Smart people are gathered we are having conversations about things that are not necessarily being discussed so broadly everywhere else. The issue here is the threat that progress poses to employment, to work, and to labor, and how we should think about those things. Weve got divide a panel with us quite a panel with us today. On your right is andrew mcafee, he is a Principal Research scientist at mit and he studies how Digital Technologies are changing business, the economy and society. He is the cofounder on the Digital Economy at mit and coauthor of a great book, the second machine age work progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. Arty sorenson is the president and chief executive officer of h marriott international. Lauren is a professor and director at the university of business. She is on the Global Agenda Council on gender parity. Another is the chief executive officer and managing director and a director general of the International Labor organization. Welcome to all of you. Thank you for being with us. The question i put out there to my panelists, as i tried to hijack what the section was about, is innovation and technology are having great leaps in productivity, but far less energy is being devoted to solving the problems of those who are displaced. Im going to start with you laura. There are very few people who tell me thats wrong, that we are not devoting enough energy to people who are displaced. I get similar responses whenever i am, how are we supposed to think about this . Is this something that just fixes itself . Iflt first of all, i want to say that you talked about your concerns about the title of this. So the promise of progress as a threat, i would talk about it as the sharing of progress because one of the key points, i think, in andrews book with eric is i think that we can be optimistic that the technology is going to create a huge what they call bounty, a huge efficiency gains for the world. How are they shared . That is a huge issue because there is the dislocation effect which is very real. Its not new. Its really not new. There has been a declining middleclass and middle income jobs and midlevel jobs in the u. S. For 30 years. It has been driven largely by technology. There have been good jobs with complimentary high skills, College Educated workers, phds, ma, getting jobs that are complimentary to the technology, but at the same time the technology at an increasing pace is taking out the medal. There are 47 of the tax or 47 of the jobs, that the paciftasks that people do can be done with the technology that we have right now. So, yes, there is significant dislocation, retraining and education is part of it but it can at the end of the day be the whole solution because the technology is taking out those jobs and not going to replace them with others. There are things like minimum wage support, collective bargaining. Who is going to bargain for the shares . How are you going to divide up those shares . It will depend upon workers having a voice in this. Tax policy in longer term, basic income or negative income tax approach will be retired these are the kinds of ideas to talk about, what we should be doing about this. I dont know where i was reading in my study for this, but fox con, they assemble ipads, they have 10,000 robots at the moment doing things that humans were doing. By next year i believe they will have 300,000 robots and in three years one million robots doing assembling. We have one in our booth serving beer tonight there you go. I would have thought serving beer was safe. The german way the point is, and we will get to this if thats not progress, nothing is thats right. So i guess my issue is when laura talks about minimum wage and in the u. S. Theres a big Movement Toward a 15 minimum wage. The president has embraced 10 and people are saying 15. If we are outsourcing jobs because we want to pay 15 to people, if youre outsourcing jobs to computers and fox com laying off pesant workers, what hope is there . Simple. It lies in people becoming more creative, going over the construction of these kinds of intelligent systems. How to enable that is education lets talk about that. Laura you mentioned retraining. At any given time in most modern western markets in the u. S. Theres a certain amount of churn, there is always jobs available. Since the Great Recession we have had far more people available than jobs. So if you retrain them all to be software engineers, every manufacturing worker in the u. S. , we still dont employ them automatic. So what degree is about educating people for this, and to what degree is there something elsewhere we are eliminating jobs faster than we can create the capital to create new work . I think the first point is were starting from the back place. Very helpful in the debate. Were starting in a sluggish Global Economy with very high levels of unemployment already and the trends going in the wrong direction still. Ive spent a lot of my time railing against technodeterminism. The point is the following, and i like the title of the panel, because i think progress is not to be measured in technical advance or innovation. It is to be measured by what we make of the application of that advance and that application. I think theres one fundamental question where the jury is out, or at least very contrasting opinions. If we are going around this carosel for the second or fourth time, lets look at the lessons of previous. Optimists will say we all know after a period of turbulence, which people did very well or badly in managing, we came out ahead in terms of Better Living standards, distributive mechanisms and jobs andrew, something i read earlier about how technology is destroying jobs, an article from 2013 by davd rockman where he is talking about yours and or erics works, about technology destroying jobs, then productivity increasing and creating jobs and there has been the cycle that since the year 2000 seems to have stopped. So we continue to be more productive as an economy, we continue to grow. To the earlier point corporate profitablity tends to increase yet we dont see substantial labor increases, or job increases, we dont see wage increases at the same time. Some say it is just cyclical it will be object if you line everyone up from poorest to richest and look at how much their incomes and livelihoods have improved over the last generation, you would notice amazing increases for almost everybody all across that spectrum and that picture would have one big divot in it, where they saw it decrease over the past 20 years. That would be right in the middleclass of the rich world. So switzerland, america, germany, u. K. The classic middleclass of those countries is where we have seen the skrobs going away and incomes under threat. Why is that . Jobs going away. My explanation for it, there are a couple of factors. One is technology and my explanation for it is we have technologies that are really, really good at doing routine doing routine now. Routine physical and knowledge work. Those technologies are rapidly Getting Better at work that we used to think of as a little bit less routine at recognising patterns, understanding human speech and responding to it. My point is that those routine jobs, jobs doing that kind of routine work, they are not coming back. Strengthening the Labor Movement will not bring them back. Raising the minimum wage will not bring it back. Entrepreneurship will not bring them back because the companies the entrepreneurs are starting up today are not employing people to do routine knowledge process work. That is better off automated. Unfortunately our educational systems, again in the most rich countries of the world, is doing a good job of providing people to do routine work. We need to change all this. The only Live National news show at 11 00 eastern. We start with breaking news. Lets take a closer look. I want to go back to laura because youve been in government and academia. Im covering the u. S. President ial election. Im in every debate and i have to tell you, were not having this level of sophistication. Were having other discussions but not these. What should the public start to expect of policy makers just to show that they even understand it. I dont think anyone is saying theres one proscriptive here. Weve talked about tax and wagess. Talk to me with these things i agree with you on the general tenor of the political discussion in the u. S. , but i will say that these issues are being touched upon. So, for example, in the area of should Community College be free and what should it be about and how do we link the Community College training to the relevant needs of both the individual getting the training and potentially their employer or their entrepreneurial enter or what can be the role of tax and policy in encouraging the development of accelerators. There are is working going on politically at the u. S. At the level of state and local governments doing this. It might be not front and center of the Political National president ial debate right now. The big debate around Technology Optimists and pessimists is about the fact that historically speaking the big revolution everybody refers to is the Industrial Revolution, enhanced productivity which created more goods and services and that created employment. The thing about the Industrial Revolution was for reasons of policy and technology and people like henry ford, the benefits, the income generated by the revolution was widely shared. That led to growing demand of the middleclass, of those who are the major engines of consumption and that led to the demand for new goods and services that employed people. Here is the problem. One of the things we can see, its most developed and clear in the developed countries is that the productivity gains are not theying up in the incomes of the average or median workers showing up in the incomes. Theyre showing up in that very small slifr of the population sliver of the population who are enhanced by the technology. As the Technology Takes out jobs, it takes out income. Where does the demand for future goods and Services Come from if the income of the consuming class is not growing commensurate with productivity but actually significantly slower than productivity. Laura has identified some good issues. There is a deeper issue going on with the dynamics that she talks about. At least in the states. Access to really good education and all the benefits that come with that is increasingly becoming the preserve of the upper middleclass and above. The top 20 25 of the population. When you look at the high technical entrepreneurs, they come disproportionately from that part of the population. Is it because nobody from 75 on down has a Good Business idea . Thats ludicrous. Of course thats not the case. One reason we should all be concerned about this is we are turning our backs on ridiculously large amounts of human capital, if were excluding them from the process of gaining skills to be able to launch themselves to make our worlds better you experience this, your income gap in india is substantially bigger than it is in the united states. How do Companies Like yours, Major Indian Companies that led to the employment and increase in incomes for working indians, deal with the idea that you might be putting them back out on the street now were not. I think that the progress of technology does create much more opportunity and we can look back to the Industrial Revolution and we continually see this. I think were threatened because we see more and more of the Technology Oriented jobs start to go away. In reality i think as mentioned, if you look back on the opportunities that are created, the profits that we are talking about, yes, it is true the profits are high, but those same profits are right for disruption to new ideas as they have ever been. Can we educate the people. We used to have a society in the u. S. Or anywhere else in the world that was dominated by agriculture. This is not the case any more. I think in the u. S. Many years ago many were involved in farming but now it is 3 . Do we prepare the world for the way is to be or what it used to be what we have been talking about speaks directly to the work you do with respect to labor i would take a much less sanguine view. This narrative that weve done pretty well havent we for labor and jobs. No. We havent. We have not. Weve seen a step back from political commitment to full employment. Weve seen the growth of very high levels of unemployment and low quality employment. Weve seen something which has only been alluded to indirectly, extraordinary growth of inequality, hardening into exclusion. If access to education, you know, the people are moving and shifting coming from the higher echelons of the social ladder this is not an accident. It is a hardening of exclusion. We should not be too sanguineb about where we have come from and where we are going. I do have that concern that in the new ways that work could be mediated by technology, some of knows existing institutions are not going to work as well as they used to. If that Employment Relationship becomes less and less the generalised form, how do we deliver social inclusion and health care, questions which we have not yet quite really got to at this point. I want to start taking questions from the audience of the right over there in the be that as it may. Australian productivity commission. Im enjoying this conversation and its useful. Were worrying about these kinds of things too. Something that nobody has mentioned which were talking about education and upskilling people, but when we come to the idea of sharing jobs, so if theres only so much work to go around how does that get shared, and what we see in the world is a smuler number of people smaller number of people working longer hours, and the women are working but both parties are more parttime than before. Theres two things. One is how to we get that sharing of jobs out there if we educate people so theyre capable of doing them and secondly, shouldnt we be focusing on educating people to make better use of their leisure time to make really good productive socially enhancing of their leisure time and why arent we talk about that . Im sceptical, and this is about how people spend their time. The notion that somehow the overwhelming majority of humanity that is not entrepreneurial will become entrepreneurial. I just dont see it. I dont see that people have the same extent of risk taking, of creativity, the wanting to design their life around innovation. Most people actually historically speaking have preferred being part of communities or organizations which provide benefits and security and some sense of community. Im a little sceptical. I think we should do everything we can to educate entrepreneurs, but i think at the end of the day, and this goes to your point about what people do with their excess time. You wrote about this. In the u. S. We have a group we can actually observe what happened in the u. S. High school drop outs, particularly men, what has happened to them over the last 35 years. Their health has gone to hell because they do not find meaningful productive depression is up, suicide is up. Mortality is up. It is not a simple solution. Here is the technology that might empower you, but to get from here to a Meaningful Life is, im afraid, not going to be through an entrepreneurial venture. I will just jump in and make a defense of jobs that we take for granted. Maybe this wont be surprising for somebody in the hotel business, but we talk about service jobs, we talk about hospitality jobs as if they dont bring with them dignity. Thats just wrong. It sort of gets to your point which is not everybody is going to be mark zchlt uckerberg zuckerberg. You need to achieve that or you should be playing golf, then were in a bizarre land. We have jobs in our business, where you think about society, were going to be taking care of our elderly in increasing numbers, they should be filled with dignity, some might be not working fulltime. How do you policies to contribute caring of the elderly, they are noble jobs and they dont pay much. Thats where minimum wage is you have to address the problem hopefully you get employers who i think one of the advantages of our company is we have a longterm focus and so we say lets build careers for people. Some people will grow into fanser jobs, some will just get years in the same job. I dont disagree with it. It is my point is that it is not a consequence of effect of what were seeing today. We are similarly living in times today where the act of writing software, the act of creating a company is viewed as this extremely exotic, on the cover of time magazine. It doesnt have to be the case. Each one of us can think of things that solve problems around us and create a world that has a solution as a result of it. Therefore, getting a meaningful and gainful employment. It is not that we all become extraordinary entrepreneurs and so forth, but there is no doubt in my mind, an Design Thinking is one of these techniques of teaching people how to be systematically creative. We need to find problems and apply our intellect and solve those. I want to pick up on what was said about work sharing, job sharing. The biggest promise of progress and Technological Progress over the years has been the productivity and Living Standard increases it permitted, frees people from excessive working hours. Weve gone from 60, to 50 and 40 oond some have gone beneath. That Conveyor Belt of progress seems to be broken today. Why does france get the reactions it does on the 35 hour a week, globalisation, Competitive Pressure puts a stop to that Conveyor Belt to progress. Thats the first thing. The second thing to think about, technology i think is blurring the distinction and definitio