>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back >> to M I. T. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volonte here with Paul Guillen. My co host, Tom Davenport, is here is the president's distinguished professor at Babson College. Huebel? Um, good to see again, Tom. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be here. So, yeah, this is, uh let's see. The 13th annual M I t. Cdo lucky. >> Yeah, sure. As this year. Our seventh. I >> think so. Really? Maybe we'll offset. So you gave a talk earlier? She would be afraid of the machines, Or should we embrace them? I think we should embrace them, because so far, they are not capable of replacing us. I mean, you know, when we hit the singularity, which I'm not sure we'll ever happen, But it's certainly not going happen anytime soon. We'll have a different answer. But now good at small, narrow task. Not so good at doing a lot of the things that we do. So I think we're fine. Although as I said in my talk, I have some survey data suggesting that large U. S. Corporations, their senior executives, a substantial number of them more than half would liketo automate as many jobs as possible. They say. So that's a little scary. But unfortunately for us human something, it's gonna be >> a while before they succeed. Way had a case last year where McDonald's employees were agitating for increasing the minimum wage and tThe e management used the threat of wrote of robotics sizing, hamburger making process, which can be done right to thio. Get them to back down. Are you think we're going to Seymour of four that were maybe a eyes used as a threat? >> Well, I haven't heard too many other examples. I think for those highly structured, relatively low level task, it's quite possible, particularly if if we do end up raising the minimum wage beyond a point where it's economical, pay humans to do the work. Um, but I would like to think that, you know, if we gave humans the opportunity, they could do Maur than they're doing now in many cases, and one of the things I was saying is that I think companies are. Generally, there's some exceptions, but most companies they're not starting to retrain their workers. Amazon recently announced they're going to spend 700,000,000 to retrain their workers to do things that a I and robots can't. But that's pretty rare. Certainly that level of commitment is very rare. So I think it's time for the companies to start stepping up and saying, How can we develop a better combination of humans and machines? >> The work by, you know, brain Nelson and McAfee, which is a little dated now. But it definitely suggests that there's some things to be concerned about. Of course, ultimately there prescription was one of an optimist and education, and yeah, on and so forth. But you know, the key point there is the machines have always replace humans, but now, in terms of cognitive functions, but you see it everywhere you drive to the airport. Now it's Elektronik billboards. It's not some person putting up the kiosks, etcetera, but you know, is you know, you've you've used >> the term, you know, paid the cow path. We don't want to protect the past from the future. All right, so, to >> your point, retraining education I mean, that's the opportunity here, isn't it? And the potential is enormous. Well, and, you know, let's face it, we haven't had much in the way of productivity improvements in the U. S. Or any other advanced economy lately. So we need some guests, you know, replacement of humans by machines. But my argument has always been You can handle innovation better. You can avoid sort of race to the bottom at automation sometimes leads to, if you think creatively about humans and machines working as colleagues. In many cases, you remember in the PC boom, I forget it with a Fed chairman was it might have been, Greenspan said, You can see progress everywhere except in the product. That was an M. I. T. Professor Robert Solow. >> OK, right, and then >> won the Nobel Prize. But then, shortly thereafter, there was a huge productivity boom. So I mean is there may be a pent up Well, God knows. I mean, um, everybody's wondering. We've been spending literally trillions on I t. And you would think that it would have led toe productivity, But you know, certain things like social media, I think reduced productivity in the workplace and you know, we're all chatting and talking and slacking and sewing all over the place. Maybe that's is not conducive to getting work done. It depends what you >> do with that social media here in our business. It's actually it's phenomenal to see political coverage these days, which is almost entirely consist of reprinting politicians. Tweets >> Exactly. I guess it's made life easier for for them all people reporters sitting in the White House waiting for a press conference. They're not >> doing well. There are many reporters left. Where do you see in your consulting work your academic work? Where do you see a I being used most effectively in organizations right now? And where do you think that's gonna be three years from now? >> Well, I mean, the general category of activity of use case is the sort of someone's calling boring I. It's data integration. One thing that's being discussed a lot of this conference, it's connecting your invoices to your contracts to see Did we actually get the stuff that we contracted for its ah, doing a little bit better job of identifying fraud and doing it faster so all of those things are quite feasible. They're just not that exciting. What we're not seeing are curing cancer, creating fully autonomous vehicles. You know, the really aggressive moonshots that we've been trying for a while just haven't succeeded at what if we kind of expand a I is gonna The rumor, trawlers. New cool stuff that's coming out. So considering all these new checks with detective Aye, aye, Blockchain new security approaches. When do you think that machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors? Well, I think you know, in a very narrow sense in some cases, that could do it now. But the thing is, first of all, take a radiologist, which is one of the doctors I think most at risk from this because they don't typically meet with patients and they spend a lot of time looking at images. It turns out that the lab experiments that say you know, these air better than human radiologist say I tend to be very narrow, and what one lab does is different from another lab. So it's just it's gonna take a very long time to make it into, you know, production deployment in the physician's office. We'll probably have to have some regulatory approval of it. You know, the lab research is great. It's just getting it into day to day. Reality is the problem. Okay, So staying in this context of digital a sort of umbrella topic, do you think large retail stores roll largely disappeared? >> Uh, >> some sectors more than others for things that you don't need toe, touch and feel, And soon before you're to them. Certainly even that obviously, it's happening more and more on commerce. What people are saying will disappear. Next is the human at the point of sale. And we've been talking about that for a while. In In grocery, Not so not achieve so much yet in the U. S. Amazon Go is a really interesting experiment where every time I go in there, I tried to shoplift. I took a while, and now they have 12 stores. It's not huge yet, but I think if you're in one of those jobs that a substantial chunk of it is automata ble, then you really want to start looking around thinking, What else can I do to add value to these machines? Do you think traditional banks will lose control of the payment system? Uh, No, I don't because the Finn techs that you see thus far keep getting bought by traditional bank. So my guess is that people will want that certainty. And you know, the funny thing about Blockchain way say in principle it's more secure because it's spread across a lot of different ledgers. But people keep hacking into Bitcoin, so it makes you wonder. I think Blockchain is gonna take longer than way thought as well. So, you know, in my latest book, which is called the Aye Aye Advantage, I start out talking by about Tamara's Law, This guy Roy Amara, who was a futurist, not nearly as well known as Moore's Law. But it said, You know, for every new technology, we tend to overestimate its impact in the short run and underestimated Long, long Ryan. And so I think a I will end up doing great things. We may have sort of tuned it out of the time. It actually happens way finally have autonomous vehicles. We've been talking about it for 50 years. Last one. So one of the Democratic candidates of the 75 Democratic ended last night mentioned the chief manufacturing officer Well, do you see that automation will actually swing the pendulum and bring back manufacturing to the U. S. I think it could if we were really aggressive about using digital technologies in manufacturing, doing three D manufacturing doing, um, digital twins of every device and so on. But we are not being as aggressive as we ought to be. And manufacturing companies have been kind of slow. And, um, I think somewhat delinquent and embracing these things. So they're gonna think, lose the ability to compete. We have to really go at it in a big way to >> bring it. Bring it all back. Just we've got an election coming up. There are a lot of concern following the last election about the potential of a I chatbots Twitter chat bots, deep fakes, technologies that obscure or alter reality. Are you worried about what's coming in the next year? And that that >> could never happen? Paul. We could never see anything deep fakes I'm quite worried about. We don't seem. I know there's some organizations working on how we would certify, you know, an image as being really But we're not there yet. My guess is, certainly by the time the election happens, we're going to have all sorts of political candidates saying things that they never really said through deep fakes and image manipulation. Scary? What do you think about the call to break up? Big check. What's your position on that? I think that sell a self inflicted wound. You know, we just saw, for example, that the automobile manufacturers decided to get together. Even though the federal government isn't asking for better mileage, they said, We'll do it. We'll work with you in union of states that are more advanced. If Big Tak had said, we're gonna work together to develop standards of ethical behavior and privacy and data and so on, they could've prevented some of this unless they change their attitude really quickly. I've seen some of it sales force. People are talking about the need for data standard data protection standards, I must say, change quickly. I think they're going to get legislation imposed and maybe get broken up. It's gonna take awhile. Depends on the next administration, but they're not being smart >> about it. You look it. I'm sure you see a lot of demos of advanced A I type technology over the last year, what is really impressed you. >> You know, I think the biggest advances have clearly been in image recognition looking the other day. It's a big problem with that is you need a lot of label data. It's one of the reasons why Google was able to identify cat photos on the Internet is we had a lot of labeled cat images and the Image net open source database. But the ability to start generating images to do synthetic label data, I think, could really make a big difference in how rapidly image recognition works. >> What even synthetic? I'm sorry >> where we would actually create. We wouldn't have to have somebody go around taking pictures of cats. We create a bunch of different cat photos, label them as cat photos have variations in them, you know, unless we have a lot of variation and images. That's one of the reasons why we can't use autonomous vehicles yet because images differ in the rain and the snow. And so we're gonna have to have synthetic snow synthetic rain to identify those images. So, you know, the GPU chip still realizes that's a pedestrian walking across there, even though it's kind of buzzed up right now. Just a little bit of various ation. The image can throw off the recognition altogether. Tom. Hey, thanks so much for coming in. The Cube is great to see you. We gotta go play Catch. You're welcome. Keep right. Everybody will be back from M I t CDO I Q In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stable, aren't they? Paul Gillis, You're watching the Cube?