WEBVTT 00:00:00.519 --> 00:00:03.271 As it turns out, when tens of millions of people 00:00:03.271 --> 00:00:05.599 are unemployed or underemployed, 00:00:05.599 --> 00:00:09.726 there's a fair amount of interest in what technology might be doing to the labor force. 00:00:09.726 --> 00:00:12.445 And as I look at the conversation, it strikes me 00:00:12.445 --> 00:00:15.397 that it's focused on exactly the right topic, 00:00:15.397 --> 00:00:18.375 and at the same time, it's missing the point entirely. 00:00:18.375 --> 00:00:21.383 The topic that it's focused on, the question is whether or not 00:00:21.383 --> 00:00:25.038 all these digital technologies are affecting people's ability 00:00:25.038 --> 00:00:28.058 to earn a living, or, to say it a little bit different way, 00:00:28.058 --> 00:00:30.336 are the droids taking our jobs? 00:00:30.336 --> 00:00:32.304 And there's some evidence that they are. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:32.304 --> 00:00:36.657 The Great Recession ended when American GDP resumed 00:00:36.657 --> 00:00:40.086 its kind of slow, steady march upward, and some other 00:00:40.101 --> 00:00:43.035 economic indicators also started to rebound, and they got 00:00:43.035 --> 00:00:45.897 kind of healthy kind of quickly. Corporate profits 00:00:45.897 --> 00:00:49.173 are quite high. In fact, if you include bank profits, 00:00:49.173 --> 00:00:51.285 they're higher than they've ever been. 00:00:51.285 --> 00:00:54.557 And business investment in gear, in equipment 00:00:54.557 --> 00:00:57.664 and hardware and software is at an all-time high. 00:00:57.664 --> 00:01:01.045 So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks. 00:01:01.045 --> 00:01:03.306 What they're not really doing is hiring. 00:01:03.306 --> 00:01:07.007 So this red line is the employment-to-population ratio, 00:01:07.007 --> 00:01:10.388 in other words, the percentage of working age people 00:01:10.388 --> 00:01:12.279 in America who have work. 00:01:12.279 --> 00:01:15.979 And we see that it cratered during the Great Recession, 00:01:15.979 --> 00:01:18.843 and it hasn't started to bounce back at all. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:18.843 --> 00:01:21.350 But the story is not just a recession story. 00:01:21.350 --> 00:01:24.347 The decade that we've just been through had relatively 00:01:24.347 --> 00:01:27.740 anemic job growth all throughout, especially when we 00:01:27.740 --> 00:01:30.675 compare it to other decades, and the 2000s 00:01:30.675 --> 00:01:32.965 are the only time we have on record where there were 00:01:32.965 --> 00:01:36.168 fewer people working at the end of the decade 00:01:36.168 --> 00:01:39.228 than at the beginning. This is not what you want to see. 00:01:39.228 --> 00:01:42.867 When you graph the number of potential employees 00:01:42.867 --> 00:01:46.471 versus the number of jobs in the country, you see the gap 00:01:46.471 --> 00:01:50.049 gets bigger and bigger over time, and then, 00:01:50.049 --> 00:01:52.449 during the Great Recession, it opened up in a huge way. 00:01:52.449 --> 00:01:56.859 I did some quick calculations. I took the last 20 years of GDP growth 00:01:56.859 --> 00:02:00.155 and the last 20 years of labor productivity growth 00:02:00.155 --> 00:02:02.897 and used those in a fairly straightforward way 00:02:02.897 --> 00:02:05.523 to try to project how many jobs the economy was going 00:02:05.523 --> 00:02:09.182 to need to keep growing, and this is the line that I came up with. 00:02:09.182 --> 00:02:12.628 Is that good or bad? This is the government's projection 00:02:12.628 --> 00:02:16.481 for the working age population going forward. 00:02:16.481 --> 00:02:21.252 So if these predictions are accurate, that gap is not going to close. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:21.252 --> 00:02:24.653 The problem is, I don't think these projections are accurate. 00:02:24.653 --> 00:02:28.009 In particular, I think my projection is way too optimistic, 00:02:28.009 --> 00:02:31.365 because when I did it, I was assuming that the future 00:02:31.365 --> 00:02:33.813 was kind of going to look like the past 00:02:33.813 --> 00:02:37.252 with labor productivity growth, and that's actually not what I believe, 00:02:37.252 --> 00:02:41.011 because when I look around, I think that we ain't seen nothing yet 00:02:41.011 --> 00:02:44.296 when it comes to technology's impact on the labor force. 00:02:44.296 --> 00:02:48.294 Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools 00:02:48.294 --> 00:02:52.700 display skills and abilities that they never, ever had before, 00:02:52.700 --> 00:02:56.488 and that, kind of, eat deeply into what we human beings 00:02:56.488 --> 00:02:59.744 do for a living. Let me give you a couple examples. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:59.744 --> 00:03:01.755 Throughout all of history, if you wanted something 00:03:01.755 --> 00:03:04.679 translated from one language into another, 00:03:04.679 --> 00:03:06.343 you had to involve a human being. 00:03:06.343 --> 00:03:09.759 Now we have multi-language, instantaneous, 00:03:09.759 --> 00:03:13.977 automatic translation services available for free 00:03:13.977 --> 00:03:17.366 via many of our devices all the way down to smartphones. 00:03:17.366 --> 00:03:19.750 And if any of us have used these, we know that 00:03:19.750 --> 00:03:23.071 they're not perfect, but they're decent. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:23.071 --> 00:03:26.222 Throughout all of history, if you wanted something written, 00:03:26.222 --> 00:03:29.637 a report or an article, you had to involve a person. 00:03:29.637 --> 00:03:31.889 Not anymore. This is an article that appeared 00:03:31.889 --> 00:03:35.119 in Forbes online a while back about Apple's earnings. 00:03:35.119 --> 00:03:37.646 It was written by an algorithm. 00:03:37.646 --> 00:03:40.901 And it's not decent, it's perfect. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:40.901 --> 00:03:43.863 A lot of people look at this and they say, "Okay, 00:03:43.863 --> 00:03:46.212 but those are very specific, narrow tasks, 00:03:46.212 --> 00:03:48.845 and most knowledge workers are actually generalists, 00:03:48.845 --> 00:03:51.374 and what they do is sit on top of a very large body 00:03:51.374 --> 00:03:54.030 of expertise and knowledge and they use that 00:03:54.030 --> 00:03:57.103 to react on the fly to kind of unpredictable demands, 00:03:57.103 --> 00:03:59.591 and that's very, very hard to automate." 00:03:59.591 --> 00:04:01.568 One of the most impressive knowledge workers 00:04:01.568 --> 00:04:03.977 in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings. 00:04:03.977 --> 00:04:09.035 He won the quiz show "Jeopardy!" 74 times in a row, 00:04:09.035 --> 00:04:11.663 took home three million dollars. 00:04:11.663 --> 00:04:15.513 That's Ken on the right getting beat three to one by 00:04:15.513 --> 00:04:20.317 Watson, the "Jeopardy!"-playing supercomputer from IBM. 00:04:20.317 --> 00:04:22.181 So when we look at what technology can do 00:04:22.181 --> 00:04:25.054 to general knowledge workers, I start to think 00:04:25.054 --> 00:04:27.653 there might not be something so special about this idea 00:04:27.653 --> 00:04:30.541 of a generalist, particularly when we start doing things 00:04:30.541 --> 00:04:34.529 like hooking Siri up to Watson and having technologies 00:04:34.529 --> 00:04:36.425 that can understand what we're saying 00:04:36.425 --> 00:04:38.506 and repeat speech back to us. 00:04:38.506 --> 00:04:41.344 Now, Siri is far from perfect, and we can make fun 00:04:41.344 --> 00:04:44.363 of her flaws, but we should also keep in mind that 00:04:44.363 --> 00:04:47.039 if technologies like Siri and Watson improve 00:04:47.039 --> 00:04:50.820 along a Moore's Law trajectory, which they will, 00:04:50.820 --> 00:04:53.404 in six years, they're not going to be two times better 00:04:53.404 --> 00:04:58.222 or four times better, they'll be 16 times better than they are right now. 00:04:58.222 --> 00:05:01.905 So I start to think that a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:01.905 --> 00:05:05.459 And digital technologies are not just impacting knowledge work. 00:05:05.459 --> 00:05:09.451 They're starting to flex their muscles in the physical world as well. 00:05:09.451 --> 00:05:11.900 I had the chance a little while back to ride in the Google 00:05:11.900 --> 00:05:17.426 autonomous car, which is as cool as it sounds. (Laughter) 00:05:17.426 --> 00:05:20.453 And I will vouch that it handled the stop-and-go traffic 00:05:20.453 --> 00:05:23.358 on U.S. 101 very smoothly. 00:05:23.358 --> 00:05:25.323 There are about three and a half million people 00:05:25.323 --> 00:05:27.532 who drive trucks for a living in the United States. 00:05:27.532 --> 00:05:29.961 I think some of them are going to be affected by this 00:05:29.961 --> 00:05:33.213 technology. And right now, humanoid robots are still 00:05:33.213 --> 00:05:36.471 incredibly primitive. They can't do very much. 00:05:36.471 --> 00:05:39.052 But they're getting better quite quickly, and DARPA, 00:05:39.052 --> 00:05:42.203 which is the investment arm of the Defense Department, 00:05:42.203 --> 00:05:43.868 is trying to accelerate their trajectory. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:43.868 --> 00:05:48.551 So, in short, yeah, the droids are coming for our jobs. 00:05:48.551 --> 00:05:52.431 In the short term, we can stimulate job growth 00:05:52.431 --> 00:05:55.375 by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing 00:05:55.375 --> 00:05:58.423 in infrastructure, because the robots today still aren't 00:05:58.423 --> 00:06:00.163 very good at fixing bridges. 00:06:00.163 --> 00:06:03.528 But in the not-too-long-term, I think within the lifetimes 00:06:03.528 --> 00:06:07.097 of most of the people in this room, we're going to transition 00:06:07.097 --> 00:06:10.033 into an economy that is very productive but that 00:06:10.033 --> 00:06:12.837 just doesn't need a lot of human workers, 00:06:12.837 --> 00:06:14.392 and managing that transition is going to be 00:06:14.392 --> 00:06:17.131 the greatest challenge that our society faces. 00:06:17.131 --> 00:06:19.893 Voltaire summarized why. He said, "Work saves us 00:06:19.893 --> 00:06:25.170 from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." NOTE Paragraph 00:06:25.170 --> 00:06:27.741 But despite this challenge, I'm personally, 00:06:27.741 --> 00:06:30.790 I'm still a huge digital optimist, and I am 00:06:30.790 --> 00:06:33.977 supremely confident that the digital technologies that we're 00:06:33.977 --> 00:06:37.533 developing now are going to take us into a utopian future, 00:06:37.533 --> 00:06:40.566 not a dystopian future. And to explain why, 00:06:40.566 --> 00:06:43.088 I want to pose kind of a ridiculously broad question. 00:06:43.088 --> 00:06:45.438 I want to ask what have been the most important 00:06:45.438 --> 00:06:47.761 developments in human history? NOTE Paragraph 00:06:47.761 --> 00:06:50.494 Now, I want to share some of the answers that I've gotten 00:06:50.494 --> 00:06:52.671 in response to this question. It's a wonderful question 00:06:52.671 --> 00:06:54.838 to ask and to start an endless debate about, 00:06:54.838 --> 00:06:57.159 because some people are going to bring up 00:06:57.159 --> 00:07:00.619 systems of philosophy in both the West and the East that 00:07:00.619 --> 00:07:03.752 have changed how a lot of people think about the world. 00:07:03.752 --> 00:07:06.588 And then other people will say, "No, actually, the big stories, 00:07:06.588 --> 00:07:09.011 the big developments are the founding of the world's 00:07:09.011 --> 00:07:12.293 major religions, which have changed civilizations 00:07:12.293 --> 00:07:14.932 and have changed and influenced how countless people 00:07:14.932 --> 00:07:17.936 are living their lives." And then some other folk will say, 00:07:17.936 --> 00:07:21.463 "Actually, what changes civilizations, what modifies them 00:07:21.463 --> 00:07:23.626 and what changes people's lives 00:07:23.626 --> 00:07:27.538 are empires, so the great developments in human history 00:07:27.538 --> 00:07:30.373 are stories of conquest and of war." 00:07:30.373 --> 00:07:32.963 And then some cheery soul usually always pipes up 00:07:32.963 --> 00:07:38.651 and says, "Hey, don't forget about plagues." (Laughter) 00:07:38.651 --> 00:07:41.554 There are some optimistic answers to this question, 00:07:41.554 --> 00:07:43.451 so some people will bring up the Age of Exploration 00:07:43.451 --> 00:07:45.399 and the opening up of the world. 00:07:45.399 --> 00:07:47.501 Others will talk about intellectual achievements 00:07:47.501 --> 00:07:49.776 in disciplines like math that have helped us get 00:07:49.776 --> 00:07:53.086 a better handle on the world, and other folk will talk about 00:07:53.086 --> 00:07:54.783 periods when there was a deep flourishing 00:07:54.783 --> 00:07:58.585 of the arts and sciences. So this debate will go on and on. 00:07:58.585 --> 00:08:01.424 It's an endless debate, and there's no conclusive, 00:08:01.424 --> 00:08:04.676 no single answer to it. But if you're a geek like me, 00:08:04.676 --> 00:08:07.574 you say, "Well, what do the data say?" 00:08:07.574 --> 00:08:10.385 And you start to do things like graph things that we might 00:08:10.385 --> 00:08:14.488 be interested in, the total worldwide population, for example, 00:08:14.488 --> 00:08:17.129 or some measure of social development, 00:08:17.129 --> 00:08:19.640 or the state of advancement of a society, 00:08:19.640 --> 00:08:23.473 and you start to plot the data, because, by this approach, 00:08:23.473 --> 00:08:26.090 the big stories, the big developments in human history, 00:08:26.090 --> 00:08:28.951 are the ones that will bend these curves a lot. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:28.951 --> 00:08:30.863 So when you do this, and when you plot the data, 00:08:30.863 --> 00:08:33.661 you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions. 00:08:33.661 --> 00:08:36.584 You conclude, actually, that none of these things 00:08:36.584 --> 00:08:41.536 have mattered very much. (Laughter) 00:08:41.536 --> 00:08:45.562 They haven't done a darn thing to the curves. (Laughter) 00:08:45.562 --> 00:08:49.146 There has been one story, one development 00:08:49.146 --> 00:08:51.752 in human history that bent the curve, bent it just about 00:08:51.752 --> 00:08:55.798 90 degrees, and it is a technology story. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:55.798 --> 00:08:58.757 The steam engine, and the other associated technologies 00:08:58.757 --> 00:09:01.688 of the Industrial Revolution changed the world 00:09:01.688 --> 00:09:04.112 and influenced human history so much, 00:09:04.112 --> 00:09:06.195 that in the words of the historian Ian Morris, 00:09:06.195 --> 00:09:10.272 they made mockery out of all that had come before. 00:09:10.272 --> 00:09:13.185 And they did this by infinitely multiplying the power 00:09:13.185 --> 00:09:16.322 of our muscles, overcoming the limitations of our muscles. 00:09:16.322 --> 00:09:18.844 Now, what we're in the middle of now 00:09:18.844 --> 00:09:21.763 is overcoming the limitations of our individual brains 00:09:21.763 --> 00:09:24.836 and infinitely multiplying our mental power. 00:09:24.836 --> 00:09:28.536 How can this not be as big a deal as overcoming 00:09:28.536 --> 00:09:31.064 the limitations of our muscles? 00:09:31.064 --> 00:09:34.442 So at the risk of repeating myself a little bit, when I look 00:09:34.442 --> 00:09:37.271 at what's going on with digital technology these days, 00:09:37.271 --> 00:09:40.097 we are not anywhere near through with this journey, 00:09:40.097 --> 00:09:42.771 and when I look at what is happening to our economies 00:09:42.771 --> 00:09:45.424 and our societies, my single conclusion is that 00:09:45.424 --> 00:09:48.952 we ain't seen nothing yet. The best days are really ahead. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:48.952 --> 00:09:50.708 Let me give you a couple examples. 00:09:50.708 --> 00:09:54.936 Economies don't run on energy. They don't run on capital, 00:09:54.936 --> 00:09:58.716 they don't run on labor. Economies run on ideas. 00:09:58.716 --> 00:10:01.236 So the work of innovation, the work of coming up with 00:10:01.236 --> 00:10:03.662 new ideas, is some of the most powerful, 00:10:03.662 --> 00:10:05.477 some of the most fundamental work that we can do 00:10:05.477 --> 00:10:09.493 in an economy. And this is kind of how we used to do innovation. 00:10:09.493 --> 00:10:13.271 We'd find a bunch of fairly similar-looking people 00:10:13.271 --> 00:10:16.682 — (Laughter) — 00:10:16.682 --> 00:10:19.211 we'd take them out of elite institutions, we'd put them into 00:10:19.211 --> 00:10:22.157 other elite institutions, and we'd wait for the innovation. 00:10:22.157 --> 00:10:26.167 Now — (Laughter) — 00:10:26.167 --> 00:10:28.748 as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT 00:10:28.748 --> 00:10:35.114 and Harvard, I got no problem with this. (Laughter) 00:10:35.114 --> 00:10:37.730 But some other people do, and they've kind of crashed 00:10:37.730 --> 00:10:40.266 the party and loosened up the dress code of innovation. 00:10:40.266 --> 00:10:41.190 (Laughter) 00:10:41.190 --> 00:10:44.834 So here are the winners of a Top Coder programming challenge, 00:10:44.834 --> 00:10:47.736 and I assure you that nobody cares 00:10:47.736 --> 00:10:51.330 where these kids grew up, where they went to school, 00:10:51.330 --> 00:10:53.818 or what they look like. All anyone cares about 00:10:53.818 --> 00:10:56.639 is the quality of the work, the quality of the ideas. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:56.639 --> 00:10:58.805 And over and over again, we see this happening 00:10:58.805 --> 00:11:01.151 in the technology-facilitated world. 00:11:01.151 --> 00:11:03.607 The work of innovation is becoming more open, 00:11:03.607 --> 00:11:07.385 more inclusive, more transparent, and more merit-based, 00:11:07.385 --> 00:11:10.354 and that's going to continue no matter what MIT and Harvard 00:11:10.354 --> 00:11:14.034 think of it, and I couldn't be happier about that development. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:14.034 --> 00:11:16.484 I hear once in a while, "Okay, I'll grant you that, 00:11:16.484 --> 00:11:19.871 but technology is still a tool for the rich world, 00:11:19.871 --> 00:11:22.585 and what's not happening, these digital tools are not 00:11:22.585 --> 00:11:25.940 improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid." 00:11:25.940 --> 00:11:28.604 And I want to say to that very clearly: nonsense. 00:11:28.604 --> 00:11:32.042 The bottom of the pyramid is benefiting hugely from technology. 00:11:32.042 --> 00:11:34.682 The economist Robert Jensen did this wonderful study 00:11:34.682 --> 00:11:37.850 a while back where he watched, in great detail, 00:11:37.850 --> 00:11:41.231 what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala, India, 00:11:41.231 --> 00:11:44.244 when they got mobile phones for the very first time, 00:11:44.244 --> 00:11:46.975 and when you write for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 00:11:46.975 --> 00:11:49.872 you have to use very dry and very circumspect language, 00:11:49.872 --> 00:11:52.344 but when I read his paper, I kind of feel Jensen is trying 00:11:52.344 --> 00:11:55.365 to scream at us, and say, look, this was a big deal. 00:11:55.365 --> 00:11:59.418 Prices stabilized, so people could plan their economic lives. 00:11:59.418 --> 00:12:03.541 Waste was not reduced; it was eliminated. 00:12:03.541 --> 00:12:06.012 And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers 00:12:06.012 --> 00:12:08.510 in these villages measurably improved. 00:12:08.510 --> 00:12:12.226 Now, what I don't think is that Jensen got extremely lucky 00:12:12.226 --> 00:12:14.580 and happened to land in the one set of villages 00:12:14.580 --> 00:12:17.092 where technology made things better. 00:12:17.092 --> 00:12:19.695 What happened instead is he very carefully documented 00:12:19.695 --> 00:12:22.387 what happens over and over again when technology 00:12:22.387 --> 00:12:25.651 comes for the first time to an environment and a community. 00:12:25.651 --> 00:12:29.615 The lives of people, the welfares of people, improve dramatically. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:29.615 --> 00:12:31.971 So as I look around at all the evidence, and I think about 00:12:31.971 --> 00:12:34.447 the room that we have ahead of us, I become a huge 00:12:34.447 --> 00:12:37.271 digital optimist, and I start to think that this wonderful 00:12:37.271 --> 00:12:40.326 statement from the physicist Freeman Dyson 00:12:40.326 --> 00:12:44.904 is actually not hyperbole. This is an accurate assessment of what's going on. 00:12:44.904 --> 00:12:47.350 Our digital -- our technologies are great gifts, 00:12:47.350 --> 00:12:50.511 and we, right now, have the great good fortune 00:12:50.511 --> 00:12:54.036 to be living at a time when digital technology is flourishing, 00:12:54.036 --> 00:12:55.694 when it is broadening and deepening and 00:12:55.694 --> 00:12:59.035 becoming more profound all around the world. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:59.035 --> 00:13:02.253 So, yeah, the droids are taking our jobs, 00:13:02.253 --> 00:13:06.066 but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely. 00:13:06.066 --> 00:13:09.319 The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, 00:13:09.319 --> 00:13:11.977 and what we are going to do, I am very confident, 00:13:11.977 --> 00:13:15.040 what we're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery 00:13:15.040 --> 00:13:17.704 and misery around the world. I'm very confident 00:13:17.704 --> 00:13:20.736 we're going to learn to live more lightly on the planet, 00:13:20.736 --> 00:13:24.217 and I am extremely confident that what we're going to do 00:13:24.217 --> 00:13:27.138 with our new digital tools is going to be so profound 00:13:27.138 --> 00:13:30.029 and so beneficial that it's going to make a mockery 00:13:30.029 --> 00:13:31.762 out of everything that came before. 00:13:31.762 --> 00:13:34.500 I'm going to leave the last word to a guy who had 00:13:34.500 --> 00:13:36.278 a front row seat for digital progress, 00:13:36.278 --> 00:13:38.843 our old friend Ken Jennings. I'm with him. 00:13:38.843 --> 00:13:40.204 I'm going to echo his words: 00:13:40.204 --> 00:13:44.175 "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords." (Laughter) 00:13:44.175 --> 00:13:47.104 Thanks very much. (Applause)