>> live from the Congress Centre in London, England. It's the queue at M I t. And the digital economy. The second machine Age Brought to you by headlines sponsor M I T. >> Everybody, welcome to London. This is Dave along with student men. And this is the cube. The cube goes out, we go to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're very pleased to be in London, the scene of the first machine age. But we're here to talk about the second Machine age. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. Gentlemen, first of all, congratulations on this fantastic book. It's been getting great acclaim. So it's a wonderful book if you haven't read it. Ah, Andrew, Maybe you could hold it up for our audience here, the second machine age >> and Dave to start off thanks to you for being able to pronounce both of our names correctly, that's just about unprecedented. In the history of this, >> I can probably even spell them. Whoa, Don't. So, anyway, welcome. We appreciate you guys coming on and appreciate the opportunity to talk about the book. So if you want to start with you, so why London? I mean, I talked about the first machine age. Why are we back here? One of the >> things we learned when we were writing the book is how big deal technological progress is on the way you learn that is by going back and looking at a lot of history and trying to understand what bet the curve of human history. If we look at how advanced our civilizations are, if we look at how many people there are in the world, if we look at GDP per capita around the world, amazingly enough, we have that data going back hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. And no matter what data you're looking at, you get the same story, which is that nothing happened until the Industrial Revolution. So for us, the start of the first machine machine age for us, it's a real thrill to come to London to come to the UK, which was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. The first machine age to talk about the second. >> So, Eric, I wonder if you could have with two sort of main vectors that you take away from the book won is that you know, machines have always replaced humans and maybe doing so at a different rate of these days. But the other is the potential of continued innovation, even though many people say Moore's law is dead. You guys have come up with sort of premises to how innovation will continue to double. So boil it down for the lay person. What should we think about? Well, sure. >> I mean, let me just elaborate on what you just said. Technology's always been destroying jobs, but it's also always been creating jobs, you know, A couple centuries ago, ninety percent of Americans worked in agriculture on farms in nineteen hundred is down to about forty one percent. Now is less than two percent. All those people didn't simply become unemployed. Instead, new industries were invented by Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. Lots of other people and people got rather unemployed, became redeployed. One of the concerns is is, Are we doing that fast enough? This time around, we see a lot of bounty being created by technology. Global poverty rates are falling. Record wealth in the United States record GDP per person. But not everyone's participating in that. Not even when sharing the past ten fifteen years, we've actually to our surprise seem median income fall that's income of the person the fiftieth percentile, even though the overall pie is getting bigger. And one of the reasons that we created the initiative on the digital economy was to try to crack that, not understand what exactly is going on? How is technology behaving differently this time around in earlier eras and part that has to do with some of the unique characteristics of eventual goods? >> Well, your point in the book is that normally median income tracks productivity, and it's it's not this time around. Should we be concerned about that? >> I think we should be concerned about it. That's different than trying to stop for halt course of technology. That's absolutely not something you >> should >> be more concerned about. That way, Neto let >> technology move ahead. We need to let the innovation happen, and if we are concerned about some of the side effects or some of the consequences of that fine, let's deal with those. You bring up what I think is the one of most important side effects to have our eye on, which is exactly as you say when we look back for a long time, the average worker was taking home more pay, a higher standard of living decade after decade as their productivity improved. To the point that we started to think about that as an economic law, your compensation is your marginal productivity fantastic what we've noticed over the past couple of decades, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we've noticed this, as the computer age has accelerated, is that there's been a decoupling. The productivity continues to go up, but the wage that average income has stagnated. Dealing with that is one of our big challenges. >> So what you tell your students become a superstar? I mean, not everybody could become a superstar. Well, our students cats, you know, maybe the thing you know they're all aspired to write. >> A lot of people focus on the way that technology has helped superstars reach global audiences. You know, I had one student. He wrote an app, and about two or three weeks, he tells me, and within a few months he had reached a million people with that app. That's something that probably would have been impossible a couple of decades ago. But he was able to do that because he built it on top of the Facebook platform, which is on top of the Internet and a lot of other innovations that came before. So in some ways it's never been easier to become a superstar and to reach literally not just millions, but even billions of people. But that's not the only successful path in the second machine age. There's also other categories where machines just aren't very good. Yet one of the ones that comes to mind is interpersonal skills, whether that's coaching or underst picking up on other cues from people nurturing people carrying for people. And there are a whole set of professions around those categories as well. You don't have to have some superstar programmer to be successful in those categories, and there are millions of jobs that are needed in those categories for to take care of other P people. So I think there's gonna be a lot of ways to be successful in the second machine age, >> so I think >> that's really important because one take away that I don't like from people who've looked at our work is that only the amazing entrepreneurs or the people with one forty plus IQ's are going to be successful in the second machine age. That's it's just not correct. As Eric says, the ability to negotiate the ability Teo be empathetic to somebody, the ability to care for somebody machines they're lousy of thes. They remain really important things to do. They remain economically valuable things >> love concern that they won't remain louse. If I'm a you know, student listening, you said in your book, Self driving cars, You know, decade ago, even five years ago so it can happen. So how do we predict with computers Will and won't be good at We >> basically don't. Our track record in doing that is actually fairly lousy. The mantra that I've learned is that objects in the future are closer than they appear on the stuff that seem like complete SciFi. You're never goingto happen keeps on happening now. That said, I am still going to be blown away the first time I see a computer written novel that that that works, that that I find compelling, that that seems like a very human skill. But we are starting to see technologies that are good at recognizing human emotions that can compose music that can do art paintings that I find pretty compelling. So never say never is another. >> I mean right, right. If if I look some of the examples lately, you know, basic news computers could do that really well. IBM, you know, the lots of machine can make recipes that we would have never thought of. Very things would be creative. And Ian, the technology space, you know, you know, a decade ago computer science is where you tell everybody to go into today is data scientists still like a hot opportunity for people to go in And the technology space? Where, where is there some good opportunity? >> Or whether or not that's what the job title on the business card is that going to be hot being a numerous person being ableto work with large amounts of data input, particular being able to work with huge amounts of data in a digital environment in a computer that skills not going anywhere >> you could think of jobs in three categories is ready to technology. They're ones that air substitutes racing against machine. They're ones that air compliments that are using technology under ones that just aren't really affected yet by technology. The first category you definitely want to stay away from. You know, a lot of routine information processing work. Those were things machines could do well, >> prepare yourself as a job. Is that for a job as a payroll clerk? There's a really bad wait. >> See that those jobs were disappearing, both in terms of the numbers of employment and the wages that they get. The second category jobs. That compliment data scientist is a great example of that or somebody who's AP Writer or YouTube. Those are things that technology makes your skills more and more valuable. And there's this huge middle category. We talked earlier about interpersonal skills, a lot of physical task. Still, where machines just really can't touch them too much. Those are also categories that so far hell >> no, I didnt know it like middle >> school football, Coach is a job. It's going to be around a human job. It's going to be around for a long time to come because I have not seen the piece of technology that can inspire a group of twelve or thirteen year olds to go out there and play together as a team. Now Erik has actually been a middle school football coach, and he actually used a lot of technology to help him get good at that job, to the point where you are pretty successful. Middle school football coach >> way want a lot of teams games, and part of it was way could learn from technology. We were able to break down films in ways that people never could've previously at the middle school level. His technology's made a lot of things much cheaper. Now then we're available. >> So it was learning to be competitive versus learning how to teach kids to play football. Is that right? Or was a bit? Well, actually, >> one of the most important things and being a coach is that interpersonal connection is one thing I liked the most about it, and that's something I think no robot could do. What I think it be a long, long time. If ever that inspiring halftime speech could be given by a robot >> on getting Eric Gipper bring the Olsen Well, the to me, the more, most interesting examples I didn't realise this until I read your book, is that the best chess player in the world is not a computer, it's a computer and a human. That's what those to me. It seemed to be the greatest opportunities for innovative way. Call a >> racing with machines, and we want to emphasize that that's what people should be focusing. I think there's been a lot of attention on how machines can replace humans. But the bigger opportunities how humans and machines could work together to do things they could never have been done before in games like chess. We see that possibility. But even more, interestingly, is when they're making new discoveries in neuroscience or new kinds of business models like Uber and others, where we are seeing value creation in ways that was just not possible >> previously, and that chess example is going to spill over into the rest of the economy very, very quickly. I think about medicine and medical diagnosis. I believe that work needs to be a huge amount, more digital automated than it is today. I want Dr Watson as my primary care physician, but I do think that the real opportunities we're going to be to combine digital diagnosis, digital pattern recognition with the union skills and abilities of the human doctor. Let's bring those two skill sets together >> well, the Staton your book is. It would take a physician one hundred sixty hours a week to stay on top of reading, to stay on top of all the new That's publication. That's the >> estimate. And but there's no amount of time that watching could learn how to do that empathy that requires to communicate that and learn from a patient so that humans and machines have complementary skills. The machines are strong in some categories of humans and others, and that's why a team of humans and computers could be so >> That's the killer. Since >> the book came out, we found another great example related to automation and medicine in science. There's a really clever experiment that the IBM Watson team did with team out of Baylor. They fed the technology a couple hundred thousand papers related to one area of gene expression and proteins. And they said, Why don't you predict what the next molecules all we should look at to get this tart to get this desired response out on the computer said Okay, we think these nine are the next ones that are going to be good candidates. What they did that was so clever they only gave the computer papers that had been published through two thousand three. So then we have twelve years to see if those hypotheses turned out to be correct. Computer was batting about seven hundred, so people say, didn't that technology could never be creative. I think coming up with a a good scientific hypothesis is an example of creative work. Let's make that work a lot more digital as well. >> So, you know, I got a question from the crowd here. Thie First Industrial Revolution really helped build up a lot of the cities. The question is, with the speed and reach of the Internet and everything, is this really going to help distribute the population? Maur. What? The digital economy? I don't I don't think so. I don't think we want to come to cities, not just because it's the only waited to communicate with somebody we actually want to be >> face to face with them. We want to hang out with urbanization is a really, really powerful trend. Even as our technologies have gotten more powerful. I don't think that's going to revert, but I do think that if you if you want to get away from the city, at least for a period of time and go contemplate and be out in the world. You can now do that and not >> lose touch. You know, the social undistributed workforce isn't gonna drive that away. It's It's a real phenomenon, but it's not going to >> mean that cities were going >> to be popular. Well, the cities have two unique abilities. One is the entertainment. If you'd like to socialize with people in a face to face way most of the time, although people do it online as well, the other is that there's still a lot of types of communication that are best done in person. And, in fact, real estate value suggests that being able to be close toe other experts in your field. Whether it's in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street is still a valuable asset. Eric and I >> travel a ton not always together. We could get a lot of our work done via email on via digital tools. When it comes time to actually get together and think about the next article or the next book, we need to be in the same room with the white bored doing it. Old school >> want to come back to the roots of innovation. Moore's law is Gordon Mohr put forth fiftieth anniversary next week, and it's it's It's coming to an end in terms of that actually has ended in terms of the way it's doubling every eighteen months, but looks like we still have some runway. But you know, experts can predict and you guys made it a point you book People always underestimate, you know, human's ability to do the things that people think they can't do. But the rial innovation is coming from this notion of combinatorial technologies. That's where we're going to see that continued exponential growth. What gives you confidence that that >> curve will continue? If you look at innovation as the work, not of coming up with some brand new Eureka, but as putting together existing building blocks in a new and powerful way, Then you should get really optimistic because the number of building blocks out there in the world is only going up with iPhones and sensors and banned weapon and all these different new tools and the ability to tap into more brains around the world to allow more people to try to do that recombination. That ability is only increasing as well. I'm massively optimistic about innovation, >> yet that's a fundamental break from the common attitude. We hear that we're using up all the low hanging fruit, that innovation. There's some fixed stock of it, and first we get the easy innovations, and then it gets harder and harder to innovate. We fundamentally disagree with that. You, in fact, every innovation we create creates more and more building blocks for additional innovations. And if you look historically, most of the breakthroughs have been achieved by combining previously existing innovations. So that makes me optimistic that we'LL have more and more of those building blocks going >> forward. People say that we've we've wrung all of the benefit out of the internal combustion engine, for example, and it's all just rounding error. For here. Know a completely autonomous car is not rounding error. That's the new thing that's going to change. Our lives is going to change our cities is going to change our supply chains, and it's making a new, entirely new use case out of that internal combustion. >> So you used the example of ways in the book, Really, you know, their software, obviously was involved, but it really was sensors and it was social media. And we're mobile phones and networks, just these combinations of technologies for innovation, >> none of which was an invention of the Ways team, none of which was original. Theyjust put those elements together in a really powerful way. >> So that's I mean, the value of ways isn't over. So we're just scratching the surface, and we could talk about sort of what you guys expect. Going forward. I know it's hard to predict well, another >> really important thing about wages in addition to the wake and combined and recombined existing components. It's available for free on my phone, and GPS would've cost hundreds of dollars a few years ago, and it wouldn't have been nearly as good at ways. And in a decade before that, it would have been infinitely expensive. You couldn't get it at any price, and this is a really important phenomenon. The digital economy that is underappreciated is that so much of what we get is now available at zero cost. Our GDP measures are all the goods and services they're bought and sold. If they have zero price, they show up is a zero in GDP. >> Wikipedia, right? Wikipedia, but that just wait here overvalue ways. Yeah, it doesn't. That >> doesn't mean zero value. It's still quite valuable to us. And more and more. I think our metrics are not capturing the real essence of the digital economy. One of the things we're doing at the Initiative initiative, the addition on the usual economy is to understand better what the right metrics will be for seeing this kind of growth. >> And I want to talk about that in the context of what you just said. The competitiveness. So if I get a piece of fruit disappears Smythe Digital economy, it's different. I wonder if you could explain that, >> and one of the ways it's different will use waze is an example here again, is network effects become really, really powerful? So ways gets more valuable to me? The more other ways er's there are out there in the world, they provide more traffic information that let me know where the potholes and the construction are. So network effects lead to really kind of different competitive dynamics. They tend to lead toward more winner, take all situations. They tend to lead toward things that look more not like monopolies, and that tends to freak some people out. I'm a little more home about that because one of the things we also know from observing the high tech industries is that today's near monopolist is yesterday's also ran. We just see that over and over because complacency and inertia are so deadly, there's always some some disruptor coming up, even in the high tech industries to make the incumbents nervous. >> Right? Open source. >> We'LL open source And that's a perfect example of how some of the characteristics of goods in the digital economy are fundamentally different from earlier eras and microeconomics. We talk about rival and excludable goods, and that's what you need for a competitive equilibrium. Digital goods, our non rival and non excludable. You go back to your micro economics textbook for more detail in that, but in essence, what it means is that these goods could be freely coffee at almost zero cost. Each copy is a perfect replica of the original that could be transmitted anywhere on the planet almost instantaneously, and that leads to a very different kind of economics that what we had for the previous few hundred years, >> or you don't work to quantify that. Does that sort of Yeah, wave wanted >> Find the effect on the economy more broadly. But there's also a very profound effects on business and the kind of business models that work. You know, you mentioned open source as an example. There are platform economics, Marshall Banal Stein. One of the experts in the field, is speaking here today about that. Maybe we get a chance to talk about it later. You can sometimes make a lot of money by giving stuff away for free and gaining from complimentary goods. These are things that >> way started. Yeah, Well, there you go. Well, that would be working for you could only do that for a little >> while. You'll like you're a drug dealer. You could do that for a little while. And then you get people addicted many. You start charging them a lot. There's a really different business model in the second machine age, which is just give stuff away for free. You can make enough off other ancillary streams like advertising to have a large, very, very successful business. >> Okay, I wonder if we could sort of, uh, two things I want first I want to talk about the constraints. What is the constraints to taking advantage of that? That innovation curve in the next day? >> Well, that's a great question, and less and less of the constraint is technological. More and more of the constraint is our ability as individuals to cope with change and said There's a race between technology and education, and an even more profound constraint is the ability of our organisations in our culture to adapt. We really see that it's a bottleneck. And at the MIT Sloan School, we're very much focused on trying to relieve those constraints. We've got some brilliant technologists that are inventing the future on the technology side, but we've got to keep up with our business. Models are economic systems, and that's not happening fast enough. >> So let's think about where the technology's aren't in. The constraints aren't and are. As Eric says, access to technology is vanishing as a constraint. Access to capital is vanishing as a constraint, at least a demonstrator to start showing that you've got a good idea because of the cloud. Because of Moore's law and a small team or alone innovator can demonstrate the power of their idea and then ramp it up. So those air really vanishing constraints are mindset, constraints, our institutional constraints. And unfortunately, increasingly, I believe regulatory constraints. Our colleague Larry Lessing has a great way to phrase the choice, he says, With our policies, with our regulations, we can protect the future from the past, or we could protect the past from the future. That choice is really, really write. The future is a better place. Let's protect that from the incumbents in the inertia. >> So that leads us to sort of some of the proposals that you guys made in terms of how we can approach this. Good news is, capitalism is not something that you're you're you're you're very much in favor of, you know, attacking no poulet bureau, I think, was your comments on DH some of the other things? Actually, I found pretty practical, although not not likely, but practical things, right? Yes, but but still, you know, feasible certainly, certainly, certainly intellectually. But what have you seen in terms of the reaction to your proposals? And do you have any once that the public policy will begin to shape in a way that wages >> conference that the conversation is shifting. So just from the publication date now we've noticed there's a lot more willingness to engage with these ideas with the ideas that tech progress is racing ahead but leaving some people behind in more people behind in an economic sense over time. So we've talked to politicians. We've talked to policy makers. We've talked to faint thanks. That conversation is progressing. And if we want to change our our government, you want to change our policies. I think it has to start with changing the conversation. It's a bottom out phenomenon >> and is exactly right. And that's really one of the key things that we learned, you know well, we talked to our political science friends. They remind us that in American other democracies, leaders are really followers on. They follow public opinion and the people are the leaders. So we're not going to be able to get changes in our policies until we change the old broad conversation. We get people recognizing the issues they're underway here, and I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss some of these bigger changes we describe as possible the book. I mean, historically, there've been some huge changes the cost of the mass public education was a pretty radical idea when it was introduced. The concept of Social Security were recently the concept of marriage. Equality with something I think people wouldn't have imagined maybe a decade or two ago so you could have some big changes in the political conversation. It starts with what the people want, and ultimately the leaders will follow. >> It's easy to get dismayed about the logjam in Washington, and I get dismayed once in a while. But I think back a decade ago, if somebody had told me that gay marriage and legal marijuana would be pretty widespread in America, I would have laughed in their face. And, you know, I'm straight and I don't smoke dope. I think these were both fantastic developments, and they came because the conversation shifted. Not not because we had a gay pot smoker in the white. >> Gentlemen, Listen, thank you very much. First of all, for running this great book, well, even I got one last question. So I understand you guys were working on your topic for you next, but can you give us a little bit of, uh, some thoughts as to what you're thinking. What do we do? We tip the hand. Well, sure, I think that >> it's no no mystery that we teach in a business school. And we spent a lot of time interacting with business leaders. And as we've mentioned in the discussion here, there have been some huge changes in the kind of business models that are successful in the second machine age. We want to elaborate on those describe nuts what were seeing when we talk to business leaders but also with the economic theory says about what will and what? What won't work. >> So second machine age was our attempt it like a big idea book. Let's write the Business guide to the Second Machine Age. >> Excellent. First of all, the book is a big idea. A lot of big ideas in the book, with excellent examples and some prescription, I think, for moving forward. So thank you for writing that book. And congratulations on its success. Really appreciate you guys coming in the Cube. Good luck today and we look forward to talking to in the future. Thanks for having been a real pleasure. Keep right. Everybody will be right back. We're live from London. This is M I t E. This is the cube right back