The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (34 page)

Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.

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Greg Mankiw ponders a thought experiment where a pill is discovered that adds one year of life to anyone who takes it, but costs $100,000 per pill to produce—more than most people could afford. Would we ban it, ration it, or regulate it in some way?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There’s a general story of how this book came to be, and a specific one. Many people contributed to each, and some to both.

The general story is about our research to understand the nature of progress with digital technologies, and its economic and societal consequences. As part of this work, we talked to two main types of geek (a label which, to us, is the highest praise): those who study economics and other social sciences, and those who build technologies. In the former group Susan Athey, David Autor, Zoe Baird, Nick Bloom, Tyler Cowen, Charles Fadel, Chrystia Freeland, Robert Gordon, Tom Kalil, Larry Katz, Tom Kochan, Frank Levy, James Manyika, Richard Murnane, Robert Putnam, Paul Romer, Scott Stern, Larry Summers, and Hal Varian have helped our thinking enormously. In the latter category are Chris Anderson, Rod Brooks, Peter Diamandis, Ephraim Heller, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Howard, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, John Leonard, Tod Loofbourrow, Hilary Mason, Tim O’Reilly, Sandy Pentland, Brad Templeton, and Vivek Wadhwa. All of them were incredibly generous with their time and tolerant of our questions. We did our best to understand the insights they shared with us, and apologize for whatever mistakes we made in trying to convey them in this book.

Some members of both groups came together at an extraordinary series of lunches at MIT organized by John Leonard, Frank Levy, Daniela Rus, and Seth Teller that assembled people from the Economics Department, the Sloan School of Management, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab to talk about exactly the topics in which we were most interested. We had truly cross-disciplinary conversations without any forcing function other than our own curiosities, which have remained strong enough to resist the countless hectoring demands of academic life.

As these lunches indicate, MIT itself is part of the general story of this book. It’s been the ideal professional home for us, and we’re grateful for the support we’ve received from Sloan, its dean David Schmittlein, and deputy dean S. P. Kothari. The intellects at MIT make it a humbling place; the people make it a lovely one.

The specific story of this book starts with an inquiry we got from Raphael Sagalyn who, we soon learned, is a lion among literary agents (he was introduced to us by Joan Powell, Andy’s equally illustrious speaking agent). Rafe wanted to know if we had any interest in turning our short, self-published e-book
Race Against the Machine
into a real book, one with a publisher, an editor, a hard cover—the works. Rafe was far too professional to use the word “real,” of course, but we knew what he meant.

And we were intrigued, because we hadn’t stopped thinking and talking to each other about the ideas in
Race Against the Machine
even after the book was done. In fact, we’d only become more interested in the concepts of technological progress and its economic consequences as a result of the e-book, and we’d enjoyed the many conversations it had sparked with people all over the world. So it didn’t take long at all for us to decide to work with Rafe to see if this interest was shared by mainstream publishers.

Amazingly enough, it was, which is how we met our editor, Brendan Curry, and his colleagues at W. W. Norton. Working under tight deadlines, Brendan and his colleagues Mitchell Kohles and Tara Powers guided our manuscript into shape. We’re grateful for their advice and keen attention, which were delivered with grace under pressure.

At the intersection where our general interests met the specifics of writing a book is a set of colleagues, family, and friends who we simply can’t thank enough. To give us up-close encounters with the technologies we were writing about, Dave Ferrucci and his colleagues at IBM brought Watson to campus, Rod Brooks introduced us to Baxter the humanoid robot, Carl Bass at Autodesk headquarters let us handle a range of objects made by 3D printing, and Betsy Masiello and Hal Varian worked their magic at Google to get us a ride in one of their driverless cars. We’re grateful for the students in our classes who served as sounding boards for many of the ideas that made it into this book, and even more that didn’t make the cut.

We are particularly grateful to our Digital Frontier team, a self-selecting group of people who are interested in the same things we are, and who get together periodically to generate, share, and refine ideas, a lot of which made their way into this book. Matt Beane, Greg Gimpel, Shan Huang, Heekyung Kim, Tod Loofbourrow, Frank MacCrory, Max Novendstern, JooHee Oh, Shachar Reichman, Guillaume Saint Jacques, Michael Schrage, Dipak Shetty, Gabriel Unger, and George Westerman helped us explore the digital frontier. Matt and Dipak went above and beyond the call by helping us with many of the graphs that appear here, as did Gabriel, George, Greg, Michael, and Tod by giving us detailed comments on the manuscript. Max put in countless hours under tight deadline checking facts. Meghan Hennessey managed Erik’s increasingly crowded work schedule, while Martha Pavlakis’s strength, courage, and grace as she battled and defeated cancer reminded him what really matters in life. Esther Simmons kept Andy on track and on time, his family kept him sane, and Tatiana Lingos-Webb constantly gave him reasons to smile (which is no small task at times).

Finally, our colleagues at the MIT Center for Digital Business and Initiative on the Digital Economy deserve more thanks than we can articulate. Tammy Buzzell and Justin Lockenwitz keep the place running like clockwork, and executive director David Verrill continues to astound us with everything he does and how easy he makes it all look. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: no matter what skills and abilities technology ever acquires, it won’t come anywhere near him.

NOTES

Chapter 1
THE BIG STORIES

1. Ian Morris,
Why the West Rules
—
For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 73.

2. Ibid., p. 74.

3. Ibid., p. 71.

4. Ibid., p. 112.

5. Karl Jaspers,
The Origin and Goal of History. Translated From the German by Michael Bullock
(London: Routledge K. Paul, 1953), p. 51.

6. “Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents,” 2007, http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html/.

7. Anne Rooney,
The History of Mathematics
(New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2012), p. 18.

8. Morris,
Why the West Rules
—
For Now
, p. 142.

9. Louis C. Hunter and Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation,
A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930: Steam Power
(Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 601–30.

10. Morris,
Why the West Rules
—
For Now
, p. 497.

11. Ibid., p. 492.

12. Martin L. Weitzman, “Recombinant Growth,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
113, no. 2 (1998): 331–60.

13. Bjørn Lomborg,
The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 165.

Chapter 2
THE SKILLS OF THE NEW MACHINES

1. Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane,
The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

2. Michael Polanyi,
The Tacit Dimension
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 4.

3. Joseph Hooper, “DARPA’s Debacle in the Desert,”
Popular Science
, June 4, 2004, http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-06/darpa-grand-challenge-2004darpas-debacle-desert.

4. Mary Beth Griggs, “4 Questions About Google’s Self-Driving Car Crash,”
Popular Mechanics
, August 11, 2011, http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/indus try/4-questions-about-googles-self-driving-car-crash; John Markoff, “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic,”
New York Times
, October 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html.

5. Ernest Hemingway,
The Sun Also Rises
(New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 72.

6. Levy and Murnane,
The New Division of Labor
, p. 29.

7. “Siri Is Actually Incredibly Useful Now,”
Gizmodo
, accessed August 4, 2013, http://gizmodo.com/5917461/siri-is-better-now.

8. Ibid.

9. “Minneapolis Street Test: Google Gets a B+, Apple’s Siri Gets a D - Apple 2.0 -Fortune Tech,”
CNNMoney
, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/29/minneapolis-street-test-google-gets-a-b-apples-siri-gets-a-d/ (accessed June 23, 2013).

10. Ning Xiang and Rendell Torres, “Architectural Acoustics and Signal Processing in Acoustics: Topical Meeting on Spatial and Binaural Evaluation of Performing Arts Spaces I: Measurement Techniques and Binaural and Interaural Modeling,” 2004, http://scita tion.aip.org/getpdf/servlet/GetPDFServlet?filetype=pdf&id=JASMAN000116000004.

11. As quoted in John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,”
New York Times
, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

12. “Spring Cleaning for Some of Our APIs,”
The Official Google Code Blog
, June 3, 2011, http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-some-of-our-apis.html.

13. Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(New York: Random House, 2007), p. 54.

14. Personal communication with Sara Buda, Lionbridge Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Development, September 2011.

15. “Top 10 TV Ratings / Top 10 TV Shows / Nielsen,”
Evernote
, August 18, 2012, https://www.evernote.com/shard/s13/sh/a4480367-9414-4246-bba4-d588d60e64ce/bb3f 380315cd10deef79e33a88e56602 (accessed June 23, 2013).

16. “Meet Watson, the Jeopardy!-Playing Computer,”
TV.com
, December 1, 2004, http://www.tv.com/news/meet-watson-the-jeopardy-playing-computer-25144/.

17. “What’s The Most Money Won On Jeopardy?,”
Celebrity Net Worth
, May 20, 2010, http://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/whats-the-most-money-won-o/.

18. Stephen Baker,
Final Jeopardy: Man Vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 19.

19. “IBM and ‘Jeopardy!’ Relive History With Encore Presentation of ‘Jeopardy!’,”
Did You Know . . .
, 2013, http://www.jeopardy.com/showguide/abouttheshow/showhistory/.

20. All Watson and human performance statistics from Willy Shih, “Building Watson: Not So Elementary, My Dear!” Harvard Business School Case 612-017, September 2011 (revised July 2012), http://hbr.org/product/building-watson-not-so-elementary-my-dear/an/612017-PDF-ENG.

21. Authors’ personal research.

22. Ken Jennings, “My Puny Human Brain,”
Slate
, February 16, 2011, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/02/my_puny_human_brain.single.html.

23. Isaac Asimov, “The Vocabulary of Science Fiction,” in
Asimov on Science Fiction
(New York, Doubleday, 1981), p. 69.

24. “The Robot Panic of the Great Depression,”
Slate
, November 29, 2011, http://www.slate.com/slideshows/technology/the-robot-panic-of-the-great-depression.html (accessed June 23, 2013).

25. “Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots,”
Open Culture
, October 31, 2012, http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/isaac_asimov_explains_his_three_laws_of_robotics.html (accessed June 23, 2013).

26. Brian Lam, “Honda ASIMO vs. Slippery Stairs,” December 11, 2006, http://giz modo.com/220771/honda-asimo-vs-slippery-stairs?op=showcustomobject&pos tId=220771&item=0.

27. Hans Moravec,
Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 15.

28. “Moravec’s Paradox,”
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
, April 28, 2013, http://en.wiki pedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moravecpercent27s_paradox&oldid=540679203.

29. Steven Pinker,
The Language Instinct
(New York: HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 2007), p. 190–91.

30. Christopher Drew, “For iRobot, the Future Is Getting Closer,”
New York Times
, March 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/technology/for-irobot-the-future-is-getting-closer.html.

31. Danielle Kucera, “Amazon Acquires Kiva Systems in Second-Biggest Takeover,”
Bloomberg
, March 19, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-19/amazon-acquires-kiva-systems-in-second-biggest-takeover.html (accessed June 23, 2013).

32. Marc DeVidts, “First Production Run of Double Has Sold Out!,” August 16, 2012, http://blog.doublerobotics.com/2012/8/16/welcome-double-update.

33. “DARPA Robotics Challenge,” n.d., http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge.aspx.

34. DARPA, “Broad Agency Announcement DARPA Robots Challenge Tactical Technology Office,” April 10, 2012, http://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=74d674ab011d5954c7a46b9c21597f30.

35. For instance,
Philips Vital Signs Camera
, n.d., http://www.vitalsignscamera.com/; Steve Casimiro, “2011 Best Outdoor iPhone Apps—Best Weather Apps,” n.d., http://www.adventure-journal.com/2011-best-outdoor-iphone-apps-%E2%80%94-best-weather-apps/;
iSeismometer
, n.d., https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iseismometer/id304190739?mt=8.

36. “SoLoMo,”
Schott’s Vocab Blog
, http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/solomo/ (accessed June 23, 2013).

37. “SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator,” accessed September 14, 2013, http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/.