Support Edward Snowden and chelsea madden, private manning and to remember that lineage that atm with the Citizens Commission to investigate the f. Era. Thank you very much. Thank you. [applause] for people in the back. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible] so is conviction that the fbi office was worth breaking into mustve been based on more than just antipathy for the fbi. Id like to know what does he know about the fbi the email of, which convinced him to take this rather drastic action. I can answer that question. We talked about it quite a bit. He had no file on the fbi, but what he had was a strong perception that turned out to beetroot. He thought that Jay Edgar Hoover was a consummate bureaucrat and i saturate keep greatly detailed files on everything, including documents about how to deal dissent. He didnt have any idea that dirty tricks that would involve in dealing with such a thing. But he thought the jay crew affair would require the meticulous records to be kept up everything. He also is a rightwing ideologue and when you combine those two things that was the very day combination. He had no ideas what would be found, just that it was true. Yes. The mac there was other fbi offices locally. One question is why media. My second question is over the five years, did the fbi ever get close to any of the way you couldnt do the downtown philadelphia. It is used 24 hours a day. We did chase the philadelphia fbi office. Security was to type. At 10 plan del, why did you pick media over the other outlying philadelphia offices . I dont really know. When he tells the story come he describes going downtown monday for another purpose. Ill check out where the fbi is. Tall building, impossible, 24 hour security. And then sometimes later click in the suburban phonebook looking for a suburban phonebook, and fbi office in media when out and let them in some others went later decided, this may be doable. Yes, back here. Do you ever think it would be a movie click well, theres a documentary video i have a chance d. C. In late may at the constitution center. There are some people who have expressed interest in making a movie. The you have the chance to see the real. Yes, sir. First of all, excuse me im beginning to get a cold. Everything you said was very original. Thank you for your sacrifice. [applause] this is an ongoing struggle. We have to continue to do this. Im looking around the room and im happy to clu people here. But im not happy about is that a teeny young people here. [inaudible conversations] not that i am young, but thats besides the point. Two questions come if you have any plans . If not, will you help us if we organize plans to come speak to young people at schools where they hang out . Well, young people have not lost hope. I teach that age group at Temple University and i think there is a great yearning to begin to try to believe in the meaning of america again and the meaning of america is fairness in the last a lot of that. The heart has not been lost in this young folks. Theyve got a lot of heart and i think they are waiting for the right moment and that moment surely would have been because our country is in very bad shape right now. The inequality in massive use of money it takes away from the rest of us. Not only elections, but on the carpetbagging stuff that goes on in washington. The young people have given up on this country. I also think its more mature citizens now healthy young people connect, help them find ways to connect, to work is social media and every other good tool they have so theyre not feeling cynical and apathetic and alone in looking at the problems in our country. They can be empowered by connecting and we can try to make that possible. To the extent we are able to do speaking things, we are more interested in talking to young people and other geezers like us. We have a nice invitation from schools and universities. We have time for one more question. This is a logistical question for bombing. I am just picturing a sketch of you. I havent read the book yet. Its probably answered in the book, but who true that . Why did they draw . Did they draw sketches of everyone that came in . Well, in the introduction of us back here where i couldnt hear everything that was being said, but he described in the book that my role in preparing for the burglary was to go with at the office. Therefore my faith was that or the fact they realized they had been cased by my faith. I did try to disguise my parents as much as they could. I never took my gloves off the whole time i was taking note in my notebook when i was interviewing the men in the office. It was a pretty crummy sketch and it didnt want very much like i looked on a daytoday basis. They thought of her immediately. The woman is jed cooper would often refer to, the woman who came into the office. Shes right here. [laughter] but there were so many young woman who are activists at that time. I couldve been just any one of 529yearold women in philadelphia. Some of those people suffered abuse at the hands of the fbi because they they were. Very frightening. Having your door broken down and not ernestine. I would like to thank you very much and id also just like to say given everything we now know about the impact of what they did, we have here people who have told off one of the most powerful nonviolent act of resistance in the country. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations] next, the Technological Advancement is taken over our lives and our economy suggests ways to harvard visiting space to benefit society. The conversation is about an hour. Good evening and welcome to todays meeting at the Commonwealth Club of california. The place where youre in the know. You can find the Commonwealth Club on the internet at the Commonwealth Club. Org. An entry minored from salon. Com, your moderator for this evenings program. To my left is aronberg alston and aaron mcafee who are business researchers at the m. I. T. School of management. Eric is the director of the m. I. T. Center for business and andrew is the Principal Research scientist. The two men made a name for themselves a couple years ago with their self published book, race against the machine, which kind of coalesce some emerging nervousness about the fact automation is beginning to place jobs at higher and higher levels. I followed this up with a bigger book, the second machine age work, progress and prosperity in a time of technology. And its really i think everybody in this room will understand how timely this is in the greater area theres a lot of tension about how the economy is changing everybodys lives and where we are headed from there. The age directly tackles both the promise of technology and some potential challenges it poses. I think both would like to start for questions, giving a brief summary of their views on what is the second machine age all about . When i heard things affected machine age got started from some confusion that those indian eye hand about what was going on in the world. On one hand, innovation has never been faster. On the other you that people are more pessimistic about features and childrens futures and reflects two different groups of people, two different tribes indian i interact with regularly. On one hand, technologists are observing in creating wondrous new things, self driving cars and machines you can talk to another amazing to know that shes been there almost infectiously optimistic about the potential of these technologies transform the world. We also spent a lot of time interacting with economists understood reason theyre called the dismal land. I just came from a meeting in america and i was on a panel there were three other economists and they were pointing out some pretty good statistic. As you may know, Median Income of the 50th percentile in america is lower now than it was in the 1990s and employment of course has been struggling as well. The employment population ratio has commented. While some of the unemployment numbers are better recently, that drops out of the labor force. Not new jobs being created. We were puzzled because he wanted to see how companies to groups of these different areas, is one right and when the strong quake how could these be simultaneously apparent . If you look deeper, and is true there are really impressive numbers that match up with the optimism of the technologists. Overall votes in the u. S. Economy hit a record high. This is an trillion dollars were at record levels of productivity. Gdp is at record levels. Profits at record levels. All the numbers are growing quite deeply. The other statistics about Median Income and unemployment are also exactly accurate and ultimately us were working on this book, we came to the conclusion that its possible for both he seems to be happening simultaneously. It reflects the fact that technology does growth economic pie. It does create more wealth. However, theres a dirty secret of economics and that is there simply no economic law that says everyone is going to benefit easily from technological advances. Its possible to remain a relatively worse outcome of the worse off in absolute terms. In the first machine age, it was people like manufacturers are pretty introduction of the automobile. Today it could be a much larger group of people. Tens of millions of people even potentially majority of people having a harder time making a living than they did before and enters and in the nature of these causes and consequences in the Central Technology and driving the bounty and the spreading out of outcomes is for we read a book about them trying to understand the implications for individuals, corporations and society is over hoping to refocus on. Erik i have spent her whole career working on tape augean economics of doing research there. We wrote this book as they got confused about both the economics and technology. Erik describes the economic paradox going on. When they talk about the technology confusion going on. Its basically that Technology Digital technology has started doing things that theyre not supposed to be able to do. The book premise for me started in the fall of 2010 when i have her breakfast open up my computer or browsing the New York Times website and came across a story about the factor google no one had been driving cars. The company developed Autonomous Cars that had at that point written thousands of miles on american roads and traffic with no mishaps. I spit out my coffee at this point because he really wants bush to be able to do that. Theres a wonderful book with six years earlier, 2004 that eric and i read in the book may be convincing, strong argument why computers were never going to be able to drive cars and he was basically because the pattern matching, processing to do that well is pretty easy for us in our brains, prohibitively difficult for computers. Erik i read the book 2004. Six years later they are already driving cars. You see similar with a tap in a bunch of other really difficult problems that have a tablet Computer Scientist and her bodice is another peep will. Its going to be really, really easy. Everyone, point to adore in this room. This is a smart crowd. Its an even weirder question. Point to where you are in this room. Some call it is. Theyre both correct answers. My point is you have just solved one of the funniest challenges in robotics. Its called simultaneous localization and mapping. What does this room like clay . Where the doors and where mainstream. We are really good at that. The problem has basically prohibited progress in robotics. But a robot in the room and asked him where he is im sorry, he or she is and where the door is and what shenanigans take place. As recently as 2008 there was richer that said weve made no progress in slam in her will be it is today hard to do. Last year colleague of ours, john leonard saw a room about the size by waving a microsoft connect around. It was a 150 piece of consumer electronics. Eric and i saw enough examples like that without what is going on here can lead us to talk to a lot of the nerves on the economic side and ella decided that eventually led to this book. The first question one would want answered is how and why this happened. We are working just north of where all these things give me the things that are going to change the world. Artificial intelligence in these promises are regularly not delivered on and now in the last three or four years, something seems to have changed. Work . Of your threepart answer that question because that is what dentists into the field. Our answer to that takes up the first third of the book. Youre going to have to do it in a couple minutes. It is a threepart answer. The first part is relentless Computing Power that most of us know of as morris ball. Its really easy to underestimate what happens when this exponential improvement has been going on long enough. Sometimes the difference in korea really is a difference in time. We think we are at that point on the smartphone that most of us, probably all of us carry around is literally the supercomputer of a generation ago. You have enough horsepower to do some extraordinarily difficult things. Part 2 is are probably all tired of the phrase, the big data. This ocean of Digital Information we are swimming in. Its not orders of magnitude different in five or 10 years ago. It is thousands, millions, billions of times greater than five or 10 years ago. The reason not to miss important data is the lifeblood of science if you want to get smarter about a realworld problem, you need scads of data. Finally, the third part of our threepart answer is the real innovation, coming up with something that was not the process of a longer recut. Its recombining elden fox already out there. An internal Combustion Engine plus a gps system plus a bunch of processing power. Google invented none of those things. They just recombined the Building Blocks that were argued there in my world has so many more Building Blocks now than it did even a short time ago thats giving us this wave of innovation. The shorthand answer, and are to question is exponential, digital, and a tory. I have one question appears so far, which i think touches a little upon not. What do the stagnation in and of innovation not recognize when their face or back . The great stagnation in which the argument kind of reach this plateau. Youre painting a quite different picture. Tethers a super smart guy. We owe him a debt because he really inspired us to work on that for us both, race against the machine, when we read his vote because he was arguing that come out of innovation and there was no market things left to invent. Hanging on places like the m. I. T. Lab in Silicon Valley come without that can possibly true. Looking at the same economy we look at what the question we have. On the other hand, yet compelling data about this detonation of Median Income in that forced us to think hard about how this could be happening. Thats where he came out with this recognition that just because Median Income is stagnating, that doesnt mean innovation is that meeting. Paradoxically, if innovation speeds up, that can lead to a lot of people falling behind if theyre not keeping up with their skills for the organizations are not keeping up and mr. Manic rear of innovation of the economy can be innovation and Wealth Creation and lead to income. Its a fundamentally different world view than wayside, then he had, which is the innovations. We dont think of them is lowhanging fruit. Thats a metaphoric uses that as he says we plucked most of the lowhanging fruit and as he plucked lowhanging fruit comments harder and harder to get the renovations. Advantages explained, innovations dont use it that way. In fact, each innovation creates Building Blocks for additional innovation, the google self driving car were really trivial, the illustrated example as i had it to an undergraduate student and he wrote this little app in a few weeks and if you meant later there were 1. 3 million users using it. He didnt do any brilliant breakthroughs, but the reason it was able to scale to rapidly was because he built on top of facebook. Facebook was built on top of the World Wide Web and the web is built on the internet, built on networking, on and on. Each of those innovations to make it harder or somebody has to make a subsequent innovation. They made it easier for someone to make innovation. The lowhanging fruit metaphor is the wrong one for the nature of innovation were lucky it is because that means we are to be more Building Blocks for Additional Information of more potential for additional growth. I just rippled through a bunch of questions towards the second part of your book. Before we break into the specifics, we need to grapple without more generally, which is that its going that doesnt appear to be distributed equally. If we can get to the root causes of that and like to know what to do about it. What i might touch on that one as well . A good example of what is going on in a conversation i overheard about the same time and he was steadiness coffee out after reading the self driving car, i was on a plane and the person from he was talking on a cell phone too loudly so i couldnt help overhear what he was. He said i used turbotax. Faster, easier, cheaper and it is things more accurately. He was right actually. Turbotax does your taxes very accurately. It took a process they used to be done by humans and codified at and digitized it. Once it digitized that come you could make a copy of that. You could make 10 copies come 100 million copies. Each of those copies is identical to the original. It can be reproduced at virtually zero cost and transmitted anywhere in the world through the internet almost instantaneously. This is a good that is free, perfect 10 instead. Those are three characteristics we have had from Muscat Services in the past. They lead to some unusual economics. In particular, winner take all market. While each new neighborhood or town might have a tax preparer that could serve as to them, with a tax preparation program, you dont want to have the secondbest program. You want the best one available. Those markets tend to concentrate to one or maybe a handful of programs or winners in those markets. As a consequence, the revenue centipede much, much more concentrated. It doesnt require a lot of people to make copies once the basic algorithms have been written. You end up with some winners and some losers. One is a small group of winners. The people who create the command developers of turbotax. Some of them are billionaires, many of them millionaires. Another large group we should forget, which is consumers. People have access amazingly cheap Accurate Software in this category that they didnt have before and can solve the problem more efficiently than they could before. But theres also people who were made absolutely worse off. A lot of people wasted time and effort in how to do that profession, went to college to do that and now in an economy where you compete against a 39 piece of software from a human taxpayer does not as much value in it not a coincidence there were 17 fewer tax preparers then there were a couple years ago and the wages are under pressure. What i just described for turbotax is a microcosm of what is happening in lots of lots of other industries. We see an obvious Software Companies that come in media, manufacturing, retailing, finance and the software is more and more of the world to mark invasiveness digitization becomes the court, more and more industries see this economics affect more society. Andrew, i love that example because it illustrates the two main economic consequence is that its in the middle third of our book on trying to elaborate. The first one is the good news. If the bounty. Maura, better stuff. Two different flavors of the bounty here. One is through his the invaders, the people that came up with turbotax. The other one, the bigger category is all of us who have access for higherquality cheaper tax preparation. Its critically important and that is really good news hit the bad news is spread. Whenever i talk about the book i invented an incredibly dorky dance move. Instead of having an economy we were pretty tight because there thanks to phenomenon like this, we are going like this. Weve got a small group of people who know how to harness digital power. Their income goes way, way up. The bottom is Holding Steady or gradually slipping behind. Thats the spread. Thats the challenge phase in our poll should be of the keep the bounty going while minimizing the negative effects of the spread. What about the standard kind of economic theory that we hear this automation may be occurring in some sectors that increase product to the overall another sectors will pick up the slack and get job growth to make up for that. All that follows through the beginning, why is that broken . For 200 years, People Like Us have been named the age of tech logical unemployment is not. It darted about 200 years ago was smashing with britain, definitely during the industrial revolution. John maynard keynes, an intellectual hero of both of the sediment and 30 tech unemployment is at hand. The question is exactly right. Knowing the history of the historical pattern should, lot is at times utterly different products is the area finally here . The answer is its too early to tell, but the data are not encouraging. There are good reasons to take this time really is different. For all of human history, if you want reported, you have to love a person not work. Not anymore. If you wanted to listen to a person, under what they wanted, financing and spits back to them come you had to involve human being and not work. Not anymore. We can go on and on. I guess it is used, drive a vehicle, answer telephone. Any of the things weve always needed people for them. We dont anymore. The digital encroachment into human territory is brought, deep, fast and i think irreversible. To me that feels like this time is different. Matches the deck elegy. Economic statistics suggest Something Different is going on. As you pointed out, technology has already been creating jobs and theyre so slow, turnover from one industry to another industry and for most of the past couple hundred years, both of them the first, both roughly in balance. If you look at the trends in product dignity, employment, and Median Income rose roughly interesting. Starting 15, 20 years ago companies started diverging. Productivity has continued to grow. Profits overall gdp has continued to grow. Median income has stagnated it back even at the way it did before. Employment has really stagnated as well. So theres something new going on in terms of the elegy in terms of economic statistics. The nature of the second machine age is that core of the difference. We dont think those two things are unrelated at all. What is going to happen to the working class . What are your views on organized labor, technological advances seem to weaken the power of the working class. Is the working class doomed economically . We dont think they are doomed, but we agreed the Bargaining Power has weekend and that reflects underlying fundamental economics that if a ceo or company can make you with robots or software machinery, its a lot harder for a working man or woman to bargain and say hey, give us our share of the revenue said the company. Give us higher wages or were going to go on strike. If they can say great come you come you guys going on strike and will replace you with robots. Hes the guy who produces or iphone over there. He says hes going to higher a million robots. Thats a pretty Severe Threat interns a realistic way. The Bargaining Power goes down at episcopate alternatives. Right now theres two credible alternatives. Workers in other countries thanks to motivation and the digital alternative, which is already pretty good and only getting better. Eric story about the robot shows these alternatives are appearing even in the lowest wage part of the world. To try to get back to the question, its way too early and we too defeated to take up the working class in america. We just dont want to walk away and say theres nothing to be done here, move on. The last third is about the intervention we think make sense in this area of astonishing Technological Progress. Welcome you can jump to not report knowledge skills or dispositions to young people need to succeed in the new machine economy . What can we do to increase educational skill level, to lead to more jobs . This is a much more specific question. Them is a little bit about that. Routine information passed have been especially hard hit over the past 10 years. It basically means following instructions, like a tax preparer we were talking about or travel agency. It turns out a big chunk of the American Economy is devoted to those stats. Careful research by my colleague david otter and others at m. I. T. Has found if you look at the skill content of all the occupations, the more routine Information Processing involved in the task, the more demand has declined among fewer jobs in the categories come at the more the wages under pressure. So if youre looking for a job to stay away from, it would be routine Information Processing. A job that requires the three hours we so they taught so much of an primary education. If you look at the way schools are structured, theyre very much set out to get people to sit quietly and rose and learn how to follow instructions carefully. That was a valuable skill in henry fords 20th century era where people had to work an Assembly Line and follow instructions and do something consistently. Going forward, those are the kinds of skills, the tasks that robots are good at, machines are good at. When machines are not particularly good at is creativity, and continue things come entrepreneurial insights or interpersonal relations relating to other people. We probably need to spend more time reinventing education to focus on that other skills. Creativity, interpersonal relations, motivating people, caring for other people rather than the skills that were dominated in the second machine age of following instructions. Ive one question pushing back on the emphasis of education. How does increasing educational level work or say to more jobs and job creation is driven by aggregate demand within the domestic economy . Are questions. If we could get it right, would that be futile . Absolutely not. The most common complaint we hear as i cannot find people with the skills i need. All of them down the ladder from a frontline employees up to the people at the very top of the company. I cant find skills they need, turning out people that are mismatched in the job market out there. Right now we can make our magic wand to fix education, we do a huge amount to help the unemployment and wage crisis. The second part of your question is the concept of aggregate demand, is an apocryphal story, but a really good story about henry for the second and martin luther, the head of the out of work or is. Ford is in a playful mood any jobs walter with this although it does how are you going to get those robots . About this in ibiza is a henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars . In other words, the large middle class we created in the postwar decade is economical engine of demand. They bought a lot of stuff, kept the economy growing. If we continue to polarize, thats the definition of the recession, recession and fortunately we all know its a nasty downward spiral downward demand. We dont want that to happen. The core of the question has a worldview or want to push back a little bit, which is either or. The recession cant be structural matters. In fact, its both. The paul krugman admires him or second room as far as i can tell. We be hearing about it by now. To run any bigger advocates for demand to stimulate the economy. Thats a Business Cycle issue right now. What we talk about is a more fundamental longterm structural issues and for that matter a standard which is pain, the structural issues can lead to the fundamental drop in demand we are seeing and we need to address both of them. You can run an economy with a very small group of the elite at the top of the whole map at the bottom. Its feasible. Its just a lousy society, smaller economy. Not where we want to go at all. They tend to be a quiet places. Just circle back to henry ford and the robot he did anticipate two questions here. One is whether given what we are seeing from longterm robot underdevelopment should these workers be required to pay Social Security taxes . And relatedly, henry ford knew he made at the lower class is too can and has products with increased wages. Do you think modern type aaronson has two controller system seeking similarly . Lets dive in a little bit deeper on that question. Theres been some great work done by others that led to what happened during the great depression, and even worse downturn that no one were suffering through. It turns out that cyberculture was recognized in tractors were introduced, their tens of millions of fewer farmworkers needed them e4. So absolutely, that kind of decline, structural change in employment led to a drop in aggregate demand, a downturn and thats because those workers couldnt instantly i knew work. Many of them had to physically geographically move. We heard about california and elsewhere and may have to be reskills for new kinds of the dvds than i could take years, even decades or more. One of our concern is that as people become rescaled and find new industries and discover new things do not produce discover those new things and talk about that a little later. By then the technology will evolve again because the syscon bank had to actively feel some really ongoing problems with not just structural employment, but aggregate demand. Viewpoint of the tech areas these days. Erik and i can report they are aware of the situation of the fact that technology is racing ahead and leaving a lot of people behind. One of the most Prominent Technology executives in the world today told us last week that he thinks this is the single most pressing issue that he and his industry and all of us are going to come onto my lifetime. I find that good news. They are not turning a blind eye to what is going on at all. Well, lets go brought and then get more specific. Which policies would you prescribe to mitigate inequality and increase employment without growth . This might not be too big of a problem here in northern california, but you cannot have that conversation in the United States of america because it is just no on the far out left fringe. It turns out that that idea was a cornerstone and has been advocated by other famous individuals and the weird bipartisan system to this idea. It really continues to play out along these trajectories it might be a need to talk about that. We like Milton Friedman when it comes to this. Lets encourage work, lets make sure that people are still working. For every dollar they earn, why dont we give them 20 cents and encourage them to keep working . We think in the system and the more far out future that the shifts of conversation, if we move too, we shift in this direction. Okay, we are at the halfway point. And this is the Commonwealth Club of California Program and were talking with eric wilson and Andrew Mcafee called the second machine age. The time of voting technology. I am your moderator and you can hear Commonwealth Club programs on the radio and also online on our youtube channel. Jumping off what you have just said with a couple of questions here, talking about basic guaranteed income and a response to this issue. And this is some of the talk that we had had about this. Let me build upon what andrew was saying. You can do a lot to divide us. But the thing that we focus on is like an income tax credit and we get the feeling that the reason for that and the distinction is part of this and both of them are ways of talking about some of the people that havent benefited as much from the technology. The we have been very convinced by voltaire, who actually said it work solves three great evils. And the point is that its not just about the need but also about a sense of meaning and other values into a be a little bit more scientific about it or it bob putnam, the great sociologist at harvard has provided some very convincing evidence that it doesnt just take money out but it also leaves a host of social evils like increased drug use and teenage pregnancy, the dissolution of the family. Increased crime rates. So its really damaging when people dont have a way to earn their livelihood. The earned income tax credit, we think that it will help with that problem by making it more economical for businesses to hire people and for people to continue to have gainful employment and to have sort of a way to contribute to Society Without us having a handout in some way, despite what was said and it will probably be a higher hurdle to get past. Eric and i became convinced of the three great evils. Neither is the one to a resolve. Especially thanks to Technological Progress. There are terribly difficult challenges and bob has talked with us a hunch about this. Hes done such careful work. Charles is another individual what they different political background and also looking at communities and what happens when work goes away and the stories that they tell and the data that they share is absolutely chilling. Divorce rates go way up. Children living in single homes go way up. Voting elections goes way down as this becomes the really troubled community and almost all the work that we have looked at says that the cause is very clear. These bad things follow. So we are terribly interested in Solutions Like the earned income tax credit that preserve the work for people. Its really important to do. Its too bad that the president is otherwise occupied with his state of union. Someone needs to give him a copy of this book. [laughter] this is one question. Would you include in the republican responses and giving us a list of things already. What do you think of the political will to act upon that . What we have witnessed for the last six years is a lot of dysfunction in moving forward in addressing these issues. And by your description these issues will become more fussy. It starts with the right diagnosis and understanding the issues because i think there are a lot of people who are angry and have a right to be angry. We see the tea party and we see the occupy wall street. They are all pointing fingers at different factors. But i think that they dont understand the powerful trends in the economy and they will come at the wrong prescriptions. But i think that ultimately these dont need to be left or right or republican or democrat or other kinds of local things. The policies and the ideas that we go forward should and could have widespread to or from lots of people. There are things that most people agree upon the government has a role in from education and infrastructure and let me relate about another category, which is that we can encourage more innovation and building new products and services with entrepreneurship and thats not because we think that everyone is going to be an entrepreneur. Its because entrepreneurs and i society are the people who are in charge of inventing new in this release and the new services that would people. If you go back and look at the first machine, which was the industrial revolution, people moving out of agriculture, 1. 9 of americans and now its 2 . These people can become unemployed. But there were people like henry ford and steve jobs and bill gates and others that invented an entirely new industries and redeployed those people and some new things for them to do. And we need to speed that process up and despite a lot of entrepreneurship that you care about, the data suggest that there is less new business creation in the past decade and i was in the 90s or the 80s. So we are not creating those new industries fasten off. Government has a role to speed that up. And for that matter to god about and slow it down and we need to make sure the we are making advances on all of those fronts. Education and tax policy and entrepreneurship. The president in the state of the union address, we have a chapter devoted towards shortterm recommendations and there are five really important areas in that chapter and this includes education, entrepreneurship, infrastructure, immigration, and basic research. No matter what you have with the topic 101, they will say that government has a clear role to play. Very little controversy about that. And this is not a time of great optimism, about getting things done in washington. We are very close to a comprehensive Immigration Reform bill. And it will be a great boost. Theres broad agreement on both sides of the aisle and the importance of increasing this. Theres a little bit of optimism about education and the two sides disagree upon what to do. But we agree that it is important. You add that up and ted williams got to the hall of fame. But to be fair there is a real problem in washington. And what we need is to change the conversation. Because the technologies are doing a great job advancing mat. But the realistic assessment is that politicians, for that matter, our Business Leaders are not keeping up with what the technology is demanding. That really sets up the size of the challenge. Because our ability to come up with policy responses to these kinds of problems is nowhere near as fast as the technology accelerating. And so at one point you quoted an earlier book about the lives of western civilization and make a mockery of everything that came before. In the second one is going to make mockery. But we are only at the cost of this and its going to go even faster. So the playbook of solutions is something that we have a hard time getting through in times where change is slow. Yes, that is why we think it is so urgent. One time we were bemoaning some of the slowness of the response of washington and a friend of mine said that the thing you have to remember is that washington doesnt we own these issues but ultimately they are followers. It is the bigger response than the people demanded that is important. So once we we start understanding these issues, that people are going to want to respond to it. So it starts with us changing the conversation and then we can expect some action in washington. You have the central challenge right. But technologists are doing astonishing work and continue to do amazing work. That is the one prediction about the future that i make with 100 confidence. The other is the elements of our society and our educational system and our political process. Some points are not currently geared up to change as quickly as technology does. So we have to address this with the other institutions. Let me emphasize that is these things get more misaligned and mismatched, we have problems. The answer is not to dampen down the technology or slowdown technology. But it is to speed up our response to it. If we dont do that there is going to be more and more pressure than those who want to stop the technology and we think that is a terrible outcome. With this theme, why are we writing questions like this on the homepage versus doing otherwise . [laughter] and we have a group of questions wondering where this ends. Do Quantum Computers that consciousness . Are there areas that humans will be able to hold off . And i see that we are just about out of time last night. One person says that computers cannot intuit something. Well, i think that is what they said before money ball came to baseball. They couldnt intuit what a good hitter he was. So i think we have learned to never say never. Because we sometimes play a game as we were writing the book and we went to a job or a task or an occupation and say heres an example of something we cant do. Then we run into someone at the media lab that was working on exactly that project. So it is making very Rapid Advances in areas where its happening more quickly and more slowly with interpersonal relations. And that matter, fine motor control and we dont have a lot of success. Theres a great video. Have you seen a . You have to watch it. Because if you watch it in real time it is like watching paint dry. The robot looks at us for a long time. It Takes Minutes to fold the towel. But again, this is part of. Yes, i had a chance to review this with my son and he built a snake that lunged at her hand. So its very interesting. Just come at the generation that will develop this. And to the area of fallout technological trajectory in progress is this idea of the singularity of this becoming intelligent were fully conscious that has been made part of this with smart proliferation. Eric and i go back and forth and i personally dont see that with what we are on right now. But i want to echo the mantra to never say never. In ultimately solves what we call her economic goblins would extreme poverty in the world. You dont have to be that wild eyed with the trends that were already on. You see that it can be eliminated in 20 years and that is something that we have always had with us and people have struggled with and we may be within sight of finally dealing with extreme poverty. That is because these technologies are creating so much bounty and wealth and the issue is going to be distribution and managing disruption associated with that. But in terms of material progress we are doing impressively. I want to say that he was my warmup act. He gave this knockout presentation. You have to go watch it about real potential. The likely trajectory to wipe out extreme poverty to echo eric, that is not independent from Technological Progress at all. Theres been beautiful Research Done that shows what happens in the poorest parts of the world when people give mobile phones for the first time. Their economic lives go on a completely different and better trajectory. Its critically important. 3d printers and the whole set of other technologies that seem to be Science Fiction from a few years ago of becoming a reality now. You think these technologies would be applicable to other pressing problems and what they help us deal with Energy Issues or reduced Global Carbon emissions are Greenhouse Gases . All of this stuff, the innovations. We were talking about a whole set of problems out there and we can only talk about one book at a time. But i do think that the Technological Capabilities show us that we will have more power to change the world and one of the ways we can do that is to address some of those fundamental needs and the case of global warming, i am somewhat optimistic that this can be a big help. There is a Research Scientist who has looked at the Energy Consumption of computers. And that is improving even faster then other laws are. So that gives me hope that we can do a lot to reduce our Energy Footprint as these technologies become pervasive area. Let me kick this up a level. I think thats exactly right. An economist named julian simon who never gets enough credit for his thinking. He was the anti, and some said you really dont understand what goes on here. We humans are good at solving our problems and they seem so dire and we find solutions to them. The reason that we should be more optimistic these days, and i mean this seriously, in the next two years we are going to the First Time Ever interconnect worlds population and we are going to have billions of people fully fledged from those who can talk with each other, access Computing Power to put their ideas into practice. This is the best news that we have going and im very confident that humanity can meet humanities challenge. When he said that its not just that people have access, its that they can contribute to bits. And this is a good sense. We can say thats when we talk about barry bonds. What you just said what the impact of some of these technologies in africa and asia raises a good question. How much of this problem with gross income inequality, will it go away once the rest of the world catches on . Is a great question. Look at the developing countries. If you look at the countries that have a rich developed country, the pattern is very similar. In 18 of the 22 other countries where we have data, inequality has been growing and its been growing in sweden, germany, france, japan. One of the exceptions is greece, but they have other things going on over there. Its not the model. [laughter] so they may start at Different Levels of inequality, but there is some pervasive worldwide trend going on. And that something more fundamental than that. Then you want to look at what is happening in china and that is where they are even more striking. Because we were looking at the issues with manufacturing and employment. People think of globalization and technology been two great forces affecting the economy. The idea of manufacturing this from the United States to china. It turns out