Irving Wladawsky-Berger

A Biological Framework for the Study of Labor Market Resilience

I recently read Universal Resilience Patterns in Labor Markets, - an article published earlier this year in Nature Communications by members of MIT Connection Science and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. The article analyzed the resilience of labor markets in US cities using a framework inspired by biological ecosystems.

Biological principles have long been an inspiration for the study of sociotechnical systems, - that is, systems that deal not only with complex technologies and infrastructures, but also with the even more complex issues associated with human and organizational behaviors, such as firms, industries, economies, and cities. For example, a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, The Biology of Corporate Survival, applied evolutionary biology principles to analyze why businesses are disappearing faster than ever before.

“[T]he typical study of urban labor at equilibrium obfuscates responses to out- of-equilibrium disruptions,” notes the Nature article. “Cities are the innovation centers of the US economy, but technological disruptions can exclude workers and inhibit a middle class. Therefore, urban policy must promote the jobs and skills that increase worker pay, create employment, and foster economic resilience.”

Business and Technology Predictions for 2021 and Beyond

Earlier this year, I attended Predictions 21, an online event organized by Forrester Research to help companies understand the key business and technology dynamics that will shape 2021 and beyond. “Faced with the pandemic, firms did things that once seemed impossible - sometimes overnight,” said the accompanying event guide. “Under the relentless pressure of new customer realities, the future came into focus: The value of your company depends on how customer-obsessed, resilient, creative, and adaptive you are in jumping to the next growth curve in your industry. … 2021 will be the year that every company - not just the 15% of firms that were already digitally savvy - doubles down on technology-fueled experiences, operations, products, and ecosystems.”

The past year has been truly chaotic. How can firms formulate their strategies for the next few years in such an uncertain environment? But, as former US president Dwight Eisenhower famously said when he was Commander of Allied Forces in WWII: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” In other words, you must carefully assess the various directions in a highly uncertain future while being ready to flexibly adjust to changing circumstances.

Much has been written about the post-pandemic new normal. There are multiple opinions on a number of areas, such as cities, globalization, supply chains, and labor markets. But, just about everyone predicts an increasingly digital post-pandemic new normal. “The COVID-19 crisis seemingly provides a sudden glimpse into a future world, one in which digital has become central to every interaction,” said McKinsey in an April, 2020 article. “The adoption of new technological behaviours in response to the pandemic, from video-conferencing to online shopping, means usage has already reached levels that were not expected for many more years,” noted The Economist several months later.

In addition to the online webinar, Predictions 21 includes a number of related articles and videos. Let me summarize a few of Forrester’s key predictions.

Can We Look Forward to a New Decade of Innovation?

Can we  look forward to a new decade of innovation, asked The Economist in its January 16 issue. “The 2010s were marked by pessimism about innovation,” notes the issue’s overview article. “Productivity growth was lackluster and the most popular new inventions, the smartphone and social media, did not seem to help much… Promising technologies stalled, including self-driving cars, making Silicon Valley’s evangelists look naive.”

“Today a dawn of technological optimism is breaking,” adds the article. Some giddily predict a new decade of progress, - a kind-of 21st century roaring Twenties. While some of this optimism may be overblown, “there is a realistic possibility of a new era of innovation that could lift living standards, especially if governments help new technologies to flourish.”

There are historical precedents for such optimism. The Roaring Twenties was a decade of economic growth and widespread prosperity, as the country recovered from the dual devastations of World World I and the Spanish flu pandemic. Technological advances like electrification, consumer appliances, the mass production of cars, and the advent of commercial aviation transformed the US into the richest country in the world.

Then following World War II and the onset of the Cold War, the federal government significantly expanded its support of R&D in the private and public sectors, making the US the undisputed leader in science, engineering, medicine and other disciplines. The blueprint for R&D in post-war America was laid out by presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush in his 1945 report, Science The Endless Frontier: “New knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research” conducted in universities and research labs, which is then applied to develop new products by the private sector and new and improved weapons by the defense sector.

The Urgent Need for Wide-Scale Upskilling

Few topics are as important as the future of work in our 21st century digital economy. In the spring of 2018 MIT President Rafael Reif commissioned a task force on the Work of the Future to address whether our rapidly advancing technologies will not only raise economic output and the wealth of nations, but enable people to attain higher living standards and better working conditions. After working across MIT for over two and a half years, the task force released its final report in November, 2020.

“Amidst a technological ecosystem delivering rising productivity, and an economy generating plenty of jobs (at least until the COVID-19 crisis), we found a labor market in which the fruits are so unequally distributed, so skewed towards the top, that the majority of workers have tasted only a tiny morsel of a vast harvest,” was the overriding conclusion of the task fore. But, it further argued that with better policies in place, more people could enjoy good careers even as new technologies transform the very nature of work.

Similar conclusions were reached by Upskilling for Share Prosperity, a report published in January, 2021 by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with PwC. “Millions of people are already being left behind because of volatile market conditions, the effects of COVID-19, or because they work in industries that are being replaced by new sectors,” said the report… There is an enormous opportunity to reconfigure the world of work at this critical juncture and embark on an upskilling revolution that will give people across the world the ability to participate fully in the future of work, whatever that might be.”

Will AI Ever Be Smarter Than a Baby?

I recently listened to a fascinating podcast where NY Times columnist Ezra Klein interviewed Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopney. Professor Gopney is best known for her research in cognitive science, particularly the study of children’s learning and development. She’s written extensively on the developmental phases of the human brain from babies to adults.

Gopnik, a member of the Berkeley AI Research group, has also been exploring the differences between human and machine intelligence, more specifically, what babies can teach us about AI. She’s long argued that babies and young children are smarter than we might think. In some ways, they’re even smarter than adults, let alone way smarter than the most advanced AIs.  

What do we mean by intelligence?

In 1994 the Wall Street Journal published the Mainstream Science on Intelligence, an article that included a definition that was agreed to by 52 leading academic researchers in fields associated with intelligence:

“Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings - ‘catching on,’ ‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do.”