Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machines
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- As machines take on more jobs, many find themselves out of work or with raises indefinitely postponed. Is this the end of growth? No, says Erik Brynjolfsson -- it's simply the growing pains of a radically reorganized economy. A riveting case for why big innovations are ahead of us ... if we think of computers as our teammates. Be sure to watch the opposing viewpoint from Robert Gordon.
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He is a perfect AI Salesman.
This guy would do well as a politician, he spoke for just over 11 minutes without saying anything
Erik Brynjolfsson advise us to raise with the machines instead raising against it. Citing the superiority of artificial intelligence and its rapid advance in various fields, he concludes 'technology is not the destiny and we shape our destiny." A good, riveting, inspiring talk and highly recommended.
There are many problems with this talk. First, GDP in the US and other advances economies is growing (alongside productivity) largely because of financial services, and financial services are growing because of the huge explosion in liquidity (provided by the central banks) and debt. Needless to say, most financial transactions today, even if they appear as GDP component, do not have any meaningful impact on the economic situation of the average person. It's a great monopoly game which is played over our heads. Scrap finance, and you will see that most real economy sectors are stagnating and/or contracting. Secondly, many of the fabulous inventions he is talking about are still to come. Artificial intelligence, transhumanism, revolutionary energy sources have been theorised for decades, but there are still not there. Why? Because their sheer complexity makes them very difficult to achieve. Thirdly, the end of growth is already a reality. Data show that the real income of the median US family for the past decade is negative. Same or worse in Europe, Japan. Mature economies, despite all internet innovation and the like, are stagnating at best.
you make valid points. also, he states that music is better now. not true, although subjective, though definitely easier for musicians to produce music at lower costs and without studios than previous decades.
The main reason this speaker gets more thumbs ups than Robert Gordon is that this guy is telling people what they want to hear, not necessarily what they need to know. These speaker is the kind of salesman that should run for office since he is so good at telling what people want to hear. People vote for the best saleman, not the truth teller. Go figure why this is and why things never change....
I disagree - people want to hear pessimistic forecasts and are much more likely to perceive pessimistic forecasts and credible and unbiased. I think this is because people have an irrational tendency toward avoiding losses (they would much rather avoid a loss than gain the same amount - well documented in psychology - Google "loss aversion"). As a result, they want to hear the bad stories, because it might allow them to protect themselves against a loss.
Mark Nagelberg Thats true when it comes to reading the morning paper or watching the news reported, but that rarily applies to politics when someone considers who to vote for. Most people vote for what they perceive to be the greater of the two evils or the one that they think will cause less damage or loss to them...
I agree, this all seems almost optimistic, but it doesn't seem totally unlikely either. If you've got a different point of view, I'd love to hear it.
This is a very interesting presentation! Thank you! I particularly liked the point where you mentioned teams of humans and machines working together can yield better results. With that in mind, when you say "We shape our destiny", machines are also included in the "we". How can we, humans confirm that the machines think/ want/ feel the same way?? They're part of our team after all!
We're heading toward an economy that just doesn't need that many people for labor. Lowering the work hours will once again have to happen to adjust for increased productivity. Or perhaps a Guaranteed Basic Income. Our economic system will have to adapt to meet people's basic needs without being forced to have a job.
When computers can simulate how human thinks and do it faster, more accurate and more creative, why would computer want human to rise with them?
The correct answer I would think, is that human brain and computer will be integrated and there is no separation
correct, perceive a factory without people as an enormous appliance. it would simply pump out produce, become outdated, eventually break. people are needed to monitor and upgrade.
people now are needed for adaptability and ideas and not brute strength.
another good analogy would be machines = bones, humans = tissues.
My Systems&Automation techer used to say that machines don't steal our jobs, they free us to do non-repetitive tasks. The problem is that there are way less non-repetitive tasks that need doing then there are assembly line or cashier jobs. And with the population getting older and larger and unqualified, there will be an increasing gap. The only solution is an ethic restriction to machine employment. Or a complete change of our economical and political systems.
I believe this is why he states that ""We're going to need to reinvent our organizations and even our whole economic system." and speaks of employment being decoupled from productivity. Andrew McAfee(Erik's co-author) is quoted saying "In the long term, more is needed, possibly some radical moves. For example, instituting a minimum income." If this were to happen employment and meeting one's basic needs would not be connected.
Employment and production go hand in hand. If you don't see the connection between the two that's your problem. You seemed to miss the entire point of my post, when I said the workers in North America are asking to be paid more than what their jobs here are worth. Hence, the rising unemployment. Automation/robots and outsourcing the jobs would only be the logical choice since neither can ask for a raise or complain.
I never said that. Humanity would have to be brain dead to let the situation get so bad before we reacted and made changes. Exactly what those changes are, how bad things got before we reacted, and how long it would take to implement those changes effectively, I have no idea. All I know is we'd address the issue long before the scenario you mentioned came into being.
For one, he isn't saying that it's "fine the way it is". The occupy movement makes a stand against big business and a small part of the population having most of it's resources, which he didn't address with as much as a syllable. Still, while it's both generalizing and harsh to call the occupy movement "misunderstanding", there is a point to it. They are more interested in the status quo than in exploring this new world that is forming around us.
People dislike people who don't work because they have no way to gain income. People who just lay around not working and complaining that they have no money is just annoying. If people continue to drop out of the labor because they're tired of working, then the machines will easily take over.
I am a Control System/Automation engineer. We automated systems so that people would have more free time. The companies converted this into larger profits and people chose to push themselves harder because they want to purchase more consumer goods or have that extra mortgage. The price of most necessities like food and clothing are quite cheap and abundant in developed countries. It is the luxury goods that people are demanding like alcohol, computers, cable TV, smartphones, etc
Excelent point Loathomar. So I guess reducing work hours could be part of the solution, but developing usable skills is essential. Thanks for making me see that! :)
The crucial equation for any energy source is "energy returned on energy invested" (eroei) . None of the sources you mention gets anywhere near to oil, and the eroei on oil itself is declining quickly. Look up Nicole Foss.
Google makes commenting tough... But these two talks - This guy's and Robert Gordon's, are very important. Erik makes a key point about so much "free" product no longer being counted in GDP. Much valuable data and knowledge is now free. This is key. But Gordon's view that future growth is not likely to match last 100 years growth still stands as obvious problem. World growth will still likely return to the very long term trend line - ie. Less than 1 percent per year. Big danger looms.
The word "job" is obsolete for future society planning. Absolutely all problems are about energy production and machinized workforce.
My point is that we can automate and reduce the costs of most necessities as long as we find a solution to the energy issue. It is all about luxury goods now. We should reduce the costs of necessities and people should focus on developing luxury good, social/entertainment content and optimising public infrastructure like education and medical facilities. That is where I believe our future is.
Geothermal energy is quite a good one, and it is quite naive to think that unlimited sources could get anywhere near oil. We need to begin to create geothermal stations, solar pannels etc...to make a transition from oil to unlimited energy. And this is the real heart of the problem, how can we manage do this?
Everyone needs to read “The Curse of Machinery,” by Henry Hazlitt.
Machines took jobs but that just means we are free to do what we want as well as inventing new industries.
Yes, and right now they are a major problem for a lot of green energy like solar and wind, because unlike gas power, we can not control when we get the solar and wind, so we must store it, which is why batteries are one of the biggest hurdles for near future for green energy.
He says "technology does not shape our destiny, we shape our destiny." I question this. Each technological choice comes with its own UNINTENDED consequence(s) and those consequences ALSO shape our destiny. This is something that overly enthusiastic technological optimists always miss. Technology is changing us in ways we can not see yet and we need to think deeply about each technological step we take
I absolutely love TED, but when it comes to economic innovation the ideas that are shared are far from being the radical ideas we need this moment.
I hope to see more bold and world changing ideas in the field of economics, as it's the key factor in creating this messed up world we have come to accept.
Machines producing consumer goods year around means less production costs in the long run. With this in mind, people will be able to start working less and less (if every fulltime employee goes down from 40 to 30 hours a week, that would mean 25% higher demand for workers), while getting enough money to live a comfortable life. Prices will have to come down to a more reasonable level considering the manufacturing costs or both society and businesses will cave in on themselves.
The problem is that it is the express policy of every central bank on the planet to inflate the money supply sufficient to generate a ~2% 'increase' in prices annually, specifically to avoid prices falling. Prices (as a whole) CANNOT come down due to this policy. It is this more than anything which keeps the poor and middle class from benefiting from improvements in productivity. Meanwhile the proceeds from this policy primarily go to investment bankers and governments, by design.
I used to think the TVP was a good idea, and in many ways I still agree with it. However, removing money from society is not ideal. Money is the materialization of value; a way to reward people for doing something productive in a social context. Sure, there several things people would do simply because they enjoy it, but that's no basis for an economy. Money - a universal measure of value - is a key thread in the fabric of society.
Perhaps he meant that music is more professionally made today and the cost of music studio equipment has dropped really low.
So I guess what he's saying is that while our income growth has stagnated, the digital era has lowered the price of, or replaced, old demands. Thus the relative income is still growing, faster than ever.
I feel like with all these machines replacing jobs, we're at the very beginnings of a work-free world. About a century down the line, I wouldn't be surprised if only the most under-developed countries still had workers, while everyone else was free to pursue their interests without the hindrance of a job.
Oh interesting. I was under the impression Moore's law had been holding constant, thanks for the update. :)
Yeah, I think a general understanding of our brain's wiring and cognitive biases would drastically improve the way the world works, especially some of the big ones like the Confirmation Bias, that one tends to be responsible for a lot of arguments... That again, even better could be just a general understanding of the scientific process as a concept... One can dream can't they. :p
Being in MIS. Lots of companies do not do any process reengineering. Draw a DFD and the their is no difference for companies today and those in past 100 years. At best only minute changes.
Man has clearly chosen technology time and time again and the vehicle seems to have no breaks. Technology is man's mode of destiny. You might say technology is the vessel we have manifested in order to row to our destiny. Call it man kinds technologically manifest destiny Because in reality this is what it is and that is how it works.
What is it with certain people? "Humanity has reached it's peak". Then we go one to accomplish so much more.
Solar is comparable costly right now, but solar cost now in comparison to 20 years ago is ~ten times cheaper. The maximum efficiency of solar has jumped from >30% to over 40% in the last 20 years. Right now, in very sunny places the ROI on solar is under ten years without direct incentives, so that is like a 7% return on investment, which is nice. By 2020, solar's price per KWh will be less and it will make more since in more places.
This would be a valid point in the current state of affairs, but much less so when the government is giving out $20K per year to everyone. Though $20K was just a relatively random number and it could be $15K or $25K and still be reasonable. This would be like saying we are paying everyone $10/hr for nothing. There is no more real poverty. Some places in the US, $20K is poor, but now you can just move and live somewhere cheap if you don't like feeling poor and don't work.
2:19 He gave the real GDP growth to be 1.9%. But the population grew at a rate of 1.3% during the 20th century. So what really matters in terms of quality of life - real growth rate per capita, was in the doldrums of around 0.6%.
exactly, I was waiting for a more solid conclusion but I feel like I was left hanging
"Free to do what we want" Try telling that to all the bankers and leaders that have control over money and greed, you see, when we still live in a world were you have to gain money in order to survive, and values based on greed and self indulgence, this option would ruin lives of billions of people, no work = no money = low survival. Unfortunately this is how the world works (Pure profit based) and until we evolve past the need for value, profit and dependence this should not be encouraged.
Yes I conclude something similar and.. obviously this statement is not practical for everyone and so in summary, he's saying that there is no practical way for those being displaced to be able to compete.
Also.. consider those that own the technology for profit. They still need a market to sell into and if their market no longer has the ability to earn.. what does this say for the economy and future productivity.
It's not "obvious" yet. It takes some foresight, or the ability to look at patterns and predict the probable future. Besides, we won't be racing with the machines, we will be merging with the machines by reprogramming ourselves.
How would AI sort that problem out?
The starvation argument only is valid if agriculture stays the same for this whole time. Advances in hydroponics over the last few decades has made it perfectly possible to build vertical farms that can put out just as much produce as a normal agriculture on only a fraction of the ground area. Plus, it's not dependent on the ground it's sat on, it only needs sun, energy (preferably through solar power and water (we have oceans of it).
Improvements in technology, in productivity, bring prices 'down'. This is virtually the definition of progress. If that is not happening with medicine, which IS seeing improvements in both technology and productivity, you should really ask why? It is NOT the case that the improved technology costs more to do "the same thing", because that would not be an improvement, but a regression. Medical costs have gone up because the Gov has removed price competition from the system.
That's assuming technology doesn't improve. If Moore's Law remains fairly constant, computers will have 16 times more processing power in 5 years. We are starting to overcome the limits of our mind, that's the whole Watson, or Google Car thing. Also 1 of DARPA's main projects atm is looking into upgrading robotics, it's easily conceivable that robots will be monitoring and repairing robots soon. There are very few actually new ideas, most ideas are simply revamped old one which computers can do.
Nice try at censoring 6:23 but that's significantly underblurred to be unreadible.
Also, this talk and the one by Robert Gordon really match up well. In fact, this talk is the perfect response to that. Really nice!
Also I really want to learn more about that cooperative freestyle chess team thing. Watching Shyam Sankar's talk next. If that's not it, I'd like to ask in advance for links, if anybody has them ready.
No hint of the unstated assumption - growth is always good & more growth is even better.
He touched upon it, but what must be emphasized is the decoupling of income from labor. Labor will increasingly be done by machines. Capitalism and competition have done the job for a while, but we need to find a way to distribute our resources that is not based on hours worked. We have the means. We just need a mechanism for moving those means around to where they're needed.
So hd outlined the general setting most people feel but do not explain. Then provides nothing but a "co operate of loose" response. Interesting to hear the problem set out but ultimately falls flat with the lack of suggestions.
NOTES
general purpose technologies unleash wave of innovation but takes time to realize - e.g., steam engines, electricity (which took 30 years for manufacturers to realize gave them increased flexibility)
from Nye’s book on technology: electricity is a platform which enabled unimagined appliances and innovations to build on top of it, and today that spending far outpaces the actual spending on electricity (and the proportion is growing)
today that platform is the computer
productivity today at all-time high
US GDP growth constant on log-scale
today is “age of the machine”
getting more technology than ever for free - but zero price is zero weight in GDP stats
Erik estimates GDP misses $300B/year of free stuff (personal note: it's like O’Reilly’s clothesline paradox)
we think linearly but tech is exponential
machine learning is game changing - Jeopardy computer learns quickly
Intuit - great for the founders, but 17% of tax preparers lost jobs because of TurboTax
in chess, team of humans and ordinary computers working together can beat even most powerful computer
www.kevinhabits.com/ted/
Government has been stifling innovation in the past few decades most but doing so since times like Nikola Tesla.
Patents, copyrights, resource monopolies, regulations, handouts, corporatism, militarism, social engineering, complex tax codes, government sector overgrowth, degraded educational system to keep bureaucrats happy, inefficient healthcare system, artificial scarcity, debt based economy, extreme consumerism, massively inflated fiat currency and an overemphasis on jobs over progress.
Taste is taste, but maybe he means the variety of sounds used.(better music in technical terms, maybe...)
hence why he said at the start "We're going to need to reinvent our organisations and even our whole economic system".
No one solution will likely be "the solution", we do not currently just make energy for oil. We currently use oil, gas, coal, hydroelectric and nuclear energy, why would we think that we would use just one in the future?
Nuclear fission energy may be the future at some point, but that is an unknow tech right now, which make it hard to predict.
Batteries are one of the biggest hurdles for near future, but there is a whole lot of work being done on it. And which of the Tesle's are ungainly?
Hmm...what about the environment? We are pruducing more than ever and the problem is that there aren't enough work for everyone? Maybe we could solve some of this problem by stop production IRL and make more stuff digitaly? What do you think?
MVHH
No, the difference is that the music YOU like isn't the music being served to you on a platter.
I don't know what kind of music you like and frankly i don't care but let me assure you that the music you like is still being produced but it's just not mainstream anymore.
Of course there's also the chance you simply won't accept new music because you live in the past and are too narrowminded to see that, had the music of the same quality made today been made 10, 20 or 30+ years ago you'd like it.
5:12 he used exponential wrong. it was linear progression. Exponential would be an almost straight line up.
You're thinking of the animatrix. That series was so awesome.
We already have a number of alternatives to oil; solar, wind, water, nuclear, ect. The are only two reasons we are still using oil, it is cheap and easier to store. The cost of alternative energy has been and continues to be dropping, which the cost of oil continues to rise. The cost of home solar should be cheaper than current electricity somewhere in the next 20 years. Then we can massively increase efficiency by changing a outlets to DC and skip the converters that use 15% of all power.
Sorry, but 2:25 is not a log scale. It's an exponential scale - related, but totally different. If it was a log scale, growth would slow dramatically as time went on.
I still think that blocking Nick Hanauers' presentation in TED "We are the job creators", is a huge mistake. It still remains the best idea that was presented.
Those of you shitting on the venus project do not understand that the core ideas behind it are starting to become focus in, around and especially outside of the movement. Thats because good ideas become infectious.
Teamwork, community building, that's what will save us.
Well sure there would be some growing pains before we get to the utopia I mentioned. I'd expect at least a century down the line things would be fine. And as stated elsewhere here, maybe there could be a fixed minimum income for us to have? Besides, I'd imagine as technology becomes more advanced, cheaper, and more accessible, we'd be able to do so, so much with so, so little.
Watson is applying for jobs...
Jacque Fresco was right, my god this is awesome
I wish more people knew about Jecque Fresco work.
People can race with the machines how much they want; if less and less jobs are available, it won't matter much. The situation looks shittier and I don't expect miracles.
If you were an unemployed man from China, Bangladesh, etc., I bet you'd be really happy when a big American company built a factory in your town and offered you a job at a relatively high wage. Whether you call that exploitation or development depends on a lot of personal opinions.
I wonder if this new machine age will allow us to produce quality food like we had prior to the last quarter of the 20th century instead of toxin laden, GMO Crap. I wonder if this machine age will allow us to spend more quality time communicating (like we use to face-to face) with loves ones or will we become dependant on the whole computer robotic system for all our means? Will we have any time for quietness, time to think and reflect, tranquality, going for picnics, and camping and fishing with loved ones and experience real nature and life, medidation etc??? Will we all be caught up in this technological so called innovation and forget to live like humans use to? Is this truly progress? I think at the rate we are going we will become a dystopian society that will forget to think for ourselves, and instead will rely on machines and computers to not only toil, but do all our thinking for us???
Well, really taxes are best collected as sales tax not production or labor tax. The problem is you see my idea being implemented now, when GPD is very strongly connected with labor force. What I am talking about is 20+ years from now when the US labor force is not strongly connected to GDP. That even if we have 50% unemployment, US GDP would not drop significantly (more than 10%). Why so we need people to serve us coffee, food, bag our food or so much more? We won't.
much better intro music
I like how this is right after the other guy on growth being dead.
Thats the issue. EVERYTHING has become commoditized. We as humans have lost local communities. We no longer need to rely on our neighbors, hell we don't even know them! I really think that exponential technologies is going to create an abundance for all, thus many things will be free. Peter Diamandis look him up.
Basically what he said was... Get a degree in the tech industry (racing w/ the machine) or you will never find a job (racing against the machine).
You have to think outside the box.
These things that we are talking about are surely true. But they are not true by nature. They are true because of how we have built our societies.
It is inevitable that our current system will change. The question is when? My guess is that it will take another 100 or so years.
We will see a system where growth isn't necessary. We will see a system where peoples roles in society are totally redefined. Maybe we won't think of jobs as a concept anymore? Who knows?
But sales tax just means higher price for people who already have a low income. Which will result in less demand and eventually a recession. And the only way out of this recession would require radical changes in politics and peoples way of thinking overall. I find it hard to believe that someone would give out their business easily or that they would cut profits without trying to do something about it.
Doesn't it mean we have too many people? As machines take over we need fewer people. Unemployment as universally seen as a lack of jobs but there are more jobs now than there have ever been. His graphs show the future will require fewer jobs and therefore fewer people. Future prosperity will come from policies promoting low birth rates and low immigration to reduce the future number of workers to the reduction in jobs. Economic growth comes from technology and innovation; not more workers.
Now hold on, if machines replace the vast majority of jobs, wouldn't it be great if it meant we could be free to do what we want instead of wasting hours upon hours at some office? Of course getting to the point where machines replace labor and we put in systems for people to fairly sustain themselves would take massive growing pains as society adjusted itself, but in the long-run I think it would be worth it.
Great vid. What's going on in the background? Was he doing a play?
He said all the wikipedia, google, etc. products that are given away for free were worth what 1 billion dollars? No if you cannot charge money for something it is generating zero revenue. If I build on top of it and generate revenue it is the added value that is generating the revenue.
So...I guess they should change their name to Rage With The Machine. And make a new hit: Loving In The Name Of.
Excellent!
Unfortunately, the US workforce is not equally skilled. You have a 3.8% unemployment rate with college grads with a 75% participation rate and an 11.1% unemployment rate with HS dropouts with a 46% participation rate. The answer is not college grads work 20 and then the HS dropouts can do the same job for the other 20 hours... they can't. We have lots of jobs for highly skilled and motivated people, but it is cheaper and easy to replace those without skills with machines and computers.
Race with the machine! I love it! I've said it to my friend and I'll say it here. Let the machines help humans with the things we're not good at, but machines are; let humans help machines with the things we're good at but machines are not. Together we can build a more abundant, sustainable, eco-friendly future for everyone.
... unfortunately sometimes such radical progress can only be made one retirement home at a time.
I think the rising unemployment in developed countries could be better explained (well, at least for the US) by the fact that we don't produce anything, just consume.
If we produced more ourselves, we could have much more jobs than buying everything from China...
Tech replaces jobs and there are more people on earth then ever before
Define "vibrant" and its relation to "good"
Why should they? We just learnt that it's better to work together.
People need to earn currency to buy goods and services. So unless all these goods and services are free or provided to us we need to earn an income. You only need look at oil companies and other industries that are keeping us dependent on them. Innovation could happen at a much faster rate but someone always wants to profit from that innovation thereby slowing down actual innovation. Ie. Intel slowing down CPU progress because of inadequate competition, this is reflected in many other areas.
"I'm listening to more and better music than ever" - this single statement makes me doubt the entire thesis.
A new machine age that is "exponential" is hardly comforting; only bubbles are exponentail.
But the buggest problem with the thesis is energy - unless we find a new source of energy to replace oil, growth is dead.
The Moore's law actually has been bypassed already, there was a talk about it about half a year ago i believe, but that level of technology still a has long way to go to be financially accessible.
as for the social revolution, I totally agree, the humanity needs a paradigm shift to advance. sadly though it's not an option when we can't even properly agree on the age of the earth, or on the fact that it's not the phenotype nor the place of birth that defines a person.
If humans want to race with machines, they better get their upgrade, cause I know my computer gets it.
We kinda have the flyn effect and epigenetics and neurplasticity(in a way that our brain adapts to our time and builds on that), but if not a big part of humans change their mindset, than they will not survive in a future world; cold hearted idea..
We are alrdy holding back machines so our numbers of unempleyed people are not as bad
Humans are different, can't change that and I also wouldn't.
And I was hoping that this would end in: Computers and technology do all the work while I can be lazy playing playstation!
Did he say productivity grew for 30 years after introduction of electricity to factories, or did he say productivity didn't grow until 30 years later?
We will never see the benefits of increased efficiency until we stop using debt-based money
i like his optimism but it's more based on feel-good "well pull through somehow" philosophy
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we need a stable, efficient replacement for energy in transport and a way of mitigating job losses.
giving people a function in life is very important, to make them fit in and feel needed. work is not against our nature.
General Western Europe yes, they have intense problems, but they're just as capitalistic as North America. I was talking about Scandinavia, sure Sweden is part of the EU, but they still have a fundamentally different culture/way of treating their citizens. Scandinavia tends to be more socialist leaning then the rest of Europe and North America.
I see a conflict rising between hardware (us and mechanical machines) and software (programs and app) everyone of these as a price tag attach... In today's world, I don't think the economy is doing the right choices... I don't see the balanced combination of the two.
there can be infinite growth in digital goods and healthier lifestyles. growth doesn't have to be in washing machines, and cars.