In my last post, which recapped a fascinating lunch I had with a bunch of economists and AI researchers at MIT, I wrote

Computers are getting bigger and faster, but not ‘smarter’ in any human sense of the word. Artificial intelligence bears very little relationship to the human variety, and the two are not going to merge. One of the AI researchers referred to the idea of the Singularity as a ‘category mistake,’ which is a great academic insult.

A couple people asked for more details about this ‘category mistake,’ so I went back and reviewed my notes from the meeting. Here’s an edited, imperfect transcript of what one of the attendees said (I’ll follow the Chatham House rule)

There’s a type error there, which is conflating FLOPS with intelligence. [Some Singularity advocates] are just plotting FLOPS against brain size, saying they cross in 2035 or whenever and therefore…  and that’s just obviously a mistake. There’s something missing there. [Intelligence is] not just counting cycles

The AI professionals were pretty adamant that faster machines were not automatically smarter machines, and that all the work they were doing to accomplish amazing feats like speech recognition, automatic translation, robot mobility and manipulation, driverless driving, and so on was not causing computers to become any more human.

To which I can only say, whew!

A little while back Frank Levy, an MIT economist whose work I’ve drawn on a lot, and Seth Teller and John Leonard of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) came to an important realization: MIT is home to both a set of people exploring the economic implications of cutting-edge technologies like AI, and many of the top AI researchers themselves. So shouldn’t these two groups come together, get acquainted, and start swapping ideas?

We did so over lunch last Thursday at CSAIL. Because we didn’t discuss blogging groundrules I’ll not disclose the attendees here, except to note that my Race Against the Machine coauthor Erik Brynjolfsson was there. The conversation flowed freely for an hour and a half, and none of us felt like we’d come anywhere close to exhausting the topic, so we’ll do it again.

I left with a full brain, the lingering sense that I was the dumbest guy in the room, and a few clear learnings and impressions. The latter include:

• The discipline of AI was Big Data before Big Data was cool. As the CSAIL researchers explained, the field of AI pivoted substantially starting in the late 80s and early 90s. Prior to that time, we were trying to teach computers rules: how language worked, how knowledge was organized, how the universe was structured. After then, we just filled them up with data and put statistical algorithms on top of them: If you see this waveform, it’s this word or this sentence; if you see this string of words in one language, it corresponds to this string in this other language; etc. This approach has only gained currency as the amount of digital data in the world continues to mushroom. (here and elsewhere I’m going to oversimplify the field of AI badly, and get important details wrong because of ignorance and/or a need for brevity. Apologies.)
• AI algorithms get better as data gets bigger. Super large datasets let researchers test their hypotheses and ideas, finding out which ones actually work. This lets the self-improving and auto-correcting features of science kick in in a way they never could when the AI debates had to remain in the realm of pure theory.
• We don’t need to worry about the Terminator or prepare for the Singularity. Computers are getting bigger and faster, but not ‘smarter’ in any human sense of the word. Artificial intelligence bears very little relationship to the human variety, and the two are not going to merge. One of the AI researchers referred to the idea of the Singularity as a ‘category mistake,’ which is a great academic insult.
• Faith in human intuition remains strong. Too strong. One of my biggest surprises came as I listened to the AI researchers defend human decision-making and pattern-matching capabilities. As I’ve said repeatedly (here, here, and here, for starters), I think our intuition, while amazing and real, is also highly overrated —  clearly glitchy and biased — and should be replaced by algorithmic approaches as soon as it’s clear that the algorithms to a better job. Costs will drop and outcomes will improve as we get humans out of the loop in more and more circumstances. I found it very strange to be working to convince a bunch of world-class algorithmicists of the comparative advantages of algorithms, but I guess I should be used to it by now. Most people, including professional technologists, are enamored of intuition.
• Nobody knows where we’re headed. When one of the AI guys walked into the room with a copy of our book, my first thought was not “Wow, that’s flattering.” It was “Uh-oh — does he expect us to tell him how the future’s going to unfold? ‘Cause that’s what I was hoping to learn from him…” I’m very sure that the economic and societal consequences of recent astonishing technical progress are going to be big, and I’m not at all sure what they are. Technology-fueled capitalist creative destruction is a messy and uneven process, and its twists and turns in coming years will leave us amazed.

I’m a huge optimist about this process overall (although I’m deeply concerned about some of the labor force implications; hence Race Against…) and I very much look forward to future conversations with leading technologists to help me understand it better. Erik and I are headed to San Francisco and Silicon Valley at the end of the month to continue these conversations. I’ll be sure to report back from there…

A little while back I sat down with Martha Mangelsdorf, the editorial director of MIT Sloan Management Review, to talk about digital business. We covered the Cloud; Big Data; Enterprise 2.0; technology, skills, and jobs; and lots else. Martha asked great questions; I hope my answers were in the same league.

SMR will air a webcast of our 40-minute talk this Thursday, May 3, at 2pm EDT. Viewers will be able to ask questions during the webcast, and I’ll be on hand to answer as many of them as possible afterward. We’ll go until 3:00 pm.

I hope you can join in. The registration page for the webcast is here.

… is actually a new course being offered to MIT students this summer.

I just learned from Bill Aulet, the Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, about a great new initiative getting started at the Institute this summer exclusively available to its students and 2012 grads. It’s called the Founder Skills Accelerator, and is intended to give very early-stage businesses a summer’s worth of support – money, space, peers, and mentors.

As its website explains:

Spend your summer at MIT iterating on a startup idea, and earn up to $20k for your team! The Founders’ Skills Accelerator pilot is designed as a hands-on summer active learning experience for MIT students (including 2012 graduates).

The accelerator, a joint project of all five MIT schools, offers:

• Up to $20k grants per team (no equity stake) upon completion of pre-determined, customized milestones
• Monthly stipend for qualified students
• Dedicated desk space at MIT
• Mentoring and all the Institute’s resources (including the SkTech MIT Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, MIT Venture Mentoring Service, MIT Technology Licensing Office, Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program, MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, SUTD-MIT International Design Centre, and more!)

The desk space runs from June 4 through August 31. Teams also participate in a Demo Day to be held in conjunction with the t=0 Festival in mid-September.

Doesn’t that sound fantastic? If I were a student with a business idea that I was at all serious about, I’d be scrambling right now to get my application in by the May 2 deadline.

If you’ve spent any time trying to make cross-disciplinary things happen in big universities, you know how amazing it is to get all of MIT’s schools to sign on t0 this. And Aulet and his colleagues in the Trust Center did it in record time. This is exactly the kind of innovation we need in higher ed, and a great countermove to Peter Thiel’s encouragement to young entrepreneurs to drop out.

At Bill’s kind invitation I’m going to be involved with FSA this summer. Exactly how is unclear, but I want to be part of this. I’ll keep you posted on what I learn…

I was reading an otherwise really good story about education and employment at Yahoo! news when I came across the following sentence:

Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren’t easily replaced by computers.

Actually, they are, or soon will be. We might need human burger-flippers for a while yet, but technology is already eating deeply into retail jobs (see this post, this one, and this article from the LA Times). And computers, of course, are already driving cars on our roads. Nevada has begun the work of regulating them, and I wonder how long it’ll be before we have automatic trucks as a significant part of our logistics infrastructure. I’ll be surprised it they’re not a business reality within ten years.

The story is headlined “1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed,” which is a chilling statistic that lines up well with what the New York Times found when it tracked down the Drew University class of 2011. Only 39% of them had full-time jobs.

The current labor market is a very tough one for all kinds of people, including the young and well-educated. The overall low unemployment rate for recent college grads hides the fact that there’s a lot of underemployment among this group.

However, not all undergraduates are sent out into the workforce equal. Some are equipped with majors that are in demand, like healthcare, science, business, education, and, social work. I’d encourage all college students (and their parents) to look at employment statistics when planning their courses of study.

As I’ve said before, it’s great if you want to be an art history major. But throw in an applied math degree, too. Yes, you’ll work harder. But college is a unique and unrepeatable chance to fill up your brain with knowledge and skills. Buckle down and take advantage of it.

Many of us can’t wait for autonomous cars, and would pay a lot to have one and be freed up from the hassles of driving. State governments should welcome autonomous cars, too. As Sebastian Thrum convincingly argues, they’ll be safer than human-piloted ones. And they’ll pretty clearly lead to better traffic flow (because they can drive so close to each other) and fewer parking hassles.

In fact, the only real problem with them that I can see is that they might lead to more total miles driven. I know I’d take a lot more road trips if I didn’t have to drive during them. And I value the convenience of car travel enough (no one makes me take off my shoes) that I’m willing to pay for the gas, even if it becomes expensive.

More miles driven by globe-warming cars is not great news for the globe. But a solution seems straightforward, at least in theory: states should initially allow autonomous cars only if they’re also zero / low emission vehicles. As a sweetener to this deal, they could allow these cars to use carpool lanes at all times, and let the passengers text, telecommute, read, watch TV, and do whatever else to their heart’s content.

I would take this deal in a heartbeat. I would buy the pokiest, least sexy, dorkiest car ever made if it freed me from driving, and I’d recharge it / refill it with whatever was necessary. I’d do so even if the car were a lot more expensive than its closest non-autonomous equivalent, or than most other vehicles on the road.

And I think I’m far from alone on this. I bet there are literally millions more like me in America alone. If this is right, we’d instantly become a big market for zero emissions vehicles, which would drive their prices down via economies of scale.

I understand that autonomous cars aren’t yet ready for prime time. But they will be pretty soon. States can and should get ready for this day not by finding ways to disallow these vehicles or constrain their spread, but by designing legislation that uses their advent to accomplish as many societal goals as possible.

I think the proposal outlined here would accomplish several such goals. Do you agree?

The speed with which our economies and societies are digitizing continues to astonish. I think Marc Andreesen was only about one third right when he wrote recently that “software is eating the world.” Data and devices are, too. The growth in hardware, software, and data is interdependent, complementary, and self-reinforcing, and emphasizing only one trend misses the broader point. As Google’s Peter Norvig points out about the interplay between software and information, for example, “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.”

This growth is occurring because of two happy phenomena inherent to the techonomy. I call them ‘free and cheaper.’

Digital content – code and information – is free in that it has essentially zero marginal cost of replication and (in the Network Era) distribution. The importance of this fact was stressed by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian in their landmark 1999 book Information Rules, and in the years since it came out we’ve seen just how right they were. Free software makes businesses like Google and Facebook possible (they would have been uneconomical, at least in their early days, if they had to pay someone a license for the operating system on every one of their servers), fills up our smartphones with apps, and generally conditions us to expect to get a tremendous amount of value from the online world without getting out our credit cards.*

This applies not only to code, by also to many kinds of information, from Wikipedia articles to Twitter updates to blog posts like this one. Ray Kurzweil recently stated that ”Kids in Africa have more information today than the President of the United States did 15 years ago.” If this is an overstatement, it’s not much of one.

Free code and information are wonderful, but their value would be limited if they could only be accessed via expensive devices. Thanks to the relentless awesomeness of Moore’s Law, however, that’s not the case. Roughly speaking, digital hardware drops in price by half every 18 months. So manufacturers can either offer us twice as much for the same price every year and a half, or offer us the same thing at 50% off. The only way they can really get away with not offering us one of these choices is if they’re a monopolist, protected by government regulation or some other barrier. Otherwise, competition and Moore’s Law are going to guarantee ever-cheaper devices over time.

The dynamic of free and cheaper is not by itself going to solve all the world’s problems, but it is the best news in the world today. The research is piling up, and it’s confirming World Bank economist Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang‘s assertion that mobile phones (which are themselves only one element of free and cheaper) “…have made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology. They have…become the single most transformative tool for development.”

Digital progress is not an unalloyed good; it brings along privacy concerns, labor force disruptions, and other side effects we need to be mindful of. But nothing is an alloyed good, and to concentrate on these side effects as if they were the main story of the techonomy is something between a disservice and a bad joke. It makes about as much sense to me as highlighting the plight of arms dealers if world peace were to suddenly arrive.

In another landmark book, 1995′s Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte made a confident prediction:

The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people’s wildest predictions.

He was right, and he teaches me to stop being so circumspect about the power, impact, and benefit of digital technologies.

So here’s what I think when I’m not being circumspect: that the dynamic of free and cheaper is going to be a greater good for humanity than anything since the Industrial Revolution, which was itself a development so profoundly beneficial that in the words of historian Ian Morris, it “made mockery of all that had gone before.” I can’t begin to guess all the ramifications of this dynamic, but I’m confident that it’s going to make us healthier, wealthier, and happier, and allow us to be better stewards of our planet. It will also cause increases in human freedom and self-expression, even if progress here is slow and spotty. Free and cheaper is already changing our world for the better, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

If you don’t agree, I’d really like to know why. Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

* I was about to write “without paying anything,” but every time I do some folk pop up to remind me that I am paying with my attention and my data, since a lot of online businesses support themselves with ads, and/or by selling my data on. I find this a silly and tiresome argument but I’m tired of having it, hence the wording in the text of the post.

According to PCMag.com, Philippe Starck said in a french radio interview that he’s working with Apple on a “revolutionary” new product to be unveiled within a year. The speculation is that they’re collaborating on TVs, since Starck has designed them before.

I have trouble believing that these two design giants are really working together; it seems to me that they have totally different ideas about what good design is.

With its many products, especially under Steve Jobs, Apple has put into practice the philosophy that excellent design is not showy, and that it’s all about the user. Apple hardware is unobtrusively gorgeous — the opposite of bling — and it generates such immense profits and market value because it succeeds so brilliantly at letting everyone from toddlers to grandparents access the digital world. Apple gear is fun to look at, but it’s even more fun to use. It’s intuitive and unobtrusive, and accomplishes the hard work of being both elegant and hyper-functional.

Starck’s gear, let’s be frank, does not. Here’s his fruit juicer:

One of his more famous chairs:

And a TV:

Maybe you like the look of these and maybe you don’t (I don’t), but do you want to use any of them? Can you imagine trying to actually squeeze some OJ with that juicer, or have dinner in the Ghost chair? You acquire Starck products because you want to have them, not because you want to use them.

That’s precisely not the case with Apple products, which is why I have trouble believing in this partnership. Am I missing something? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

The cool news: I’m going to be on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today at 3 pm Boston Time talking about technology, the economy, and jobs.

The not-so-cool news: it appears that Boston’s WBUR only carries the first hour of the show, from 2-3. So the hometown audience will have to stream it, find another station. or listen to it online later.

The Economist reports that US corporate profit margins are higher than they’ve been in 65 years, and absolute profits have reached unprecedented levels:

And how are the US workers who help generate these profits doing? Worse than ever, as measured by the nonfarm business sector’s labor share —    roughly speaking, the share of GPD going to wages

There are many reasons why labor share is going down as profits and profit margins rise. I believe that technology is one of the major ones. As Moore’s Law continues to spur digital innovation, companies throughout the economy buy computers and computer-controlled machinery to do things that people used to do. This makes capital’s share go up, and labor’s go down.

It also reduces the bargaining power of the remaining workers. If they and their bosses know that it’s getting easier, cheaper, and more feasible to replace humans with machines in more and more job categories, it becomes more difficult and risky to demand higher wages. So again, labor share goes down over time as computer power goes up.

These graphs are not evidence of some vast and orchestrated plot against workers. Instead, they’re just (I believe) evidence of how labor markets operate in an era of astonishingly powerful technology. And I have a lot easier time seeing how profits might fall in the future than seeing how labor share could substantially and sustainably rise.

Do you see things differently? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.