Are droids taking our jobs Andrew McAfee

as it turns out when tens of millions of

people are unemployed or underemployed

there’s a fair amount of interest in

what technology might be doing to the

labor force and as I look at the

conversation it strikes me that it’s

focused on exactly the right topic and

at the same time it’s missing the point

entirely the topic that it’s focused on

the question is whether or not all these

digital technologies are affecting

people’s ability to earn a living or to

say it a little bit different way are

the droids taking our jobs and there’s

some evidence that they are the Great

Recession ended when American GDP

resumed it’s kind of slow steady march

upward and some other economic

indicators also started to rebound and

they got kind of healthy kind of quickly

corporate profits are quite high in fact

if you include bank profits they’re

higher than they’ve ever been and

business investment in gear in equipment

and hardware and software is at an

all-time high so the businesses are

getting out their checkbooks what

they’re not really doing is hiring so

this red line is the

employment-to-population ratio in other

words the percentage of working-age

people in America who have work and we

see that it cratered during the Great

Recession and it hasn’t started to

bounce back at all but the story is not

just a recession story the decade that

we’ve just been through had relatively

anemic job growth all throughout

especially when we compare it to other

decades and the to thousands of the only

time we have on record where there were

fewer people working at the end of the

decade than at the beginning this is not

what you want to see when you graph the

number of potential employees versus the

number of jobs in the country you see

the gap gets bigger and bigger over time

and then during the Great Recession it

opened up in a huge way I did some quick

calculations I took the last 20 years of

GDP growth and the last 20 years of

labor productivity growth and used those

in a fairly straightforward way to try

to project how many jobs the economy was

going to need to keep growing and this

is the line that I came up with is that

good or bad this is the government’s

affection for what for the working age

population going forward so if these

predictions are accurate that gap is not

going to close the problem is I don’t

think these projections are accurate in

particular I think my projection is way

too optimistic because when I did it I

was assuming that the future was kind of

going to look like the past with labour

productivity growth and that’s actually

not what I believe because when I look

around I think that we ain’t seen

nothing yet when it comes to

technology’s impact on the labour force

just in the past couple years we’ve seen

digital tools display skills and

abilities that they never ever had

before and that kind of eat deeply into

what we human beings do for a living let

me give you a couple examples throughout

all of history if you wanted something

translated from one language into

another

you had to involve a human being now we

have multi-language instantaneous

automatic translation services available

for free via many of our devices all the

way down to smartphones and if any of us

have used these we know that they’re not

perfect but they’re decent throughout

all of history if you wanted something

written a report or an article you had

to involve a person not anymore this is

an article that appeared in Forbes

online a while back about Apple’s

earnings it was written by an algorithm

and it’s not decent it’s perfect a lot

of people look at this and they say ok

but those are very specific narrow tasks

and most knowledge workers are actually

generalists and what they do is sit on

top of a very large body of expertise

and knowledge and they use that to react

on-the-fly to kind of unpredictable

demands and that’s very very hard to

automate one of the most impressive

knowledge workers in recent memory is a

guy named Ken Jennings he won the quiz

show Jeopardy seventy four times in a

row took home three million dollars

that’s Ken on the right getting beat

three-to-one by Watson the jeopardy

playing supercomputer from IBM so when

we look at what technology can do to

general knowledge workers I start to

think there might not be

something so special about this idea of

a generalist particularly when we start

doing things like hooking Siri up to

Watson and having technologies that can

understand what we’re saying and repeat

speech back to us now Siri is far from

perfect and we can make fun of her flaws

but we should also keep in mind that if

technologies like Siri and Watson

approve along a Moore’s Law trajectory

which they will in six years they’re not

going to be two times better or four

times better

there’ll be sixteen times better than

they are right now so I start to think

that a lot of knowledge work is going to

be affected by this and digital

technologies are not just impacting

knowledge work they’re starting to flex

their muscles in the physical world as

well I had the chance a little while

back to ride in the Google autonomous

car which is as cool as it sounds and I

will vouch that it handled the

stop-and-go traffic on US 101 very

smoothly there are about three and a

half million people who drive trucks for

a living in the United States I think

some of them are going to be affected by

this technology and right now humanoid

robots are still incredibly primitive

they can’t do very much but they’re

getting better quite quickly and DARPA

which is the investment arm of the

Defense Department is trying to

accelerate their trajectory so in short

yeah the the droids are coming for our

jobs in the short term we can stimulate

job growth by encouraging

entrepreneurship and by investing in

infrastructure because the robots today

still aren’t very good at fixing bridges

but in the not-too long term I think

within the lifetimes of most of the

people in this room we’re going to

transition into an economy that is very

productive but that just doesn’t need a

lot of human workers and managing that

transition is going to be the greatest

challenge that our society faces

Voltaire summarized why he said work

saves us from three great evils boredom

vice and need but despite this challenge

I I’m personally I’m still a huge

digital optimist and I am supremely

confident that the digital technologies

that we’re developing now are going to

take us into a utopian future not a

dystopian

future and to explain why I want to post

kind of a ridiculously broad question I

want to ask what have been the most

important developments in human history

now I want to share my some of the

answers that I’ve got in response to

this question it’s a wonderful question

to ask and to start an endless debate

about because some people are gonna

bring up systems and philosophy in both

the west and the East that have changed

how a lot of people think about the

world and then other people will say no

Ashley the big stories the big

developments are the founding of the

world’s major religions which have

changed civilizations and have changed

and influenced how countless people are

living their lives and then some other

folk will say actually what changes

civilizations what modifies them and

what changes people live people’s lives

are empires so the great developments in

human history are stories of conquest

and of war and then some cheery soul

usually always pipes up and says hey

don’t forget about plagues

there are some optimistic answers to

this question so some people will bring

up the age of exploration on the opening

up of the world others will talk about

intellectual achievements in disciplines

like math that have helped us get a

better handle on the world and other

folk will talk about periods when there

was a deep flourishing of the Arts and

Sciences so this debate will go on and

on it’s an endless debate and there’s no

conclusive no single answer to it but if

you’re a geek like me you say well what

if the data say and you start to do

things like graph and things that we

might be interested in the total

worldwide population for example or some

measure of Social Development or the

state of advancement of a society you

start to plot the data because by this

approach the big stories the big

developments in human history are the

ones that will bend these curves a lot

so when you do this and when you plot

the data you pretty quickly come to some

weird conclusions you conclude actually

that none of these things have mattered

very much

hey they haven’t done a darn thing to

the curse there has been one story one

development in human history that bent

the curve bent it just about 90 degrees

and it is a technology story the steam

engine and the other associated

technologies of the Industrial

Revolution

changed the world and influenced human

history so much that in the words of the

historian Ian Morris they made mockery

out of all that had come before and they

did this by infinitely multiplying the

power of our muscles overcoming the

limitations of our muscles now what

we’re in the middle of now is overcoming

the limitations of our individual brains

and infinitely multiplying our mental

power how can this not be as big a deal

as overcoming the limitations of our

muscles so at the risk of repeating

myself a little bit when I look at

what’s going on with digital technology

these days we are not anywhere near

through with this journey and when I

look at what is happening to our

economies and our societies my single

conclusion is that we ain’t seen nothing

yet the best days are really ahead let

me give you a couple examples economies

don’t run on energy they don’t run on

capital they don’t run on labour

economies run on ideas so the work of

innovation the work of coming up with

new ideas is some of the most powerful

some of the most fundamental work that

we can do in an economy and this is kind

of how we used to do innovation we’d

find a bunch of fairly similar looking

people

we’d take them out of elite institutions

we put them into other elite

institutions and we’d wait for the

innovation now as a white guy who spent

his whole career at MIT and Harvard I

got no problem with this but some other

people do and they’ve kind of crashed

the party and loosened up the dress code

of innovation so here are the winners of

a top quarter programming challenge and

I assure you that nobody cares where

these kids grew up where they went to

school or what they look like all anyone

cares about is the quality of the work

the quality of the ideas and over and

over again we see this happening in the

technology facilitated world the work of

innovation is becoming more open more

inclusive more transparent and more

merit-based and that’s going to continue

no matter what MIT and Harvard think of

it and I couldn’t be happier about that

development I here once in a while okay

I’ll grant you that but but technology

is still a tool for the rich world and

what’s not happening these digital tools

are not improving the lives of people at

the bottom of the pyramid and I want to

say to that very clearly nonsense the

bottom of the pyramid is benefiting

hugely from technology the Economist

Robert Jensen did this wonderful study a

while back where he watched in great

detail what happened to the fishing

villages of Kerala India when they got

mobile phones for the very first time

and when you write for the quarterly

Journal of economics you have to use

very dry and very circumspect language

but when I read his paper I kind of feel

Jensen is trying to scream at us and say

look this was a big deal

prices stabilized so people could plan

their economic lives waste was not

reduced it was eliminated and the lives

of both the buyers and the sellers in

these villages measurably improved now

what I don’t think is that Jensen got

extremely lucky and happened to land in

the one set of villages where technology

made things better what happened instead

is he very carefully documented what

happens over and over again when

technology comes for the first time 25

in the community the lives of people the

welfares of people improve dramatically

so as I look around at all the evidence

and I think about the the room that we

have ahead of us I become a huge digital

optimist and I start to think that this

wonderful statement from the physicist

Freeman Dyson is actually not hyperbole

this is an accurate assessment of what’s

going on our digital art technologies

are great gifts and we right now have

the great good fortune to be living at a

time when digital technology is

flourishing when it is broadening and

deepening and being becoming more

profound all around the world so yeah

the the droids are taking our jobs but

focusing on that fact and this is the

point entirely the point is that then we

are freed up to do other things and what

we’re going to do I am very confident

what we’re going to do is reduce poverty

and drudgery and misery around the world

I’m very confident we’re going to learn

to live more lightly on the planet and I

am extremely confident that what we’re

going to do with our new digital tools

it’s going to be so profound and so

beneficial that it’s gonna make a

mockery out of everything that came

before I’m gonna leave the last word to

a guy who had a front-row seat for

digital progress our old friend Ken

Jennings I’m with him I’m gonna echo his

words I for one welcome our new computer

overlords thanks very much