Going a little further into the future, we'll start literally connecting to machines. Some of my colleagues at MIT here - some of them are working on a neural mesh that connects directly to your brain, and they've already done it with some disabled people and allowed them to move objects just by thinking.

Erik Brynjolfsson

Categorized in : Thinking Moving People

Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.

Erik Brynjolfsson

powerful military children

We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.

Erik Brynjolfsson

entering data use

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power - the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

Erik Brynjolfsson

machines age brain

The economy in the next 20 to 25 years is going to change more than they did in the last 20, 25 years. And that's because exponential trends are affecting a bigger and bigger share of the economy. So we have some huge disruptions in store, and I can't predict exactly what the innovations are going to be. If I did, I would have already invented them. But I think they'll be comparable to the innovations we saw in the past 20, 25 years if not greater.

Erik Brynjolfsson

innovation past thinking

What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to try to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine.

Erik Brynjolfsson

racing technology race

Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.

Erik Brynjolfsson

destiny technology shapes

There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks, and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them. They could be software robots; they could be physical robots.

Erik Brynjolfsson

design community jobs

Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.

Erik Brynjolfsson

skills knowing years

But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.

Erik Brynjolfsson

team race people

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs.

Erik Brynjolfsson

creating technology jobs

Computers get better, faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at like driving a car through traffic.

Erik Brynjolfsson

car powerful military

The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer.

Erik Brynjolfsson

where-you-come becoming jobs

Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.

Erik Brynjolfsson

innovation growth technology

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

Erik Brynjolfsson

get-better computer faster

It's most useful to think about not jobs but tasks. And within any given job, there are lots of different tasks. If you're a radiologist maybe reading the images machines can be able to do that better, maybe making the broader diagnosis and communicating it to the patients.

Erik Brynjolfsson

different reading thinking

The heart of science is measurement.

Erik Brynjolfsson

measurement heart

Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment.

Erik Brynjolfsson

environment information gone

G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers. Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.

Erik Brynjolfsson

metrics welfare should

For a long time, the humans are going to be better than the machines and so different parts of the job will be leveraged. In a way that's happened for centuries, and we've adapted. And it's made the people who had parts of their jobs automated more valuable and more productive to the extent that they are essential for the other components of their jobs.

Erik Brynjolfsson

different long people

Because the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation.

Erik Brynjolfsson

innovation opportunity ideas