I'll start out by committing the logical fallacy of Appeal to Authority:
...I am Visiting Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and
Engineering Systems Division; Executive-in-Residence at NYU’s Center for
Urban Science and Progress; Senior Fellow at the Levin Institute of the
State University of New York; and Adjunct Professor in the Innovation
and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School. I
am a member of the Board of Directors of Inno360, ID³ and CNRI, the
InnoCentive Advisory Board, the Visiting Committee for the Physical
Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, and the Advisory Board
of USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab.
I served on and later became co-chair of the President’s Information
Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2001, and was a founding
member of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the
National Research Council in 1986. I am a former member of University
of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratories, the
Board of Overseers for Fermilab, and BP's Technology Advisory Council. A
few years ago, I was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences....
And here's the headline blog post:
MIT just launched a new Initiative for the Digital Economy
to systematically address the impact of digital technologies on
business, the economy and society. The university-wide initiative is
being organized by MIT’s Center for Digital Business (CDB), and is led by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee, who are respectively the CDB’s director and principal research scientist.
Since the mid 1990s, we’ve been talking about the emergence of an Internet-based digital economy.
It has often been said that powerful disruptive innovations like the
Internet are overhyped in the short term but under-hyped in the long
term. This is certainly the case with digital economy. The term was
widely thrown around in the heady dot-com bubble days as people talked about a new economy with eyeballs instead of revenue, profit and cash as key business metrics.
But, over the past decade the Internet has transitioned from the connected world of PCs, browsers and web servers, to the hyperconnected world of mobile devices, cloud computing
and broadband wireless networks. The physical and the the digital now
blend into each other over porous boundaries, as people, institutions
and things are all becoming interconnected. A 21st century digital economy is indeed now emerging in this hyperconnected, inclusive, and increasingly smart world.
In October of 2011 Brynjolfsson and McAfee published Race
Against the Machine: How The Digital Revolution Is Accelerating
Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming
Employment and the Economy. This excellent short book focused on the impact of digital technologies on jobs, skills, wages and the overall economy.
They wrote
about the profound transformations brought about by ever more advanced
technologies and innovations. These are bringing many benefits to
people around the world as well as creating unprecedented wealth.
However, as the technology races ahead, many cannot keep up and are
being left behind.
The US recession has been officially over for a number of years, yet the country is still suffering from a jobless recovery. US unemployment rate
is still near 8 percent, with almost 40 percent classified as long-term
unemployed, - that is, jobless for 27 weeks or more, - and an
additional 5 percent working part time but wishing for full time work.
On January 13, Brynjolfsson and McAfee appeared with correspondent Steve Kroft in a 60 Minutes segment looking at how technology advances are revolutionizing the workplace.
“The percentage of Americans with jobs is at a 20-year low,” observed
Kroft. “Just a few years ago if you traveled by air you would have
interacted with a human ticket agent. Today, those jobs are being
replaced by robotic kiosks. Bank tellers have given way to ATMs, sales
clerks are surrendering to e-commerce and switchboard operators and
secretaries to voice recognition technology. . .”
“Economic
evolution has been going on for centuries and society has always
successfully adapted to technological change creating more jobs in the
process. But Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT think this time
may be different. . .”
“The
changes are coming so quickly it’s been difficult for workers to
retrain themselves and for entrepreneurs to figure out where the next
opportunities may be. . . It’s all part of a massive high tech industry
that’s contributed enormous productivity and wealth to the American
economy but surprisingly little in the way of employment. . . Everyone
agrees that it’s impossible now to short circuit technology. It has a
life of its own and the world is all in for better or for worse.”
Technology has been replacing workers and improving productivity ever since the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 18th century. In past technology-based economic revolutions, the periods of creative destruction and high unemployment
eventually worked themselves out. Over time, these same disruptive
technologies and innovations led to the transformation of the economy
and the creation of new industries and new jobs.
While we are hopeful that this will once more be the case, there is no way of knowing. As Race Against the Machine repeatedely points out, technology is being increasingly applied
to activities requiring cognitive capabilities and problem solving
intelligence that not long ago were viewed as the exclusive domain of
humans. These technology advances are truly pushing the boundaries
between human and machines.
Many workers are learning to co-evolve
with our intelligent machines, and as has been the case in the past,
they will be ready for whatever new jobs are created. But, our fear is that this time is different and the long predicted era of technological unemployment
is finally upon us. Technology advances are running so far ahead that
large numbers of people may not be able to keep up, and the future will
bring even more serious economic disruptions.
This past December, the Center for Digital Business convened a roundtable on Work and Value in the Digital Economy to further explore
where jobs will likely come from and whether the very nature of work
will be significantly different as the digital economy plays out in the
coming years. Despite the presence of top thinkers on the subject, the
answer, in short, is that we truly don’t know....MORE
And his most recent posts:
