Thinking About Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s Second Machine Age: Wednesday Focus: January 29, 2014

So last night I went down to the Commonwealth Club on Market Street in San Francisco to listen to Eric Brynjolffson and Andrew McAfee talk about their book [The Second Machine Age}(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393239357/ref=aslitf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0393239357&linkCode=as2&tag=brde-20). It is somewhat odd that I did this: I have, by now, spent about five hours reading and explicitly thinking about this 100,000-word book. In a sixty-minute seminar, with back-and-fill, false starts, and so forth, we are lucky to hear 50 words a minute. 50 words/minute x 60 minutes = 3000 words. So why if I have spent five hours on 100,000 words do I feel that there is significant value to be gained by spending one hour and processing only 3000?

That there is value added is clear. How many of us economics professors have said: “I had read it twice, but I didn’t understand the paper, really, until after the seminar”? And the persistence of the lecture and seminar as modes of learning strongly suggest that there is something to the group, live, face-and-voice-and-question-and-answer that monologuing symbols on a printed page do not substitute for very well at all…

But these are thoughts for the ongoing debate about the future of education and of the public sphere…

For now simply note that I went down and listened to Eric and . And I left thinting this:

Let me assert that there are six modes of technological progress:

1. Figuring out genuinely new things to make and do.
2. Figuring out how better to use the properties of matter and energy in order to combine them to accomplish our purposes.
3. Figuring out how better to organize and refine our collective division of labor.
4. Figuring out how to use nonhuman energy to supplement or replace testosterone-fueled human muscles.
5. Figuring out how to use machines to amplify for substitute for fine manipulating human fingers.
6. Figuring out how to amplify, supplement, or replace the human eye-ear-brain-voice-hand-loop in control, assessment, and decision-making.

All of these, of course, shade into one another. All of these overlap. But, IMHO at least, the six directions are clear and distinct: frame-breaking, combination (of natural resources), organization (of people), and substitution or amplification (of big muscles, of fingers, of brains).

The pessimistic case for global technological progress in the future of a Robert Gordon[1] or a Tyler Cowen is essentially this.

1. Frame-breaking is unpredictable and in any case extremely rare. How different, really, are our ends and goals today from those of our mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors of 20,000 years ago? An extraordinary desire to satisfy our insatiable monkey curiosity about things, and an obsessive focus on gossiping about our imaginary friends and not-friends–those seem to be the new things to do that we have figured out over the past 20,000 years. Otherwise: we eat, we drink, sleep, you stay warm, we get cool, we make love, we raise children, we gossip, we do stuff to make life easier in the future, we try to organize ourselves and make collective decisions, we exchange gifts, we grumble about being under obligation from gifts received, we argue–non-violently and violently–and we engage in status display. That is it, That is who we are. That is unlikely to change. And not all the technological revolutions in the world would change that without profoundly changing us. And this is not a piece about the unknowable Singularity, about the Rapture of the Nerds.

2. Combination, is nearly over. Additional useful progress in chemistry and physics–and even in biology–is really really hard, and will be really, really slow.

3. Organization is intractable: also really, really hard and really, really slow.

4. That leaves, from the eagle-eye Gordon-Cowen perspective, substitution or amplification of big muscles, of fingers, and of brains-in-the-control-loop. Substitution of nonhuman energy sources for big muscles is all but accomplished in the North Atlantic.

5. And fingers? That is also largely done in the North Atlantic. And how to further apply technology to make us that much better at throwing beautiful pots on the wheel or rolfing one another is unclear.

6. That leaves robots–both real-world robots and virtual ‘bots. Hitherto the human eye-ear-brain-voice-hand loop has been the essential, indeed the only, effective and possible kybernos, the only at-all-robust feedback-assessment-and-control mechanism. Thus we have all, or at least most, had steady employment. They can take away our comparative advantage in moving things with big muscle. They can take away our comparative advantage at finely adjusting things with our fingers. But–so far–even the mind-numbingly boring task of watching the looms and then figuring out which thread has broken and how to fix it have been things that only humans can do well. Gordon and Cowen believe that progress here, too, will be slow and difficult, at least for the next two generations.

   Brynjoffson and McAfee believe it will be swift and incredible.

So how are the rest of us to judge?

[1] Yes, I know that Gordon now wants to talk about the “six headwinds” (unfavorable demography, exhaustion of education, effects on growth of rising inequality, globalization, burden of dealing with energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt) rather than about:

The three industrial revolutions… steam, railroads from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960…. IR #2 was more important… responsible for 80 years of relatively rapid productivity growth…. Once the spin-off inventions from IR #2 (airplanes, air conditioning, interstate highways) had run their course, productivity growth… was much slower than before. In contrast, IR #3 created only a short-lived growth revival…. Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once–urbanization, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature…

But we all find the “IR #2 was the big enchilada, and it is gone” hypothesis more intriguing. We understand demography, energy/environment, globalization, and debt overhang and know what in a good world with good politics we would do to solve them. We don’t understand the exhaustion of education and the effects on growth of rising inequality very well, but we do see them as largely but not completely orthogonal to the issues of the information age and what it will be.

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