From Irving Wladawsky-Berger:
A couple of weeks ago I attended MIT’s Second Machine Age Conference, an event inspired by the best-selling book of the same title published earlier this year by MIT’s Erik Brynjolffson and Andy McAfee. The conference presented some of the leading-edge research that’s ushering the emerging second machine age,
and explored its impact on the economy and society. It was quite an
interesting event. Let me discuss a few of the presentations as well as
my overall impressions.
In his opening keynote, Brynjolffson explained
what the second machine age is all about. “Like steam power and
electricity before it, the explosion of digitally enabled technologies
is radically transforming the landscape of human endeavor. Astonishing
progress in robotics, automation, and access to information presents
major challenges for institutions from small businesses and communities
to large corporations and governments, but it also creates opportunities
to rethink how we live and work in profoundly positive ways.”
The
machines of the industrial economy, - the first age, - made up for our
physical limitations, - steam engines enhanced our physical power,
railroads and cars helped us go faster, and airplanes gave us the
ability to fly. For the most part, they complemented, rather than
replaced humans. The second age machines are now enhancing our cognitive powers, giving us the ability to process vast amounts of information and make ever more complex decisions. They’re being increasingly applied
to activities requiring intelligence and cognitive capabilities that
not long ago were viewed as the exclusive domain of humans. Will these
second age machines complement or replace humans?
Brynjolfsson
said that he’s amazed at the advances in machine intelligence in the
last decade. They’re able to sense and interact with the physical
world, like the Google self-driving cars. Their vision and fine motor control has significantly advanced, like Baxter, the interactive production robot from Rethink Robotics. We’re now able to communicate in natural language with smartphone apps and customer service applications. And question-answering systems like IBM’s Watson are enabling us to solve increasingly complex problems.
“We’re in the midst of the greatest one-time event
in history!,” he added. But, what does this mean for the economy? On
the one hand, we have a bounty of highly sophisticated and inexpensive
technologies, as exemplified by a Radio Shack ad from the 1980s, where
the functions of just about every single one of the devices then on sale
are now available in our smartphones, - computer, phone, messages
answering, music, video and audio recorders, and so on....MUCH MORE
