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The writer George Eliot cautioned us that,

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among all forms of mistake,

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prophesy is the most gratuitous.

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The person that we would all acknowledge

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as her 20th-century counterpart, Yogi Berra, agreed.

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He said, "It's tough to make predictions,

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especially about the future."

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I'm going to ignore their cautions

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and make one very specific forecast.

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In the world that we are creating very quickly,

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we're going to see more and more things

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that look like science fiction,

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and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs.

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Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves,

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which means we're going to need fewer truck drivers.

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We're going to hook Siri up to Watson

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and use that to automate a lot of the work

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that's currently done by customer service reps

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and troubleshooters and diagnosers,

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and we're already taking R2D2,

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painting him orange, and putting him to work

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carrying shelves around warehouses,

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which means we need a lot fewer people

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to be walking up and down those aisles.

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Now, for about 200 years,

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people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you --

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the age of technological unemployment is at hand —

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starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain

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just about two centuries ago,

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and they have been wrong.

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Our economies in the developed world have coasted along

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on something pretty close to full employment.

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Which brings up a critical question:

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Why is this time different, if it really is?

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The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years,

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our machines have started demonstrating skills

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they have never, ever had before:

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understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing,

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answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills.

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For example, mobile humanoid robots

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are still incredibly primitive,

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but the research arm of the Defense Department

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just launched a competition

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to have them do things like this,

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and if the track record is any guide,

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this competition is going to be successful.

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So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all

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when we're going to have androids

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doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now.

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And we're creating a world where there is going to be

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more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs.

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It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling

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"the new machine age."

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The thing to keep in mind is that

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this is absolutely great news.

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This is the best economic news on the planet these days.

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Not that there's a lot of competition, right?

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This is the best economic news we have these days

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for two main reasons.

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The first is, technological progress is what allows us

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to continue this amazing recent run that we're on

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where output goes up over time,

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while at the same time, prices go down,

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and volume and quality just continue to explode.

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Now, some people look at this and talk about

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shallow materialism,

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but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it.

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This is abundance, which is exactly

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what we want our economic system to provide.

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The second reason that the new machine age

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is such great news is that, once the androids

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start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore,

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and we get freed up from drudgery and toil.

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Now, when I talk about this with my friends

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in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, they say,

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"Fantastic. No more drudgery, no more toil.

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This gives us the chance to imagine

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an entirely different kind of society,

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a society where the creators and the discoverers

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and the performers and the innovators

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come together with their patrons and their financiers

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to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten,

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provoke each other."

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It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference.

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And there's actually a huge amount of truth here.

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We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place.

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In a world where it is just about as easy

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to generate an object as it is to print a document,

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we have amazing new possibilities.

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The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists

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are now makers, and they're responsible

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for massive amounts of innovation.

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And artists who were formerly constrained

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can now do things that were never, ever possible

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for them before.

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So this is a time of great flourishing,

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and the more I look around, the more convinced I become

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that this quote, from the physicist Freeman Dyson,

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is not hyperbole at all.

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This is just a plain statement of the facts.

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We are in the middle of an astonishing period.

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["Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." — Freeman Dyson]

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Which brings up another great question:

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What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age?

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Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home.

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We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges

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as we head deeper into the future that we're creating.

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The first are economic, and they're really nicely summarized

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in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth

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between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther,

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who was the head of the auto workers union.

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They were touring one of the new modern factories,

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and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says,

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"Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots

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to pay union dues?"

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And Reuther shoots back, "Hey Henry,

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how are you going to get them to buy cars?"

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Reuther's problem in that anecdote

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is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy

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that's full of machines,

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and we see this very clearly in the statistics.

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If you look over the past couple decades

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at the returns to capital -- in other words, corporate profits --

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we see them going up,

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and we see that they're now at an all-time high.

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If we look at the returns to labor, in other words

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total wages paid out in the economy,

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we see them at an all-time low

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and heading very quickly in the opposite direction.

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So this is clearly bad news for Reuther.

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It looks like it might be great news for Ford,

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but it's actually not. If you want to sell

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huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people,

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you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class.

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We have had one of those in America

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for just about the entire postwar period.

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But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now.

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We all know a lot of the statistics,

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but just to repeat one of them,

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median income in America has actually gone down

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over the past 15 years,

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and we're in danger of getting trapped

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in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization

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continue to go up over time.

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The societal challenges that come along

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with that kind of inequality deserve some attention.

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There are a set of societal challenges

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that I'm actually not that worried about,

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and they're captured by images like this.

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This is not the kind of societal problem

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that I am concerned about.

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There is no shortage of dystopian visions

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about what happens when our machines become self-aware,

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and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us.

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I'm going to start worrying about those

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the day my computer becomes aware of my printer.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about.

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To tell you the kinds of societal challenges

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that are going to come up in the new machine age,

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I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers.

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And to make them really stereotypical,

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let's make them both white guys.

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And the first one is a college-educated

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professional, creative type, manager,

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engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker.

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We're going to call him "Ted."

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He's at the top of the American middle class.

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His counterpart is not college-educated

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and works as a laborer, works as a clerk,

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does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy.

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We're going to call that guy "Bill."

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And if you go back about 50 years,

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Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives.

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For example, in 1960 they were both very likely

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to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week.

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But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented,

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as we started to automate the economy,

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and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses,

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as we started to progressively inject technology

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and automation and digital stuff into the economy,

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the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot.

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Over this time frame, Ted has continued

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to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't.

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In many cases, Bill has left the economy entirely,

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and Ted very rarely has.

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Over time, Ted's marriage has stayed quite happy.

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Bill's hasn't.

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And Ted's kids have grown up in a two-parent home,

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while Bill's absolutely have not over time.

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Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society?

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He's decreased his voting in presidential elections,

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and he's started to go to prison a lot more often.

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So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends,

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and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves.

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They're also true no matter which ethnic group

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or demographic group we look at,

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and they're actually getting so severe

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that they're in danger of overwhelming

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even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement.

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And what my friends in Silicon Valley

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and Cambridge are overlooking is that they're Ted.

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They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives,

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and they've got all the benefits to show from that,

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while Bill is leading a very different life.

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They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was

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when he talked about the benefits of work,

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and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils.

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["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire]

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So with these challenges, what do we do about them?

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The economic playbook is surprisingly clear,

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surprisingly straightforward, in the short term especially.

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The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two,

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so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine:

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Encourage entrepreneurship,

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double down on infrastructure,

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and make sure we're turning out people

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from our educational system with the appropriate skills.

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But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy

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that's heavy on technology and light on labor,

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and we are, then we have to consider

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some more radical interventions,

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for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income.

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Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable,

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because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing

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and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth.

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I did a little bit of research on this notion,

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and it might calm some folk down to know that

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the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income

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has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists

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Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman.

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And if you find yourself worried

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that something like a guaranteed income

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is going to stifle our drive to succeed

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and make us kind of complacent,

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you might be interested to know that social mobility,

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one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States,

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is now lower than it is in the northern European countries

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that have these very generous social safety nets.

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So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward.

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The societal one is a lot more challenging.

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I don't know what the playbook is

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for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life.

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I do know that education is a huge part of it.

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I witnessed this firsthand.

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I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education,

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and what that education taught me

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is that the world is an interesting place

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and my job is to go explore it.

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The school stopped in third grade,

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so then I entered the public school system,

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and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag.

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With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job

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was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer,

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but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of

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bore me into some submission with what was going on around me.

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We have to do better than this.

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We cannot keep turning out Bills.

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So we see some green shoots that things are getting better.

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We see technology deeply impacting education

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and engaging people, from our youngest learners

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up to our oldest ones.

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We see very prominent business voices telling us

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we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while.

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And we see very serious and sustained

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and data-driven efforts to understand

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how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have.

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So the green shoots are out there.

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I don't want to pretend for a minute

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that what we have is going to be enough.

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We're facing very tough challenges.

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To give just one example, there are about five million Americans

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who have been unemployed for at least six months.

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We're not going to fix things for them

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by sending them back to Montessori.

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And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world

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where we're going to have glittering technologies

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embedded in kind of a shabby society

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and supported by an economy that generates inequality

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instead of opportunity.

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But I actually don't think that's what we're going to do.

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I think we're going to do something a lot better

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for one very straightforward reason:

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The facts are getting out there.

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The realities of this new machine age

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and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known.

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If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things

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like have our best economists and policymakers

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play "Jeopardy!" against Watson.

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We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip.

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And if we do enough of these kinds of things,

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the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different.

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And then we're off to the races,

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because I don't believe for a second

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that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges

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or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try.

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I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths

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who were separated by an ocean and a century.

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Let me end it with words from politicians

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who were similarly distant.

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Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949,

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and he said, "If we are to bring the broad masses

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of the people in every land to the table of abundance,

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it can only be by the tireless improvement

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of all of our means of technical production."

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Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient.

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He said, "I am a firm believer in the people.

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If given the truth, they can be depended upon

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to meet any national crisis.

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The great point is to give them the plain facts."

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So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with

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is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear,

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and I have every confidence that we're going to use them

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to chart a good course into the challenging,

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abundant economy that we're creating.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)