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Blog postJanuary’s jobs report was so good that The Atlantic declared it to be ‘without a blemish.’ Job creation remained strong and wages grew as well. I agree that there was a lot to like about it, but it also strikes me that the enthusiasm it’s generated is a bit unsettling because it shows me how far our expectations have been diminished.
At first glance, job growth looks quite torrid. The New York Times noted that “Since Nov. 1, employers have hired more than one million ne -
Blog postToday we got the happy news that The Second Machine Age was named one of the best books of the year by Bloomberg. Their methodology for putting together their list was interesting: they just asked a lot of heavy hitters in finance, industry, and public affairs what their favorite books were.
I’m flattered to see what our book was among the most cited. Mohamed El-Erian, Dominic Barton, Jeff Sachs, Tim Adams, and and Pippa Malmgren all gave it a shout-out, which is a grea -
Blog postFacebook’s recent announcement that it’s readying a version of its social software for workplaces got me thinking about Enterprise 2.0, a topic I used to think a great deal about. Five years ago I published a book with that title, arguing that enterprise social software platforms would be valuable tools for businesses.
The news from Facebook, along with rapid takeup of new tools like Slack, the continued success and growth of Salesforce’s Chatter and Yammer (now part of Microsoft), an -
Blog postA while back I set up autopayment on the Citi credit card I used for business expenses, and it’s been working fine. Recently, however, I ran up so many travel expenses in a month that I hit my credit limit (the clearest sign yet that I’ve been on the road too much). So in order to keep further charges from being declined, I went to the Citi credit cards site to make a manual payment.
I wanted to use the same bank account for this manual payment that I use for my automatic one. But I c -
Blog postI’ve been involved with the Boston Book Festival since Deborah Porter founded it in 2009, and it’s become one of my favorite events of the year. And since I had a for-real mainstream published book come out this year (as opposed to a self-published glorified pamphlet) I get to participate this year as a full-fledged author in the session titled “Technology: Promise and Peril”
What makes this especially exciting to me is the fact that I’ll share the stage with Nick Carr, who’s one of m -
Blog postYesterday we got the good news that The Second Machine Age had been shortlisted for the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. Erik and I are floored and very flattered, and looking forward to the award dinner in London in November. I’m pretty sure we’ll watch Thomas Piketty another author hoist the trophy, but it’ll be great fun to attend.
In a nice coincidence, next week Erik and I are also giving our first joint public talk about the book since the initial book tour. -
Blog postMy MIT colleague David Autor delivered a wonderful paper at the recent Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium about American job and wage patterns in recent decades, and their link to the computerization of the economy. I’ll say more later about his paper, which was one of the highlights of the event for me (sighting this moose was another one). For now I just want to highlight one graph that he included, and draw a couple additional ones.
Autor included a chart very much like the one -
Blog postI am sorry to brag, but this really is an all-star lineup. If you’re at all interested in technological progress and its implications for our businesses, economies, and societies, you should attend the 2014 Second Machine Age conference.
It’s being held on September 10 and 11 at the gorgeous MIT Media Lab building, and organized jointly by the Institute’s Industrial Liaison Program and the Initiative on the Digital Economy (which I cofounded with Erik Brynjolfsson). Erik and I are bo -
Blog postIt’s been a while since I posted data on US employment trends, so here’s a chart created with FRED’s snazzy new graphing interface. It shows the employment rate (in other words, 100 – the standard unemployment rate) in blue, the employment-to-population ratio (the % of working-age people with work) in green, and the labor force participation rate (the percent of working-age people who have work or are actively looking for it) in red.
This graph clearly shows a very steady up-then -
Blog postEvery once in a while you have one of those “microcosm experiences” that perfectly encapsulates the trends shaping our world. My most recent one came last week during an Uber ride.
I needed to get from my house in Cambridge to the WBUR studios in Boston so I could be a guest on local legend Christopher Lydon’s new show Radio Open Source. Ray Kurzweil, the other guest, was calling in from California. Instead of walking (too far), driving (no park -
Blog postMy last post here took on Zeynep Tufekci and, by extension, others who believe the current trend of using robots and other forms of advanced technology for caregiving is, as she put it, “an abdication of a desire to remain human, to be connected to each other through care, and to take care of each other.” I wonder how these self-appointed guardians of our humanity feel about the new iPhone app that provides automated diagnoses of imminent mood swings for people with bipol
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Blog postPeople and computers are coming together in all kinds of interesting ways these days. The right combination of human and digital smarts in chess will beat the top grandmaster, the best chess supercomputer, and the top grandmaster with the best supercomputer. At least one VC firm is giving an algorithm a formal vote on its investments. And robots (which I consider to be computers with a physical presence) are increasingly working side by side with people on factory and warehouse floo
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Blog postLike many other people, I thought the (thankfully temporary) decision by the French Council of State to force Uber and other app-based car summoning services to bake in a 15-minute delay, so as not to compete unfairly with taxis, was a classic example of Eurosclerosis, of Gallic dirigisme run amok, and lots of other bad and un-American things.
But then I read James Surowiecki’s recent column about the regulatory barriers that geek chic car company Tesla is facing as it tries to set up -
Blog postI sometimes find it hard to believe that America’s current immigration systems weren’t designed by our enemies. More liberal policies and streamlined procedures would bring technical talent and entrepreneurial energy at a time when we clearly need them. Yet these reforms remain out of reach.
Overwhelmingly, the best and brightest in the world still want to come here to study, work, and start companies; a worldwide 2012 Gallup poll revealed that the US “holds the undisputed t -
Blog postMy last post here, the descriptively-titled “Big Data’s Biggest Challenge? Convincing People NOT to Trust Their Judgment,” generated a fair amount of commentary. So I think it’s worthwhile to devote a couple follow-on posts to the reactions, questions, and objections raised in response to my contention, which was (and is) that we should generally be relying a lot less on the judgments, diagnoses, and forecasts of human ‘experts,’ and a lot more on the outputs of cold, hard, data-driven algori
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Blog postHere’s a simple rule for the second machine age we’re in now: as the amount of data goes up, the importance of human judgment should go down.
The previous statement reads like heresy, doesn’t it? Management education today is largely about educating for judgment—developing future leaders’ pattern-matching abilities, usually via exposure to a lot of case studies and other examples, so that they’ll be able to confidently navigate the business landscape. And whether or not we’re in b-sch -
Blog postYou might think it’s legitimate and appropriate for management to make sure employees aren’t stealing from the business. Apparently, not everyone agrees.
A little while back, a Steve Lohr post at the New York Times described some research Lamar Pierce, Dan Snow, and I just finished up and published as an MIT Sloan working paper. We had the chance to study a question that business academics and managers alike have been interested in for a while: what happens to performance when compani -
Blog postNeuroscientist Gary Marcus has a typically sharp post over at the New Yorker’s site explaining how dumb our most cutting edge artificial intelligence technologies still are. They remain really lousy, for example, at answering questions like:
The town councilors refused to give the angry demonstrators a permit because they feared violence. Who feared violence?
a) The town councilors
b) The angry demonstrators
The large ball crashed right through the tabl -
Blog postIt’s dismaying how easy it is to screw up college.
I don’t know exactly when, why, or how it happened, but important things are breaking down in the US higher education system. Whether or not this system is in danger of collapsing it feels like it’s losing its way, and failing in its mission of developing the citizens and workers we need in the 21st century.
This mission clearly includes getting students to graduate, yet only a bit more than half of all US students enrolled in -
Blog postMy MIT colleague Frank Levy had the great idea a while back to put on a series of lunches bringing together the MIT economics, business, computer science, and robotics geeks who are interested in how recent technological progress is affecting the economy and labor force. It’s a large group, and a ridiculously impressive one. The Institute is home to some of the world’s best people in each of these areas, so the lunches always leave me with a buzzing head, a full notebook, and an advanced case
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Blog postThe current surge of enthusiasm around big data has produced a predictable backlash. Some of it, like Gary Marcus’s New Yorker post “Steamrolled by Big Data,” is insightful and well-reasoned (even though I have my quibbles with some of his points). This is not surprising, since he’s a neuroscientist as well as a writer, and so quite comfortable with data.
Unfortunately, some other prominent commentators clearly aren’t. David Brooks has taken up big data in his New York Times column re -
Blog postI completely support the right of companies to stop paying people they don’t need any more, but the latest round of recent and planned layoffs from United Technologies is troubling me. Because UTC is doing great; its stock is at an all-time high, and sales have grown by more than 35% since 2005, to $57.7 billion.
This growth was accomplished, however, without expanding its workforce much at all, and now UT believes it can continue to grow as it wants to while actually shrinking its em -
Blog postIf you’re an employer, there are lots of signals about a young person’s suitability for the job you’re offering. If you’re looking for someone who can write, do they have a blog, or are they a prolific Wikipedia editor? For programmers, what are their TopCoder or GitHub scores? For salespeople, what have they sold before? If you want general hustle, do they have a track record of entrepreneurship, or at least holding a series of jobs?
These days, there are also a range of tests you ca -
Blog postThe story of how technological progress is affecting employment — whether, in other words, the robots are eating our jobs — is clearly an important one. But who’s telling it correctly? I believe that technological unemployment (and underemployment) is a real and growing phenomenon.
But since Erik Brynjolfsson and I appeared on 60 Minutes in January for “March of the Machines,” a story that examined the labor force implications of advanced digital technologies like robots and other for -
Blog postI’m starting to come to the conclusion that of all the myths businesses and their leaders tell themselves, one of the most harmful is that they know where the expertise is. The more I learn about the results from crowdsourcing and open innovation efforts, the more I believe that the smart strategy is to expose your problems and challenges to as many people as possible and let them show you what they can do. Here’s my most recent example of the power of this approach.
The online startu -
Blog postBusiness English deserves its terrible reputation.
We invent jargon, rely heavily on clichés, repeat catchphrases endlessly, and restart sentences three or four times before finding a way to finish them. And to paraphrase Schopenhauer, every generation ridicules the other ones, and they are all right. Millennials think their elders speak in a lifeless monotone (think Ben Stein), and we think they use upspeak way too much. But for some reason, nothing pains me as much as the bac -
Blog postI wish I could say I was surprised that Uber was banned for a while in here in Massachusetts.
If you don’t know about Uber, you should. It’s the town car service for the smartphone generation, up and running now in several cities around the country. You use the Uber app on your phone to locate the nearest participating car and have it start driving to where you are. The car is not a taxi, but instead a ‘sleek black car.’ When it gets there, you tell the driver where you want to go. Wh -
Blog postHow do you tell an uplifting, inspirational story about the possibility that droids will take all our jobs?
This is the challenge I faced when I was invited by the organizers of TEDxBoston to give a talk about our book Race Against the Machine. As event curator Jimmy Guterman explained to me in our initial conversation, TED talks are not typically dire, dour, or downbeat. Instead, the way to make them “jaw-dropping,” according to TED.com, is to make them “persuasive, courageous, ingen -
Blog postDoes anyone actually enjoy break-out groups? It’s a serious question. I participate in more than a few full-day-or-longer meetings every year — management retreats, training sessions, meetings of centers and professional societies, and so on — and there’s nothing I dread seeing on the agenda more than a time slot devoted to “break-out groups.”
This time slot usually follows a presentation on an important topic. The organizers then ask participants to split up into break-out groups for -
Blog postEvery time I take a walk in the woods around Boston now, I’m going to be looking over my shoulder for giant robot dogs.
I’ve just been watching videos of Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, which is aimed at supporting American troops in the field by, among other things, carrying heavy loads over rough terrain. As the videos show, it’s already pretty good at that. It can go up steep hills, recover from slips on ice and kicks from people, and do other very dog-like things.
I took enough c -
Blog postI’ve been learning a lot from Danny Kahneman’s great book Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman is the world’s leading expert on human judgment and decision-making and the only non-economist to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (he’s a psychologist by training), so his insights and conclusions should be taken seriously. In Thinking Fast and Slow he collects them and explains them to the non-specialist. Read it and you won’t look at the world the same way again. And you and the world will bot
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Blog postSome recent reading crystallized two hypotheses that have been rattling around in my head for a while now:
Digital crowds work better than real-world ones.
For some things, nothing works except solitude.
These formed after reading a great article by Susan Cain in the New York Times called “The Rise of the New Groupthink.” The column is a preview of her new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (the title alone assures that I will bu -
Blog postGeorge Eliot observed that “among all forms of error, prophesy is the most gratuitous.” Yogi Berra is said to have said the same thing in less adorned language: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” So a lot of what’s below will be off-base or dead wrong. But predictions are both fun for writers and popular among readers, so here goes. My crystal ball devoted to the intersection of business and digital technology brought forth six predictions for 2012. They are:
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Blog postThanks to a lot of great reporting, most recently by Bloomberg, we now know how strong the government’s reaction to the banking crisis of 2008 was — how quickly and heavily financial institutions were propped up with federal money. This may well have been the right move, but as Paul Krugman says, “The real scandal isn’t so much that those banks got rescued as that the rest of the population didn’t.”
A recent post and set of graphs from Mike Konczal, who maintains the excellent Rortybo -
Blog postI originally wanted to kick off one of the chapters in Race Against the Machine with a quote from Karl Marx, but my co-author Erik Brynjolfsson talked me out of it. And I’m glad he did. Because the more I think about it, the more displeased with myself I am for suggesting it. In fact, I’m instituting a blanket rule for myself: from now on, no more quoting Marx, or citing or discussing his work.
I know that this sounds shortsighted or even dumb, especially now. The Great Recession and
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