
got friends in the Media Lab and elsewhere that are there
pushing the frontiers on that, but whether that's motivating
people, or even just caring for a sick child,
comforting somebody-- that's something
that machines don't seem to be very good at.
I would encourage my kids to be flexible,
because whatever types of tasks that are or aren't automated
now-- it's likely to change, and people
are going to have to change and adapt
much more quickly than in the past.
So we don't know for sure exactly which
categories are going to be affected.
Those are some of them, but maintaining that flexibility
is probably going to be one of the key things you can do you.
ANDREW MCAFEE: You asked a personal question.
I'll give a little bit of a personal answer.
I'm not a parent, but the most common question
that we get asked about this stuff
comes from parents of kids of all ages
saying, what advice do I give?
What do I do?
So my advice for parents of young kids
is actually a lot easier for me.
I say, just send them to Montessori.
And not that that's a panacea.
Are there Montessori kids in the room?
Really?
That's amazing.
If one or both your founders were in the room,
hands would be going up.
There's a Montessori mafia among the technology elite,
and I was a Montessori kid, too.
And what it taught me is that the world
is a really interesting place, and your job
is to go poke at it.
I think that's great.
My school only went up through the third grade,
so in the fourth grade, I went into the public school system
in the Indiana town where I'm from,
and I felt like I had been sent to the Gulag.
I'm like, you want me to sit here all day,
and a series of things is going to be inflicted
on me at 45-minute intervals?
What are you people, sadists?
It just made no sense to me, whatsoever.
So early on, go teach your kids that the world
is an interesting place.
At the college level, my silly bumper sticker advice
is put down the beer pong paddle,
and just go do a double major.
Go hang out with the theater geeks at one side of campus,
and the math geeks at the other side of campus.
Fill up your toolkit as much as you can.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: And the only other thing I would add to that
is that if we do tend to more of a winner take all market,
there's even more of a premium than there was in the past
on being the very best in something,
so it becomes important to pursue things
that you're really passionate about,
that you're interested in, because we all
know that you're not likely to be the best at anything
that you're just doing because you have to
or because you're supposed to.
But there are going to be niches-- large niches
and small niches and tiny ones-- where somebody
has the potential to be among the best in the world,
and those are the ones that are still
going to be in demand, whereas if you just another person
doing a job because you have to, it's
going to be increasingly hard for people
to find a way to make a living doing that.
AUDIENCE: We seem to take it for granted
that investing education is a wise thing
to do, at least on a macroeconomic scale,
but on a personal scale, given the rising
popularity and prosperity, if I'm not rich,
and my prospect of becoming well-off are very, very slim,
why should I be motivated to invest in educating myself
if the chances of that having me better off are so low?
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Well, the data
suggests that even today, the difference in earnings
between people with more education and less education
is enormous, and it's been growing,
so from a purely selfish, personal point of view,
it does pay to get more education.
But it's important to understand,
when we talk about education, first off,
we don't just mean college or post-graduate education.
We mean all levels, whether it's K through 12, vocational,
lifelong learning-- all of them building more human capital
in any of those dimensions is likely to add value.
But we also think that education has to be reinvented exactly
along the lines that Andy was describing earlier.
The traditional pattern of having people sit in rows,
and learn to follow instructions carefully
from the person at the front of the room-- well,
following instructions is something that machines
are really pretty good at doing, so education of that model,
and imparting facts and numbers, isn't
likely to be the kind of thing that we
need more of the future.
Education that sparks creativity,
that allows you to think about new ways of putting things
together, and create things-- that's much more
likely to be something that adds value.
ANDREW MCAFEE: Here, here.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for a wonderful talk.
So coming back to this policy question,
how aware would you say the average policy
maker or politician in US is about these trends,
and how could we actually get more of our politicians
to understand the nuance of what you're talking about?
ANDREW MCAFEE: Someone needs to write a book about it.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW MCAFEE: You can either be really pessimistic or somewhat
optimistic about it.
I'd say the awareness is early, early days, but growing kind
of quickly, and everyone that we talk to,
these really well-informed people, bemoan
the polarization in Washington, and this environment we have
where, if you say black, by definition,
I'm going to say white.
But the green shoots that we see are
around some pretty important areas, like immigration policy.
There is a pretty broad bipartisan agreement
that we need to change some things.
There's a lot of talk about how we need to reinvent education.
No one's exactly sure how we need to do that.
So I would say the awareness is, especially about this tech
stuff, because Washington's not a technophilic place,
the awareness is low.
It's getting better kind of quickly,
and maybe it'll get OK at some point.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Yeah, I mean, that's
certainly one of the more depressing parts
of our analysis is just the way things are
so stagnant in Washington and in public policy, in general.
There is a growing amount of anger,
whether it's the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street,
or other groups, but our sense is that, by and large, they
mostly have misdiagnosed the nature of the problem,
and if you don't have the right diagnosis,
you're probably not going to have the right prescriptions.
And so a big part of the reason we wrote this book was to help
change the conversation.
Ultimately we've been told by people
who know better-- Washington doesn't lead the country.
It's people who lead it, and they
will respond to what people are demanding.
So phase one is spreading the awareness,
as I think you just brought up, getting people
to understand some of the issues that are important,
and once that conversation has been changed,
we're going to have much better hope of changing
the kinds of policies.
AUDIENCE: So you talked quite a bit
about what regulators can do to counteract
some of these effects.
Is anything we can do, given that at Google we
are pushing technology forward and are often techno-optimists?
ANDREW MCAFEE: Yes, stop, OK?
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: No, no, no.
ANDREW MCAFEE: No, don't.
That's the first thing.
This is actually really important.
We come across a lot of really well-meaning people
who kind of want you guys to stop what you're doing,
and want the tech sector to slow down and stop
putting people out of work.
We think that's the single-worst idea that we come across,
so by all means, carry on taking us into the future.
It's incredibly important work.
As individuals, advocate, support enlightened policies,
vote for and support people who are taking our policies
in the right direction, and just participate in the democracy.
Our friend Larry Lessig talks about how we just
feel so disengaged from the process,
and we've become increasingly cynical about it.
Just don't do that, please.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: You know, technology-- go ahead.
AUDIENCE: I think I meant in between, so--
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Yeah, yeah.
Let me try and go to that, because I
think that the technologists and engineers have been
great at solving problems, and we talked
to some of the folks that responded to the first DARPA
Grand Challenge, which was, as you know probably,
to build a driverless car, which many people thought
was impossible, and they responded.
The new DARPA Urban Challenge is a robot-- six-foot,
Atlas robot-- that weighs about 300 pounds that actually will
be able to walk up to a vehicle, open the door,
get inside, drive it, get out, walk across rubble, up
some stairs, attach a hose, a whole set of other tasks.
And again, at first it seemed like science-fiction
impossibility, but our friends at the MIT Computer Science
and AI Lab and elsewhere seem to be making headway on that.
It may be that we need to think about a new kind
of grand challenge that isn't to make an amazing new technology,
but is just to think about how we can reinvent
an economic, social, organizational system--
one that creates as many jobs as it's automating.
Many of the previous engineering tasks have either
implicitly or quite explicitly been designed
to answer the question, how can we
take labor out of this process?
How can we make this more labor-saving,
and have a machine do what a person used to be able to do?
But technology doesn't have to just
be a substitute for humans.
Many technologies can be complements for humans,
and can enhance the value of humans,
and maybe if we put more focused effort
into a grand challenge for creating technologies that
boost the amounts of labor, that are complements to labor,
and allow people to do things they couldn't have done before,
then we are likely to get that kind of shared-prosperity world
that we were hoping for.
And so that would be the kind of grand challenge.
We haven't quite figured out how to formulate that right,
but maybe if we could do that, it
would inspire many of you and people
elsewhere in the country and the world
to try to solve that problem, as opposed
to waiting for, say, Washington to take action.
ANDREW MCAFEE: I think we have time for one more question,
but it has to be a really bang-up final question.
Are you ready?
AUDIENCE: Sure.
Maybe.
So actually, that was a really interesting answer,
if under-specified so far, that you started to give,
because before you started to give that,
I would've started to wonder if you had had
the reaction-- other people had the reaction to the book
that your proposed prescriptions don't seem
of the same magnitude as the problem that you're describing.
For the most part, you seem to just be describing tweaks,
or maybe if you have one big idea,
it's education, which everybody has talked about for years,
and nobody knows how to fix, and if you could fix it,
it wouldn't pay off for decades down the line anyway,
and you have new problems by that point.
So what do you think is the biggest policy prescription
or advice for the future that you
have that is proportionate to the magnitude of the problem?
ANDREW MCAFEE: And the nastiest and maybe most accurate
comment we've gotten about our work
is, you guys are proposing linear solutions
to an exponential situation.
Ow, right?
So we're mindful of it.
What we don't want to do is say that we
know what the trajectory of technology is going to be,
and therefore what kind of moonshotty intervention
is appropriate to get there.
What we're saying instead is essentially, let's iterate.
Let's tinker.
Let's mess with the things that we know
will move the dial in the right direction,
and let's make sure that we're tracking the problem correctly,
as opposed to trying to anticipate where this thing is
going to be in some crazy time frame down the road.
I take a lot of insight from your chairman's repeated
assertion that the crazy, long-frame planning
horizon for Google is five years.
Overshooting that by a lot with our policy recommendations
seems like a recipe for failure or disaster.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: I mean, you've
raised a very important point, which
is that we don't have a silver-bullet solution to this.
I wish we did, but we can't point
to one silver-bullet solution, and that partly
reflects how we went about writing this book.
Many people who write this kind of book start with a policy,
and then they go and write a bunch
of reasons why this policy needs to be put in place.
ANDREW MCAFEE: Because they're policy guys.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: Right.
We are not policy guys, and we focused
on diagnosing what's going on.
We want to lay those issues out.
We have three chapters' worth of potential solutions that we
think will help with the problem,
but ultimately we think that by start this conversation,
maybe you and others in this room and elsewhere will help
develop the solutions.
We lay out some of the problems there,
and this is the kind of thing that, just as in the past,
we hope to crowdsource it, in essence.
And we have tried to walk the walk a little bit,
in terms of starting a new initiative
on the digital economy at MIT, where we were bringing together
people to grapple with these questions,
and we're hoping we can make some progress.
But I have to confess, I can't say here,
if you just implemented the Earned Income Tax
Credit, the problem will be solved,
because it's not going to be that easy.
AUDIENCE: A very brief follow-up--
when you're in a ditch, stop digging.
What's the single-most thing that we shouldn't
do to make the problem worse than maybe we are already
doing?
ANDREW MCAFEE: Turning out people
who do not have the skills to be valuable workers in the economy
of today, let alone tomorrow.
The business leaders that we talk to are so frustrated.
Up and down the skill ladder, they
can't find the people that they need, even
for the positions they have open, even here in America.
That just doesn't make any sense.
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON: I would second that.
I would also say that there's been
a problem of siloing technical people,
from the economists and the policy makers.
We find that these groups that we've tried to bridge just
don't speak the same language.
They don't even recognize the same problems,
and if we could get people coordinating on those,
I think that would be half the battle.
ANDREW MCAFEE: Thank you all for coming.
This is fantastic.
[APPLAUSE]