Well, we say that we are in the middle of what Andrew McAfee and I call "the second machine age." As the first automated industrial revolution and increased muscular work, we are doing the same with mental and cognitive tasks. There are some similarities in terms of potential growth and the disturbance, but there are also some major differences.
Which is hard hit by rising robots?
The data say that the information processing of routine tasks were particularly affected. Think accounting or travel agents or tax preparers. This was part of the first wave of the way "second machine age" was affecting the work, but what Andy and I speak is just this whole wave of new technology that affects all kinds of professional duties such as disease diagnosis, legal briefs, assigning tasks that require mobility and fine motor control. We recently installed in the Google driver less car, we visited "rethink" Rodney Brooks factory where they make robots Baxter that can do a lot of precision work. So there are a number of categories that were previously not affected now are affected.
What are the skills that man can have that will not be replaced?
It's a really hard question actually because Andy and I have been playing this game for a few years and each time we think we have a task that can not be done, we discover soon after that there someone in a laboratory at MIT or Silicon Valley working on a prototype 0.1 exactly a machine to do this task.
... Whenever we think we have a task that can not be done, we discover soon after that there is someone in a laboratory at MIT or Silicon Valley working on a prototype 0.1 exactly a machine to do this task.
So it's a little scary.
That said, there are areas which are certainly much more difficult. Interpersonal relationships is something that the machines are just not very good. Humans evolved over millions of years to be paid to social signals. Creativity, come up with a grand opera or piece of art or a piece of literature is something that machines can not do right. Scientific discovery.
Also the agility that the human body still is not anywhere close to being identified by machines. But of course, technology is moving forward and it accelerates so that the next 10 years are likely to have more disturbances than the last 10 years.
Income inequality has increased and this is a major issue. What percentage of the question you want to assign to technology?
Well there are many forces that influence inequality. There is globalization, there are institutional changes, cultural changes, but I think most economists would agree that most of this is due to technology. And it is because of what economists call technical change skill-biased - in favor skilled workers over less skilled workers.
Also, we talk about in the book on capital biased technical change - bring you capital over labor like when you replace humans with robots. And the third category is perhaps the most important, we call technical change biased superstar, maybe we should come up with a better name. But it is the fact that technology can leverage and amplify the talents, skills, or luck of 1% or perhaps even the 100th of 1% and reproduce over millions or billions of people. In these kinds of markets, you tend to be winner-take-all results and some people derive huge benefits and all of us as consumers reap the benefits as well, but there is much less need people skills fair average to above average.
What long-term policy should encompass ideas governments to ensure that the benefits of new technologies will not only benefit a narrow elite?
The reason Andy and I wrote the book because we want to change the conversation to get people focused on this kind of political ideas. Because technology is racing ahead and it's great that the technologies are in that is doing the much bigger pie. But policymakers are stagnant and people do not follow their skills. We could do much more to reinvent education. We could do a lot in stimulating the spirit of enterprise moor. We could do much more in the evolution of our tax policy to encourage people who create more jobs.
To address each of these in a little more depth, on education, we have to cultivate this kind of creative skills that are increasingly in demand. The word "work" really existed for about 300 years and it really boiled down to make people close to cogs in a machine. These types of the following routine teaching jobs are automated away. What's more important are the creative skills and our schools are not structured to teach those.
When you think about it, for the 20th century, they focused on getting people to sit quietly in rows of desks and simply follow the instructions as best they could. This is not the kind of education that we have to move forward. I think that digitization can help with that.
On entrepreneurship, we are seeing more and more entrepreneurs because jobs are disappearing, but the real reason to try to stimulate entrepreneurship is not because everyone is going to become an entrepreneur or should become an entrepreneur, This is because ultimately it is the people in charge of inventing new industries that we must create new jobs.
Just as Henry Ford helped create a new industry that employed millions of people who once worked in farms and Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, others have helped invent new industries, we have to invent the next new industries second machine age if we are going to find work for all the people whose jobs can now be done by highly machines.
The third category of tax policy and in this category, one of the fundamental laws of economics is that if you want less of something you impose and if you want more of something you subsidize. At present, we impose the job for about 80% of our revenues in one direction or another in the US. We put a gap between what the employer pays and what the employee actually receives. And then we saddle them with much needed benefits. Each of these policies essentially discourages the use of contractor work to do the job. Maybe it did not matter so much in the 19th and 20th century, but in the future, I think we have to return about. Remove the additional load we put on the job hiring and instead seek ways of making at least neutral, or even better, even subsidize.
What surprises you in your search?
What surprised me the most was how I was incompetent to understand how fast technology change. I study it as work at MIT, but even I was surprised several times by the speed with which technology advances faster than expected.
Ten years ago, I was teaching a class and part of it was that could do well and machinery that could do the humans. And I gave to drive a car as an example.
Ten years ago, I was teaching a class and part of it was machinery could do well and what humans could do well. And I gave to drive a car as an example.
You can not write a program for it. There is no set number of steps like playing chess. Lo and behold, two years ago, eight years later, I was driving on Route 101, yes, a car without a driver. I had not expected it to happen so quickly. And frankly, none of my colleagues expect it to happen so quickly.
Same thing with machines that you can speak and understand what you do and perform your instructions. Many of us carry those around in our pocket. Or have machines that can play Jeopardy, like Watson of IBM, and win, and now also diagnose diseases and solve legal issues. So I try to adapt to keep pace with technology, and as I make these adjustments hopefully I will not be as surprised many in the next 10 years because now I have very high expectations.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
Thus, people I meet, they tend to fall into two camps. Some people are really excited about the future, especially technologists, techno-optimistic. I also embarked on a number of economists. I come from the American Economic Association, where I was on a panel with economists who all had a very dark vision. In fairness, some economic statistics on median income and employment were pretty dismal. Andy and I try to resist falling into one of these camps.
We call ourselves "optimistic aware"
We call ourselves "optimistic conscious" in the sense that we think that the result can be very good. We have much more wealth and have it shared prosperity, but the conscious part is also important. We will have to adjust our policies, our skills, our organizations to deal with technology. It will not happen automatically. If we do not start paying more attention to these issues, we do not necessarily have good result that we all hope.
By Rainey
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