WEBVTT 00:00:00.328 --> 00:00:03.277 The writer George Eliot cautioned us that, 00:00:03.277 --> 00:00:05.344 among all forms of mistake, 00:00:05.344 --> 00:00:07.707 prophesy is the most gratuitous. 00:00:07.707 --> 00:00:09.555 The person that we would all acknowledge 00:00:09.555 --> 00:00:13.857 as her 20th-century counterpart, Yogi Berra, agreed. 00:00:13.857 --> 00:00:15.722 He said, "It's tough to make predictions, 00:00:15.722 --> 00:00:18.458 especially about the future." NOTE Paragraph 00:00:18.458 --> 00:00:20.269 I'm going to ignore their cautions 00:00:20.269 --> 00:00:22.242 and make one very specific forecast. 00:00:22.242 --> 00:00:24.882 In the world that we are creating very quickly, 00:00:24.882 --> 00:00:26.595 we're going to see more and more things 00:00:26.595 --> 00:00:28.320 that look like science fiction, 00:00:28.320 --> 00:00:31.436 and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs. 00:00:31.436 --> 00:00:34.188 Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves, 00:00:34.188 --> 00:00:36.884 which means we're going to need fewer truck drivers. 00:00:36.884 --> 00:00:39.005 We're going to hook Siri up to Watson 00:00:39.005 --> 00:00:41.602 and use that to automate a lot of the work 00:00:41.602 --> 00:00:43.828 that's currently done by customer service reps 00:00:43.828 --> 00:00:46.732 and troubleshooters and diagnosers, 00:00:46.732 --> 00:00:48.988 and we're already taking R2D2, 00:00:48.988 --> 00:00:52.228 painting him orange, and putting him to work 00:00:52.228 --> 00:00:54.777 carrying shelves around warehouses, 00:00:54.777 --> 00:00:56.852 which means we need a lot fewer people 00:00:56.852 --> 00:00:58.818 to be walking up and down those aisles. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:58.818 --> 00:01:02.620 Now, for about 200 years, 00:01:02.620 --> 00:01:04.803 people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you -- 00:01:04.803 --> 00:01:07.620 the age of technological unemployment is at hand — 00:01:07.620 --> 00:01:10.035 starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain 00:01:10.035 --> 00:01:11.931 just about two centuries ago, 00:01:11.931 --> 00:01:13.963 and they have been wrong. 00:01:13.963 --> 00:01:16.780 Our economies in the developed world have coasted along 00:01:16.780 --> 00:01:18.714 on something pretty close to full employment. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:18.714 --> 00:01:20.813 Which brings up a critical question: 00:01:20.813 --> 00:01:23.739 Why is this time different, if it really is? 00:01:23.739 --> 00:01:26.735 The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, 00:01:26.735 --> 00:01:28.630 our machines have started demonstrating skills 00:01:28.630 --> 00:01:31.255 they have never, ever had before: 00:01:31.255 --> 00:01:34.515 understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, 00:01:34.515 --> 00:01:38.728 answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills. 00:01:38.728 --> 00:01:41.298 For example, mobile humanoid robots 00:01:41.298 --> 00:01:43.245 are still incredibly primitive, 00:01:43.245 --> 00:01:45.083 but the research arm of the Defense Department 00:01:45.083 --> 00:01:46.598 just launched a competition 00:01:46.598 --> 00:01:48.912 to have them do things like this, 00:01:48.912 --> 00:01:50.645 and if the track record is any guide, 00:01:50.645 --> 00:01:53.044 this competition is going to be successful. 00:01:53.044 --> 00:01:56.680 So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all 00:01:56.680 --> 00:01:58.856 when we're going to have androids 00:01:58.856 --> 00:02:01.737 doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now. 00:02:01.737 --> 00:02:05.495 And we're creating a world where there is going to be 00:02:05.495 --> 00:02:09.180 more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs. 00:02:09.180 --> 00:02:11.429 It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling 00:02:11.429 --> 00:02:12.920 "the new machine age." NOTE Paragraph 00:02:12.920 --> 00:02:15.053 The thing to keep in mind is that 00:02:15.053 --> 00:02:17.602 this is absolutely great news. 00:02:17.602 --> 00:02:20.919 This is the best economic news on the planet these days. 00:02:20.919 --> 00:02:24.448 Not that there's a lot of competition, right? 00:02:24.448 --> 00:02:26.347 This is the best economic news we have these days 00:02:26.347 --> 00:02:27.963 for two main reasons. 00:02:27.963 --> 00:02:30.948 The first is, technological progress is what allows us 00:02:30.948 --> 00:02:34.685 to continue this amazing recent run that we're on 00:02:34.685 --> 00:02:37.206 where output goes up over time, 00:02:37.206 --> 00:02:40.532 while at the same time, prices go down, 00:02:40.532 --> 00:02:44.736 and volume and quality just continue to explode. 00:02:44.736 --> 00:02:46.737 Now, some people look at this and talk about 00:02:46.737 --> 00:02:48.143 shallow materialism, 00:02:48.143 --> 00:02:50.561 but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. 00:02:50.561 --> 00:02:53.056 This is abundance, which is exactly 00:02:53.056 --> 00:02:56.478 what we want our economic system to provide. 00:02:56.478 --> 00:02:59.694 The second reason that the new machine age 00:02:59.694 --> 00:03:02.000 is such great news is that, once the androids 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:05.252 start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore, 00:03:05.252 --> 00:03:09.008 and we get freed up from drudgery and toil. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:09.008 --> 00:03:11.032 Now, when I talk about this with my friends 00:03:11.032 --> 00:03:13.584 in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, they say, 00:03:13.584 --> 00:03:15.857 "Fantastic. No more drudgery, no more toil. 00:03:15.857 --> 00:03:17.908 This gives us the chance to imagine 00:03:17.908 --> 00:03:20.201 an entirely different kind of society, 00:03:20.201 --> 00:03:23.113 a society where the creators and the discoverers 00:03:23.113 --> 00:03:24.942 and the performers and the innovators 00:03:24.942 --> 00:03:28.451 come together with their patrons and their financiers 00:03:28.451 --> 00:03:31.130 to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten, 00:03:31.130 --> 00:03:33.208 provoke each other." 00:03:33.208 --> 00:03:37.783 It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference. 00:03:37.783 --> 00:03:40.266 And there's actually a huge amount of truth here. 00:03:40.266 --> 00:03:43.289 We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place. 00:03:43.289 --> 00:03:45.291 In a world where it is just about as easy 00:03:45.291 --> 00:03:48.698 to generate an object as it is to print a document, 00:03:48.698 --> 00:03:50.787 we have amazing new possibilities. 00:03:50.787 --> 00:03:54.464 The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists 00:03:54.464 --> 00:03:56.331 are now makers, and they're responsible 00:03:56.331 --> 00:03:58.721 for massive amounts of innovation. 00:03:58.721 --> 00:04:01.003 And artists who were formerly constrained 00:04:01.003 --> 00:04:04.171 can now do things that were never, ever possible 00:04:04.171 --> 00:04:06.067 for them before. 00:04:06.067 --> 00:04:08.184 So this is a time of great flourishing, 00:04:08.184 --> 00:04:11.116 and the more I look around, the more convinced I become 00:04:11.116 --> 00:04:14.190 that this quote, from the physicist Freeman Dyson, 00:04:14.190 --> 00:04:16.223 is not hyperbole at all. 00:04:16.223 --> 00:04:19.013 This is just a plain statement of the facts. 00:04:19.013 --> 00:04:20.858 We are in the middle of an astonishing period. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:20.858 --> 00:04:21.742 ["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] NOTE Paragraph 00:04:21.742 --> 00:04:24.533 Which brings up another great question: 00:04:24.533 --> 00:04:27.509 What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age? 00:04:27.509 --> 00:04:30.871 Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home. 00:04:30.871 --> 00:04:33.537 We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges 00:04:33.537 --> 00:04:36.330 as we head deeper into the future that we're creating. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:36.330 --> 00:04:39.580 The first are economic, and they're really nicely summarized 00:04:39.580 --> 00:04:42.670 in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth 00:04:42.670 --> 00:04:45.712 between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, 00:04:45.712 --> 00:04:48.457 who was the head of the auto workers union. 00:04:48.457 --> 00:04:50.640 They were touring one of the new modern factories, 00:04:50.640 --> 00:04:53.390 and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says, 00:04:53.390 --> 00:04:55.552 "Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots 00:04:55.552 --> 00:04:57.366 to pay union dues?" 00:04:57.366 --> 00:04:59.311 And Reuther shoots back, "Hey Henry, 00:04:59.311 --> 00:05:03.853 how are you going to get them to buy cars?" NOTE Paragraph 00:05:03.853 --> 00:05:06.864 Reuther's problem in that anecdote 00:05:06.864 --> 00:05:10.973 is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy 00:05:10.973 --> 00:05:12.608 that's full of machines, 00:05:12.608 --> 00:05:14.832 and we see this very clearly in the statistics. 00:05:14.832 --> 00:05:17.224 If you look over the past couple decades 00:05:17.224 --> 00:05:20.888 at the returns to capital -- in other words, corporate profits -- 00:05:20.888 --> 00:05:22.572 we see them going up, 00:05:22.572 --> 00:05:24.659 and we see that they're now at an all-time high. 00:05:24.659 --> 00:05:27.360 If we look at the returns to labor, in other words 00:05:27.360 --> 00:05:29.244 total wages paid out in the economy, 00:05:29.244 --> 00:05:31.791 we see them at an all-time low 00:05:31.791 --> 00:05:34.856 and heading very quickly in the opposite direction. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:34.856 --> 00:05:36.626 So this is clearly bad news for Reuther. 00:05:36.626 --> 00:05:40.024 It looks like it might be great news for Ford, 00:05:40.024 --> 00:05:42.328 but it's actually not. If you want to sell 00:05:42.328 --> 00:05:45.672 huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people, 00:05:45.672 --> 00:05:49.460 you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class. 00:05:49.460 --> 00:05:51.684 We have had one of those in America 00:05:51.684 --> 00:05:54.317 for just about the entire postwar period. 00:05:54.317 --> 00:05:58.669 But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now. 00:05:58.669 --> 00:06:00.080 We all know a lot of the statistics, 00:06:00.080 --> 00:06:02.439 but just to repeat one of them, 00:06:02.439 --> 00:06:05.206 median income in America has actually gone down 00:06:05.206 --> 00:06:06.897 over the past 15 years, 00:06:06.897 --> 00:06:08.612 and we're in danger of getting trapped 00:06:08.612 --> 00:06:12.537 in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization 00:06:12.537 --> 00:06:15.717 continue to go up over time. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:15.717 --> 00:06:18.116 The societal challenges that come along 00:06:18.116 --> 00:06:20.692 with that kind of inequality deserve some attention. 00:06:20.692 --> 00:06:22.360 There are a set of societal challenges 00:06:22.360 --> 00:06:24.304 that I'm actually not that worried about, 00:06:24.304 --> 00:06:26.655 and they're captured by images like this. 00:06:26.655 --> 00:06:28.477 This is not the kind of societal problem 00:06:28.477 --> 00:06:30.941 that I am concerned about. 00:06:30.941 --> 00:06:33.084 There is no shortage of dystopian visions 00:06:33.084 --> 00:06:36.567 about what happens when our machines become self-aware, 00:06:36.567 --> 00:06:39.743 and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us. 00:06:39.743 --> 00:06:41.490 I'm going to start worrying about those 00:06:41.490 --> 00:06:44.719 the day my computer becomes aware of my printer. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:44.719 --> 00:06:48.348 (Laughter) (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:06:48.348 --> 00:06:51.320 So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about. 00:06:51.320 --> 00:06:54.108 To tell you the kinds of societal challenges 00:06:54.108 --> 00:06:56.320 that are going to come up in the new machine age, 00:06:56.320 --> 00:07:00.031 I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers. 00:07:00.031 --> 00:07:01.799 And to make them really stereotypical, 00:07:01.799 --> 00:07:03.946 let's make them both white guys. 00:07:03.946 --> 00:07:07.708 And the first one is a college-educated 00:07:07.708 --> 00:07:10.854 professional, creative type, manager, 00:07:10.854 --> 00:07:13.605 engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker. 00:07:13.605 --> 00:07:16.024 We're going to call him "Ted." 00:07:16.024 --> 00:07:18.297 He's at the top of the American middle class. 00:07:18.297 --> 00:07:21.179 His counterpart is not college-educated 00:07:21.179 --> 00:07:24.243 and works as a laborer, works as a clerk, 00:07:24.243 --> 00:07:27.555 does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy. 00:07:27.555 --> 00:07:29.960 We're going to call that guy "Bill." NOTE Paragraph 00:07:29.960 --> 00:07:32.039 And if you go back about 50 years, 00:07:32.039 --> 00:07:35.856 Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives. 00:07:35.856 --> 00:07:38.359 For example, in 1960 they were both very likely 00:07:38.359 --> 00:07:41.729 to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week. 00:07:41.729 --> 00:07:45.025 But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, 00:07:45.025 --> 00:07:47.993 as we started to automate the economy, 00:07:47.993 --> 00:07:52.140 and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, 00:07:52.140 --> 00:07:55.011 as we started to progressively inject technology 00:07:55.011 --> 00:07:57.747 and automation and digital stuff into the economy, 00:07:57.747 --> 00:08:00.772 the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot. 00:08:00.772 --> 00:08:02.891 Over this time frame, Ted has continued 00:08:02.891 --> 00:08:05.643 to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't. 00:08:05.643 --> 00:08:09.914 In many cases, Bill has left the economy entirely, 00:08:09.914 --> 00:08:12.178 and Ted very rarely has. 00:08:12.178 --> 00:08:15.443 Over time, Ted's marriage has stayed quite happy. 00:08:15.443 --> 00:08:17.084 Bill's hasn't. 00:08:17.084 --> 00:08:20.406 And Ted's kids have grown up in a two-parent home, 00:08:20.406 --> 00:08:23.626 while Bill's absolutely have not over time. 00:08:23.626 --> 00:08:26.030 Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society? 00:08:26.030 --> 00:08:29.719 He's decreased his voting in presidential elections, 00:08:29.719 --> 00:08:33.712 and he's started to go to prison a lot more often. 00:08:33.712 --> 00:08:37.696 So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends, 00:08:37.696 --> 00:08:40.443 and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves. 00:08:40.443 --> 00:08:43.416 They're also true no matter which ethnic group 00:08:43.416 --> 00:08:45.137 or demographic group we look at, 00:08:45.137 --> 00:08:47.213 and they're actually getting so severe 00:08:47.213 --> 00:08:48.984 that they're in danger of overwhelming 00:08:48.984 --> 00:08:52.632 even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:52.632 --> 00:08:55.144 And what my friends in Silicon Valley 00:08:55.144 --> 00:09:00.395 and Cambridge are overlooking is that they're Ted. 00:09:00.395 --> 00:09:03.832 They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, 00:09:03.832 --> 00:09:06.222 and they've got all the benefits to show from that, 00:09:06.222 --> 00:09:08.657 while Bill is leading a very different life. 00:09:08.657 --> 00:09:10.797 They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was 00:09:10.797 --> 00:09:13.049 when he talked about the benefits of work, 00:09:13.049 --> 00:09:16.630 and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:16.630 --> 00:09:17.627 ["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire] NOTE Paragraph 00:09:17.627 --> 00:09:20.963 So with these challenges, what do we do about them? NOTE Paragraph 00:09:20.963 --> 00:09:23.546 The economic playbook is surprisingly clear, 00:09:23.546 --> 00:09:26.686 surprisingly straightforward, in the short term especially. 00:09:26.686 --> 00:09:29.578 The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two, 00:09:29.578 --> 00:09:34.046 so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine: 00:09:34.046 --> 00:09:36.198 Encourage entrepreneurship, 00:09:36.198 --> 00:09:38.394 double down on infrastructure, 00:09:38.394 --> 00:09:40.093 and make sure we're turning out people 00:09:40.093 --> 00:09:43.690 from our educational system with the appropriate skills. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:43.690 --> 00:09:46.967 But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy 00:09:46.967 --> 00:09:49.619 that's heavy on technology and light on labor, 00:09:49.619 --> 00:09:52.047 and we are, then we have to consider 00:09:52.047 --> 00:09:53.831 some more radical interventions, 00:09:53.831 --> 00:09:57.030 for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income. 00:09:57.030 --> 00:10:00.742 Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable, 00:10:00.742 --> 00:10:04.599 because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing 00:10:04.599 --> 00:10:07.818 and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth. 00:10:07.818 --> 00:10:09.771 I did a little bit of research on this notion, 00:10:09.771 --> 00:10:12.226 and it might calm some folk down to know that 00:10:12.226 --> 00:10:14.858 the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income 00:10:14.858 --> 00:10:18.020 has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists 00:10:18.035 --> 00:10:23.508 Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman. 00:10:23.508 --> 00:10:25.387 And if you find yourself worried 00:10:25.387 --> 00:10:28.696 that something like a guaranteed income 00:10:28.696 --> 00:10:30.971 is going to stifle our drive to succeed 00:10:30.971 --> 00:10:32.735 and make us kind of complacent, 00:10:32.735 --> 00:10:35.525 you might be interested to know that social mobility, 00:10:35.525 --> 00:10:38.200 one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States, 00:10:38.200 --> 00:10:41.540 is now lower than it is in the northern European countries 00:10:41.540 --> 00:10:44.739 that have these very generous social safety nets. 00:10:44.739 --> 00:10:47.531 So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:47.531 --> 00:10:50.587 The societal one is a lot more challenging. 00:10:50.587 --> 00:10:52.735 I don't know what the playbook is 00:10:52.735 --> 00:10:56.563 for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:56.563 --> 00:10:59.067 I do know that education is a huge part of it. 00:10:59.067 --> 00:11:00.847 I witnessed this firsthand. 00:11:00.847 --> 00:11:04.603 I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, 00:11:04.603 --> 00:11:06.132 and what that education taught me 00:11:06.132 --> 00:11:08.223 is that the world is an interesting place 00:11:08.223 --> 00:11:10.864 and my job is to go explore it. 00:11:10.864 --> 00:11:12.565 The school stopped in third grade, 00:11:12.565 --> 00:11:14.633 so then I entered the public school system, 00:11:14.633 --> 00:11:18.999 and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag. 00:11:18.999 --> 00:11:21.900 With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job 00:11:21.900 --> 00:11:24.414 was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer, 00:11:24.414 --> 00:11:26.744 but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of 00:11:26.744 --> 00:11:30.568 bore me into some submission with what was going on around me. 00:11:30.568 --> 00:11:31.916 We have to do better than this. 00:11:31.916 --> 00:11:35.592 We cannot keep turning out Bills. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:35.592 --> 00:11:37.936 So we see some green shoots that things are getting better. 00:11:37.936 --> 00:11:40.760 We see technology deeply impacting education 00:11:40.760 --> 00:11:43.288 and engaging people, from our youngest learners 00:11:43.288 --> 00:11:45.052 up to our oldest ones. 00:11:45.052 --> 00:11:47.672 We see very prominent business voices telling us 00:11:47.672 --> 00:11:50.888 we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while. 00:11:50.888 --> 00:11:53.148 And we see very serious and sustained 00:11:53.148 --> 00:11:55.952 and data-driven efforts to understand 00:11:55.952 --> 00:11:59.495 how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:59.495 --> 00:12:01.704 So the green shoots are out there. 00:12:01.704 --> 00:12:03.138 I don't want to pretend for a minute 00:12:03.138 --> 00:12:05.080 that what we have is going to be enough. 00:12:05.080 --> 00:12:07.222 We're facing very tough challenges. 00:12:07.222 --> 00:12:10.328 To give just one example, there are about five million Americans 00:12:10.328 --> 00:12:13.142 who have been unemployed for at least six months. 00:12:13.142 --> 00:12:14.484 We're not going to fix things for them 00:12:14.484 --> 00:12:16.927 by sending them back to Montessori. 00:12:16.927 --> 00:12:19.282 And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world 00:12:19.282 --> 00:12:21.831 where we're going to have glittering technologies 00:12:21.831 --> 00:12:24.136 embedded in kind of a shabby society 00:12:24.136 --> 00:12:27.103 and supported by an economy that generates inequality 00:12:27.103 --> 00:12:28.584 instead of opportunity. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:28.584 --> 00:12:31.336 But I actually don't think that's what we're going to do. 00:12:31.336 --> 00:12:32.965 I think we're going to do something a lot better 00:12:32.965 --> 00:12:35.075 for one very straightforward reason: 00:12:35.075 --> 00:12:37.043 The facts are getting out there. 00:12:37.043 --> 00:12:39.085 The realities of this new machine age 00:12:39.085 --> 00:12:42.400 and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known. 00:12:42.400 --> 00:12:45.251 If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things 00:12:45.251 --> 00:12:48.017 like have our best economists and policymakers 00:12:48.017 --> 00:12:50.436 play "Jeopardy!" against Watson. 00:12:50.436 --> 00:12:53.986 We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip. 00:12:53.986 --> 00:12:55.639 And if we do enough of these kinds of things, 00:12:55.639 --> 00:12:59.043 the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different. 00:12:59.043 --> 00:13:00.814 And then we're off to the races, 00:13:00.814 --> 00:13:03.244 because I don't believe for a second 00:13:03.244 --> 00:13:06.212 that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges 00:13:06.212 --> 00:13:10.562 or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:10.562 --> 00:13:12.956 I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths 00:13:12.956 --> 00:13:15.772 who were separated by an ocean and a century. 00:13:15.772 --> 00:13:17.924 Let me end it with words from politicians 00:13:17.924 --> 00:13:19.655 who were similarly distant. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:19.655 --> 00:13:22.988 Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949, 00:13:22.988 --> 00:13:25.136 and he said, "If we are to bring the broad masses 00:13:25.136 --> 00:13:28.846 of the people in every land to the table of abundance, 00:13:28.846 --> 00:13:31.876 it can only be by the tireless improvement 00:13:31.876 --> 00:13:34.849 of all of our means of technical production." NOTE Paragraph 00:13:34.849 --> 00:13:37.468 Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient. 00:13:37.468 --> 00:13:40.366 He said, "I am a firm believer in the people. 00:13:40.366 --> 00:13:42.699 If given the truth, they can be depended upon 00:13:42.699 --> 00:13:45.068 to meet any national crisis. 00:13:45.068 --> 00:13:47.852 The great point is to give them the plain facts." NOTE Paragraph 00:13:47.852 --> 00:13:50.962 So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with 00:13:50.962 --> 00:13:54.107 is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, 00:13:54.107 --> 00:13:56.564 and I have every confidence that we're going to use them 00:13:56.564 --> 00:13:59.479 to chart a good course into the challenging, 00:13:59.479 --> 00:14:02.012 abundant economy that we're creating. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:02.012 --> 00:14:03.703 Thank you very much. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:03.703 --> 00:14:08.085 (Applause)