Irving Wladawsky-Berger

AI Is Mostly About Business Value, Not Technology

A few months ago, Babson College professor Tom Davenport convened a virtual meeting of chief data and analytic officers (CDAO) from a variety of industries to discuss how to best achieve a return on investments (ROI) in AI. “We wanted to learn to what degree these senior leaders shared our perspective that AI faces an important economic return issue, and what, if anything, their companies were doing to address it.”  Many participants said that a decent ROI remains a critical issue for AI projects.

Davenport has long been analyzing how companies should build up their AI capabilities to achieve their business objectives.  For example, in a 2018 Harvard Business Review article he co-authored, Davenport advised companies to build their AI capabilities through the lens of business opportunities, rather than technology.  As has been generally the case with new technologies, highly ambitious, multi-year moon shot projects are less likely to be successful than low-hanging-fruit projects.  Business process automation is one of the least expensive and easiest capability to implement, since companies have long been engaged with enhancing and automating their business processes.

The following year, Davenport talked about the state of AI in the enterprise at the annual conference of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy  His talk was based on recent surveys by Deloitte of executives in US-based companies who were involved in AI projects.  The surveys found that 20-30% of enterprises were early adopters, having implemented at least one AI prototype or production application; most of the projects were in pilots with relatively few already in production; simple projects prevailed over more ambitious and complex ones; and implementation, integration, data issues and talent topped the list of challenges faced by these early adopters.

Are There Limits to the Predictability of Elections?

The elegant mathematical models of classical mechanics depict a world in which objects exhibit deterministic behaviors. These models make perfect predictions within the accuracy of their human-scale measurements.

But, once you start dealing with atoms, molecules and exotic subatomic particles, you find yourself in a very different  world, one with somewhat counter-intuitive behaviors governed by the laws of quantum mechanics.  The orderly, predictable models of classical physics have now given way to wave functions, uncertainty principles, quantum tunneling and wave-particle dualities.

But, the world of the very small is not the only one with non-deterministic behaviors.  So are highly complex systems, especially those systems whose components and interrelationships are themselves quite complex.  This is the case with social systems, which are based on individuals, groups, and institutions.  It’s quite a challenge to make accurate predictions in such systems due to the the dynamic nature of human behaviors.  Terms, like emergence, long tails, and butterfly effects - every bit as fanciful as quarks, charm and strangeness, - are part of the social systems lexicon.

Which brings us to the 2020 US election. “The polls were wrong again, and much of America wants to know why,” wrote NY Times journalist David Leonhardt in a recent article. “This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, such as FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Economist’s election unit,” said David Graham  in The Atlantic.

Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines

On November 18, the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future released its final report, The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines.  The Task Force was commissioned in the spring of 2018 by MIT President Rafael Reif to address what may well be the most critical question of the digital economy: as emerging technologies raise aggregate economic output and the wealth of nations, will they also enable people to attain higher living standards, better working conditions, greater economic security, and improved health and longevity?  An interim report was released in September, 2019.

“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,” is the Task Force overriding conclusion.  Yet, it argues that with better policies in place, more people could enjoy good careers even as new technologies transform the very nature of work.

AI Technologies Are Fundamentally Changing How Work Gets Done

After decades of promise and hype, artificial intelligence is finally becoming one of the most important technologies of our era.  AI technologies, like machine learning, are clearly having a major impact on the very nature of work.  But, how can we best quantify their impact on the actual evolution of jobs?

The best approach for exploring the relationship between technology and jobs is to look at the individual tasks that comprise a job.  Most jobs involve a number of tasks.  Some of these tasks are relatively routine and based on well-understood rules, while others require judgement, social skills and other human capabilities.  The more routine and rules-based the task, the more amenable it is to automation. 

However just because some of its component tasks have been automated, does not imply that the whole job has disappeared.  To the contrary, automating the more routine parts of a job will often increase the productivity and quality of workers by complementing their skills with technologies and tools, thus enabling them to focus on those aspect of the job that most need their attention.  While automation  substitutes for labor, automation also complements labor, increasing productivity and other economic outputs in ways that often raise the demand for and earnings of workers.

“The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) poses a new set of opportunities - and challenges - for work and workers,” said The Future of Work: How New Technologies Are Transforming Tasks, a research report released last Fall by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.  “The tasks that can be done by machine learning are much broader in scope than previous generations of technology have made possible.  The expanded scope will change the value employers place on tasks, and the types of skills most in demand.”

After Years of Promise and Hype, Is AI Once More Failing to Deliver?

The June 13 issue of The Economist included an in-depth look at the limits of AI, with seven articles on the subject.  “There is no question that AI - or, to be precise, machine learning, one of its sub-fields - has made much progress,” notes The Economist in the issue’s overview article.  “Computers have become dramatically better at many things they previously struggled with…  Yet lately doubts have been creeping in about whether today’s AI technology is really as world-changing as it seems.  It is running up against limits of one kind or another, and has failed to deliver on some of its proponents’ more grandiose promises.”

Transformative technologies, - remember the dot-com bubble, - are prone to hype cycles, when all the excitement and publicity accompanying their early achievements often lead to inflated expectations, followed by disillusionment if the technology fails to deliver.  But AI is in a class by itself, as the notion of machines achieving or surpassing human levels of intelligence has led to feelings of both wonder and fear over the past several decades.

The article reminds us that AI has gone through two such major hype cycles since the field began in the mid-1950s.  Early achievements, - like beating humans at checkers and proving logic theorems, - led researchers to conclude that machines would achieve human-level intelligence within a couple of decades.  This early optimism collapsed leading to the first so-called AI winter from 1974-1980.  The field was revived in the 1980s with the advent of commercial expert systems and Japan’s Fifth Generation project, but it didn’t last long, leading to the second AI winter from 1987-1993.

The Social Network Is the Computer

“Human beings have always been a social species,” writes MIT professor Sinan Aral in the opening paragraph of The Hype Machine, his recently published book.  “We’ve been communicating, cooperating, and coordinating with one another since we were hunting and gathering.”  Our increasingly complex social interactions have been the critical factor in the exponential increase of human cranial capacity over the past few million years.  “But today something is different.  Over the last decade, we’ve doused our kindling fire of human interaction with high-­octane gasoline.  We’ve constructed an expansive, multifaceted machine that spans the globe and conducts the flow of information, opinions, and behaviors through society.”

Professor Aral has been studying social media since its beginning in the early 2000s, when it was driven by the idealistic vision of connecting the world and providing free access to information.  The Hype Machine is what he now calls our global social media ecosystem.  This ecosystem has been designed to stimulate and manipulate the human psyche, “to draw us in and persuade us to change how we shop, vote, and exercise, and even who we love.”  His book nicely explains how the social media industrial complex works, how it affects us, and what we can do to help achieve its original vision while avoiding its later perils.  Let me discuss a few of its key points.

The AI Factory: A New Kind of Digital Operating Model

“Whether you’re leading a digital start-up or working to revamp a traditional enterprise, it’s essential to understand the revolutionary impact AI has on operations, strategy, and competition,” wrote Harvard professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani in “Competing in the Age of AI”, a recently published article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR).  Earlier this year, they also published a book of the same title, which expands on the ideas in the article and illustrates them with a number of concrete use cases.

The age of AI is being ushered by the emergence of a new kind of digital firm.  Rather than just relying on traditional business processes operated by its workers, these firms are leveraging software and data-driven algorithms to eliminate traditional constraints and transform the rules of competition.  Managers and engineers are responsible for the design of the new AI-based operational systems, but the system then runs the operations pretty much on its own.

“At the core of the new firm is a decision factory - what we call the AI factory,” note the authors.  “[T]he AI factory treats decision-making as a science.  Analytics systematically convert internal and external data into predictions, insights, and choices, which in turn guide and automate operational workflows…  As digital networks and algorithms are woven into the fabric of firms, industries begin to function differently and the lines between them blur.”

The Industrial Revolution transformed the economy by developing a scalable, repeatable approach to manufacturing.  The AI factory is now driving another fundamental transformation by industrializing the data gathering, decision making, and overall digital operations of 21st century firms.

Could AI Reshape the Global Balance of Power?

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) was established by the US Congress in Fiscal Year 2019 to “advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies by the United States to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.”  A few months ago, the 15 member Commission, - led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt  and former deputy secretary of defense Robert Work, - released its interim report. The final report is due to be released in March, 2021.  It remains to be seen how the Covid-19 pandemic will impact the final report’s recommendations and release date.

“The convergence of the artificial intelligence revolution and the reemergence of great power competition… threaten the United States’ role as the world’s engine of innovation and American military superiority,” said the interim report in its opening statements.  “How the United States adopts AI will have profound ramifications for our immediate security, economic well-being, and position in the world…  We are concerned that America’s role as the world’s leading innovator is threatened… We know strategic competitors are investing in research and application.  It is only reasonable to conclude that AI-enabled capabilities could be used to threaten our critical infrastructure, amplify disinformation campaigns, and wage war.”

Like the Internet, - let’s remember that ARPANET was started in the late 1960s by the US Department of Defense, - AI is usable for military and civilian purposes.  But, - also like the Internet, - AI is a general purpose technology that can be used for a wide variety of applications, many of them beneficial, but others potentially threatening.

The Post-Pandemic Enterprise: What Will It Be Like?

In the near term, nations have been mostly focused on surviving the massive disruptions caused by Covid-19.  But, what about the longer term?  What will the post-pandemic new normal be like for societies and economies?  More specifically, how will the pandemic impact the world of business?  How can enterprises leverage the crisis to accelerate their journey toward what most everyone agrees will be an even faster changing future?  As Rahm Emanuel famously said in a 2008 WSJ interview: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

“The future is not what we thought it would be only a few short months ago,” said a recent McKinsey article, From thinking about the next normal to making it work.  “As businesses step into the post-coronavirus future, they need to find a balance between what worked before and what needs to happen to succeed in the next normal.”  The article offers 21 concrete recommendations for succeeding in the next normal, organized into seven major areas.  Let me summarize a few of these recommendations.

Building a More Resilient, Data-Driven Economy

“With each major crisis, be it war, pandemic, or major new technology, there has been a need to reinvent the relationships between individuals, businesses, and government,” wrote MIT professor Alex “Sandy Pentland in the first chapter of Building the New Economy.  Pentland cites two major historical examples.  In the early 20th century, the rise of mass manufacturing led to the creation of regulations governing working conditions and pay, health rules for mass-produced foods, and laws to prevent monopolies that stifled competition.  Then in mid-century, the decades following WWII saw greater access to higher education, racial and gender progress, and increased support for scientific research and medical advances.

“Today we face two simultaneous disruptions: one is the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic shock, and the second is the rise of pervasive digital data, crypto systems, and artificial intelligence (AI).”  The two disruptions are highly interrelated.  Digital technologies have been deployed to fight the global pandemic as well as helping us stay connected as we practice social distancing.

But, these same technologies are also increasing the already high levels of disinformation and fraud, threatening privacy rights with well-meaning public health technology measures, and likely to impact employment as institutions accelerate their embrace of digitization, AI and automation.  “These problems highlight the need to reinvent the ways data and AI are used in all of societies’ civic and government systems, both to guarantee that future pandemics can be handled better and to reinvigorate the economy but also to spread the economic benefits throughout society.”

High resilience in the face of an uncertain, changing environment is the essence of evolution and natural selection.  Building a new post-pandemic economy requires the creation of more agile, resilient systems and institutions to help us better adapt to an unpredictable future and withstand turbulent events like Covid-19.  In a resilient economy, power and decision-making should be distributed among a diverse set of stakeholders rather than concentrated in a few hands.

Why “The Techlash” Is a Threat to Growth and Progress

A few months ago, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published A Policymaker’s Guide to the “Techlash” - What It Is and Why It’s a Threat to Growth and Progress.  “Does information technology (IT) solve problems and make our lives easier, allowing us to do more with less?,” asks the ITIF report.  “Or does it introduce additional complexity to our lives, isolate us from each other, threaten privacy, destroy jobs, and generate an array of other harms?”

It wasn’t all that long ago that digital technologies and Big Tech were largely seen as catalysts for positive change: the Internet had become a global platform for collaborative innovation; social media was a liberating force, helping democratic uprisings like the Arab Spring; and the smartphone was transforming the lives of people all over the world.

But, the 2010s saw the emergence of what’s come to be called the techlash.  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines techlash as “a strong and widespread negative reaction to the growing power and influence of large technology companies, particularly those based in Silicon Valley.”  The term seems to have originated in a November, 2013 article in The Economist, which said that tech elites are turning out to be some of the most ruthless capitalists around, and “will join bankers and oilmen in public demonology.”  By 2018, techlash was one of eight shortlisted entries for OED Word of the Year.

Even When Plans Are Useless, Planning Is Indispensable

“As scientists race to develop a cure for the coronavirus, businesses are trying to assess the impact of the outbreak on their own enterprises,” wrote MIT professor Yossi Sheffi in a February 18 article in the Wall Street Journal.  “Just as scientists are confronting an unknown enemy, corporate executives are largely working blind because the coronavirus could cause supply-chain disruptions that are unlike anything we have seen in the past 70 years.”

Sheffi is Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.  He’s written extensively on the critical need for resilience in global enterprises and their supply chains, - including The Power of Resilience and The Resilient Enterprise, - so they can better react to major unexpected events.  Covid-19 is the kind of massively disruptive event he had in mind when he wrote those books.

While learning from historical precedents is always a good idea, recent supply chain disruptions - the 2003 outbreak of SARS in Asia, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, or the 2011 Thailand floods, - were very different from our current pandemic.  Those events were much more localized, lasted a relatively short time, and they mostly impacted supply, not demand.  The impact of Covid-19 is much bigger, affecting consumer demand as well as supply chains all over the world, and likely to last quite a bit longer.  “Today’s supply chains are global and more complex than they were in 2003,” with factories all over the world affected by lockdowns and quarantines.  Apple, for example, works with suppliers in 43 countries.

What History Tells Us About the Accelerating AI Revolution

A few weeks before our lives were turned upside down by Covid-19, I read Technology at Work v4.0, the fourth report in the Technology at Work Series developed by Citigroup in collaboration with Oxford University.  The report includes an excellent chapter on What History Tells Us About the Coming AI Revolution by Oxford professor Carl Benedikt Frey based on his 2019 book The Technology Trap.

Recent AI advances have “sparked much excitement…  yet despite this, most ordinary people don’t feel particularly optimistic about the future,” wrote Frey.  For example, a 2017 Pew Research survey found that three quarters of Americans expressed serious concerns about AI and automation, and just over a third believe that their children will be better off financially than they were.

But, in fact, serious concerns about the impact of technology are part of a historical pattern.  “Many of the trends we see today, such as the disappearance of middle-income jobs, stagnant wages and growing inequality were also features of the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain around 1750.  This was a period of unprecedented technological change but also one of turbulent social and political change.”

An Increasingly Digital “New Normal”

About a dozen years ago, I attended a conference where I was interviewed on stage by then WSJ technology columnist Walter Mossberg.  He started out by asking me about IBM’s near-death experience in the early 1990s, and the subsequent technical and cultural transformation that made it possible for IBM to reinvent itself and survive, while many other IT companies didn’t make it.  In particular, we discussed whether a successful company transformation must be preceded by the kind of major crisis IBM went through.  When it comes to humans, the ancient Greeks certainly thought so, as reflected in their tragedies.

Transformative change is very difficult for established companies.  Over the years, they’ve amassed valuable assets and extensive organizations.  Already consumed with managing their existing operations, they may look at transformative change as more of a threat or distraction than an opportunity, - unless they’re in dire straits and have no other choice, as was the case with IBM.

A serious crisis is an opportunity for companies to focus on the actions needed to survive in a fast changing environment.  As Rahm Emanuel famously said in a 2008 interview with the WSJ: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”  In that spirit, how should companies take advantage of the Covid-19 crisis, - arguably the biggest shock the world has experienced since WWII, - to accelerate their journey toward what most everyone agrees will be an increasingly digital future?

The Urgent Need to Strengthen the Nation’s Resilience

Following World War II and the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the US undertook a series of measures to strengthen the resilience of the country.  These included a significant expansion of government support for scientific research in universities and R&D labs, leading to product innovations from the private sector and better weapons from the defense industry, which contributed to making the US the most prosperous and secure nation in the world.

Another important measure was the expansion of educational opportunities, like the GI Bill which offered the nation’s 16 million WWII veterans payments of tuition and living expenses to attend high school, college or vocational/technical schools.  By 1956, over 2.2 million had used the GI Bill to attend college or university, and 5.8 million had used it for some kind of job training program.

In the 1950s the government enacted the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which led to the construction of over 48,000 miles of the Interstate Highway System at a total price estimated at over $500 billion, - the largest public work in America .  The Act had a dual purpose: facilitating the economic growth of the country as well as supporting the country’s defense during a conventional or nuclear war should it be necessary.

And, last but far from least, in the late 1960s the government launched ARPANET, the digital infrastructure that eventually became the Internet.  ARPANET was supported by the Department of Defense to significantly enhance the resilience of the country following a nuclear attack by enabling computers to communicate with each other using a flexible packet-switching digital network.

But, this post-war focus on resilience has significantly waned over the past few decades.  Let me explain.

Blockchain and Public Health Solutions

The Blockchain Research Institute (BRI) is a global think tank dedicated to the strategic implications of blockchain technologies to business, government and society.  On March 26, I participated in a virtual roundtable convened by the BRI to discuss the potential use of blockchain technologies for public health solutions.  The roundtable’s findings and recommendations were released in early April in Blockchain Solutions in Pandemics: A Call for Innovation and Transformation in Public Health.

The report identified five key areas where blockchain could be deployed to fight Covid-19 as well as future pandemics: identity, health records and shared data; just-in-time supply chains; sustaining the economy; a rapid response registry for medical professionals; and incentives models to reward responsible behavior.  In each of these areas, the report presented uses cases where blockchain is already being deployed, and recommended a number of blockchain related public health measures that will help better prepare for future pandemics.  Given the broad scope of the report, I will focus my attention on one area in particular: identity, health records and shared data.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Distancing Policies

One of the most interesting projects in the MIT Connection Science group I’m affiliated with is The Atlas of Inequality.  The project, - led by visiting professor Esteban Moro and professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland - uses aggregated anonymous geolocation data from digital devices to estimate where different groups of people in US cities spend their time.  Over time, the project will be expanded to cities around the world.  The data show the significant income inequality among people in those cities, not just by neighborhoods as you’d expect, but also in the restaurants, stores and other places beyond their neighborhoods which they visit every day.

A couple of weeks ago, the Atlas research group started to apply their geolocation data and methods to analyze the effectiveness of the social distancing policies adopted in the New York metropolitan area in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  These policies include school closures, bans on non-essential gatherings, limiting restaurants to take-out orders, and strict stay-in-place measures.   There’s no way to empirically measure the impact of these social distancing measures in real time on the spread of Covid-19.  You can only measure their impact retrospectively, or simulate what might happen in the future based on past data.

However, you can empirically address a key set of important question: how have these social distancing policies changed mobility and social behavior?; how does social distancing behavior vary across the New York metropolitan area?; how does the behavior vary across the variety of demographic groups in the NY metro area?; and overall, how well are people following these social distance measures?

The 2019 Artificial Intelligence Index

AI has emerged as the defining technology of our era, as transformative over time as the steam engine, electricity, and the Internet.  While still in its early stages, AI is already reshaping the economy, society, our personal lives and the very nature of work, with much more to come as the technology and applications mature, including the scientific research necessary to anticipate and fight future pandemics.  But, what’s the current state of AI and where is it heading?

To help address these important questions, the annual Artificial Intelligence Index was created under the auspices of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, - guided by a Steering Committee of experts from academia and industry, and in collaboration with a number of sponsoring partners and data contributors.  The AI Index aims to “provide unbiased, rigorous, and comprehensive data for policymakers, researchers, journalists, executives, and the general public to develop a deeper understanding of the complex field of AI.”

Now in its third year, the 2019 AI Index Report was released this past December.  So was the associated 2019 AI Index Data, which includes three times as many data sets as the 2018 edition.  The report  comprises nine chapters.  Let me summarize a few of its highlights.

The Coming Era of Decision Machines

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is the pursuit of machines that are able to act purposefully to make decisions towards the pursuit of goals,” wrote Harvard professor David Parkes in A Responsibility to Judge Carefully in the Era of Prediction Decision Machines, an essay recently published as part of Harvard’s Digital Initiative.  “Machines need to be able to predict to decide, but decision making requires much more.  Decision making requires bringing together and reconciling multiple points of view.  Decision making requires leadership in advocating and explaining a path forward.  Decision making requires dialogue.”

In April, 2017 I attended a seminar by University of Toronto professor Avi Goldfarb on the economic value of AI.  Goldfarb explained that the best way to assess the impact of a new radical technology is to look at how the technology reduces the cost of a widely used function.  For example, computers are essentially powerful calculators whose cost of digital operations have dramatically decreased over the past several decades.  Over the years, we’ve learned to define all kinds of tasks in terms of digital operations, e.g., financial transactions, word processing, photography.  Similarly, the Internet has drastically reduced the cost of communications and of access to all kinds of information, - including text, pictures, music and videos.

Viewed through this lens, the AI revolution can be viewed as reducing the cost of predictions.  Prediction means anticipating what is likely to happen in the future.  Over the past decade, increasingly powerful and inexpensive computers, advanced machine learning algorithms, and the explosive growth of big data have enabled us to extract insights from all that data and turn them into valuable predictions.

Given the widespread role of predictions in business, government and everyday life, AI is already having a major impact on many human activities.  As was previously the case with arithmetic, communications and access to information, - we will be able to use predictions in all kinds of new applications.  Over time, we’ll discover that lots of tasks can be reframed as prediction problems.

The Long-Term Future of Work and Education: Three Potential Scenarios

“Experts differ widely in their predictions about how technological innovation will change the labor market, but they all see a need for changes in education,” write British professors Ewart Keep and Phillip Brown in  a recently published article, Rethinking the Race Between Education and Technology.  While experts don’t generally agree on much, they’re pretty much of one mind when it comes to the growing importance of skills and education in our 21st century digital economy.

Every past technological transformation ultimately led to more jobs, higher living standards and economic growth.  But, as a number of recent studies concluded, to ensure that this will indeed be the case, our emerging knowledge economy should be accompanied by the expansion of educational opportunities for everyone.

While noting that this is the most likely scenario for the next 10 - 15 years, Keep and Brown also consider two potential longer-term scenarios.  Perhaps AI will lead to even more pervasive and fundamental transformations in the nature of work, making it difficult for even those with a college or higher education to find a good job.  Beyond that, some have suggested that in the more distant future we might see an even more radical, science-fiction-like transformation: the end of work as we’ve long known it.

The authors argue that considering such a spectrum of possibilities will help us better prepare for what’s essentially an unpredictable future.  In that spirit, their paper discusses three different labor market scenarios: labor scarcity, job scarcity, and the end of work.

Can Democracy and Free Markets Survive in the Coming Age of AI?

Can technology plan economies and destroy democracy? is the provocative title of an essay in the end-of-2019 issue of The Economist.  “The success of market- and semi-market-based economies… has made the notion of a planned economy seem like a thing of the past.”  But, given all the data that can now be gathered by billions of smartphones and 10s of billions of sensors, - with many more to come, - could our increasingly intelligent and powerful AI systems “replace the autonomous choices on which the market is based?… And if technology can outperform the invisible hand in the economy, might it be able to do the same at the ballot box when it comes to politics?” 

As we’ve already seen, AI applications “can provide not just data on what people want and will tolerate, but also the means to manipulate those desires.  When such means are available to actors within or outside a state the struggle to gain, or for that matter retain, a democracy which reflects a genuine popular will might become even harder than it is.”  Could this all mean that free-market economics and liberal democracy will become obsolete over the coming century?

These questions were often raised and repeatedly tested throughout the 20th century, as various governments attempted to redesign their economies and societies in accord with what were believed to be scientific laws.  But, most such schemes, especially those carried out by authoritarian states, ended up as complete failures.  And some went tragically awry, - like Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union and Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, - both of which brought death and disruption to millions.

The State of AI Adoption - High Performers Show the Way

For the past few years, the McKinsey Global Institute has been conducting a yearly survey to assess the state of AI adoption.  Its 2017 survey of over 3,000 AI-aware executive found that outside the technology sector, AI adoption was at an early, often experimental stage.  Only 20% of respondents used any AI-related technology in a core part to their business.  A common theme throughout the report was that the same players who were leaders in the earlier waves of digitization and analytics were the early leaders in the AI wave.

The McKinsey 2018 survey garnered responses from over 2,000 participants from a wide range of company sizes across 10 industry sectors.  Overall, the 2018 survey found that while the business world had begun to adopt AI, few companies had in place the foundational building blocks that would help them to generate value from AI at scale.  30% were conducting AI pilots.  Nearly half, 47%, had embedded at least one AI capability in their standard business processes, but only 21% reported using AI across multiple business functions.  AI investments were still quite small, with almost 60% of respondents saying that less that one-tenth of their digital budgets went toward AI.

The most recent Global AI Survey was published in November of 2019.  McKinsey garnered responses from over 2,300 participants, nearly 80% of whose companies were using AI in some capacity.  Overall,  the survey showed that “Most companies report measurable benefits from AI where it has been deployed; however, much work remains to scale impact, manage risks, and retrain the workforce.”  AI is becoming more mainstream, with 58% of respondents using AI in at least one function, - a nearly 25% increase over the previous year; and 30% reported using AI across multiple business units, - a nearly 50% increase.

One of the survey’s major findings is that a small share of high performers, around 3% of companies using AI, are already achieving outsize business results.   High performing companies are much further along in scaling the use of AI in their organizations, with an average of 11 different use cases compared an average of 3 among the other companies.

Conceptualizing AI in Human Terms is Misleading and Potentially Harmful

“We speak of machines that think, learn, and infer.  The name of the discipline itself - artificial intelligence - practically dares us to compare our human modes of reasoning with the behavior of algorithms,” writes Oxford doctoral candidate David Watson in his recently published article The Rhetoric and Reality of Anthropomorphism in Artificial Intelligence.  “Despite the temptation to fall back on anthropomorphic tropes when discussing AI, however, I conclude that such rhetoric is at best misleading and at worst downright dangerous.  The impulse to humanize algorithms is an obstacle to properly conceptualizing the ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies.”

What do we mean by intelligence?  In 1994 the Wall Street Journal published a definition which reflected the consensus of 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.”  This is a very good definition of general intelligence, - the kind of intelligence that’s long been measured in IQ tests, and that, for the foreseeable future, only humans have.

On the other hand, specialized intelligence, - the ability to effectively address well-defined, specific goals in a given environment, - is the kind of task-oriented intelligence that’s part of many human jobs.  In the past several years, our increasingly smart machines have become quite proficient at handling a variety of such specialized intelligent tasks.  AI technologies are approaching or surpassing human levels of performance in vision, speech recognition, language translation, the early detection and diagnosis of various forms of cancer, and other capabilities that were once viewed as the exclusive domain of humans.

Why Some AI Efforts Succeed While Many Fail

Winning with AI, - a 2019 report based on a survey jointly conducted by the MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group, - found that 90% of respondents agree that AI represents a business opportunity for their company.  The global survey attracted over 2,500 respondents from 29 industries and 97 countries, and conducted interviews with 17 executives leaders of AI initiatives in large organizations.

The report classified the total survey population into four subgroups based on their understanding of AI tools and concepts and their levels of adoption of AI applications: Pioneers (20%) are leading-edge organizations that both understand and have widely adopted AI; Investigators (30%) understand AI but have not deployed applications beyond the pilot stage; Experimenters (18%) are learning by doing, conducting pilots without a deep understanding of AI; and Passives (32%) have not adopted AI and have little understanding of the technology.

“Many AI initiatives fail,” was the report’s overriding finding.  “Seven out of 10 companies surveyed report minimal or no impact from AI so far.  Among the 90% of companies that have made at least some investment in AI, fewer than 2 out of 5 report obtaining any business gains from AI in the past three years. This number improves to 3 out of 5 when we include companies that have made significant investments in AI.  Even so, this means 40% of organizations making significant investments do not report business gains from AI.”

Innovation and National Security in the 21st Century

“Countries that can harness the current wave of innovation, mitigate its potential disruptions, and capitalize on its transformative power will gain economic and military advantages over potential rivals,” was the top finding of the Innovation and National Security Task Force which was commissioned by the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) to assess the current state of US technological innovation.  The Task Force noted that leadership in innovation, research and technology since World War II has made the US the most secure and economically prosperous nation on earth.

“Today, this leadership position is at risk,” the Task Force warned.  Federal support and funding for R&D has stagnated over the past two decades.  “Washington has failed to maintain adequate levels of public support and funding for basic science.  Federal investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP peaked at 1.86 percent in 1964 but has declined from a little over 1 percent in 1990 to 0.66 percent in 2016.”

The US has successfully responded to technological competition in the past.  Sputnik was a tipping point in the space race with the Soviet Union during the cold war, leading to, among other things, a significant increase in the number of graduate student fellowships in STEM disciplines, of which I was personally a beneficiary.  Another prominent example is the strong economic competition from Japan in the 1980s, which the US fended off a decade later with our leadership in the Internet and other major digital innovations.

The Internet of Things is Changing the World

“How the world will change as computers spread into everyday objects,” is the title of the lead article in a comprehensive review of the Internet of Things (IoT) in a recent issue of The Economist.  Like many technological advances, IoT has been long in coming.  Ubiquitous or Pervasive Computing dates back to the 1990s, when neither the necessary low-cost devices and wireless networks were anywhere near ready.  “But the transformation is about to go into overdrive, notes The Economist.  “One forecast is that by 2035 the world will have a trillion connected computers, built into everything from food packaging to bridges and clothes.”

IoT promises to bring many benefits, including a whole new generation of innovative products.  We’ve long thought of products as physical entities built with a combination of mechanical and electrical components, - e.g., appliances, cars, agricultural machines, industrial equipment, - some quite simple and some highly complex.  IoT has been ushering a whole new class of smart connected products.  In addition to mechanical and electrical components, these new products use digital components like microprocessors, sensors, data storage, software, and connectivity in a wide variety of ways.

As the world’s digital and physical infrastructures converge, digital technologies are being designed right into all kinds of consumer and industrial products.  Internet-connected smart doorbells, for example, include motion sensors and video cameras that notify a home owner when someone arrives at the door.  Using a smartphone app, the home owner can watch and talk to the visitor, while a video of their interaction is saved for an added level of security.

“The magic of computers is that they provide in a machine an ability - to calculate, to process information, to decide - that used to be the sole preserve of biological brains,” writes The Economist.  “The IoT foresees a world in which this magic becomes ubiquitous.  Countless tiny chips will be woven into buildings, cities, clothes and human bodies, all linked by the internet… Over the past century electricity has allowed consumers and businesses at least in the rich world, access to a fundamental, universally useful good - energy - when and where they needed it.  The IoT aims to do for information what electricity did for energy.”

The Puzzling Economic Impact of Transformative Technologies

“General purpose technologies (GPTs) are engines for growth,…” wrote Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson in The Productivity J-Curve, a working paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).  “These are the defining technologies of their times and can radically change the economic environment.  They have great potential from the outset, but realizing that potential requires larger intangible and often unmeasured investments and a fundamental rethinking of the organization of production itself.”

As we’ve learned over the past two centuries, there’s generally been a significant time lag between the broad acceptance of a major new transformative technology and its ensuing impact on companies, governments and other institutions.  Even after reaching a tipping point of market acceptance, it takes considerable time, - often decades, - for these new technologies and business models to be widely embraced across economies and societies, - and for their full benefits to be realized.

In her 2002 influential book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, economic historian Carlota Perez wrote that since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve had a major technological revolution every 60 years or so.  First was the age of machines and factories in the latter part of the 18th century.  This was followed by the age of steam, coal and iron in the early to mid 19th century; electricity and steel around the 1870s-1880s; and automobiles, oil and mass production in the early decades of the 20th century.  Then came the computer and communications revolution in the latter part of the 20th century, ushering the transition from the industrial economy of the past two centuries to our present digital economy.

According to Perez, the economic transformations accompanying these technologies are composed of two distinct periods, each lasting roughly 20 to 30 years.  First comes the installation period when the new technologies emerge into the marketplace, entrepreneurs launch many new startups, and venture capitalists encourage experimentation with new business models. This is then followed by the deployment period, when the now well accepted technologies and business models become the norm, leading to long-term economic and productivity growth.

Can AI Help Develop and Execute a Competitive Business Strategy?

Strategy For and With AI, a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review by David Kiron and Michael Schrage, argues that while formulating a comprehensive strategy for the use of AI technologies is absolutely necessary, it’s not sufficient.  “Creating strategy with AI matters as much - or even more - in terms of exploring and exploiting strategic opportunity.”  The article is based on a survey of over 3,000 executives, managers and analysts from companies in over 100 countries and 20 industries, as well as on interviews with executives and academics.

AI is expected to be the biggest commercial opportunity for companies and industries over the next couple of decades.  Two 2018 reports, one by PwC and one by McKinsey, estimated that AI has the potential to incrementally add around $13-$15 trillion to global economic output by 2030.  The growth will come from productivity gains, - e,g, the continuing automation of routine tasks, and AI-based tools to augment human capabilities, - and from increasingly sophisticated, AI-enhanced products, services, and system-wide applications.

Machine learning advances, like deep learning, have played a central role in AI’s recent achievements, giving computers the ability to be trained by ingesting and analyzing large amounts of data instead of being explicitly programmed.  Machine learning methods for solving problems, - subtle adjustments to the numerical weights that interconnect huge number of artificial neurons, - are radically different and complement the way humans solve problems.  But, while being a very powerful tool, machine learning, and AI in general, lack all-important human qualities like common sense and empathy, so their decisions and suggestions should be carefully reviewed by humans.  People and technology must closely collaborate, with each playing the particular role they are best at.

Every day we can read about the latest AI advances from research labs, startups and large companies.  AI technologies are approaching or surpassing human levels of performance in vision, speech recognition, language translation, playing championship-level Go, and the early detection and diagnosis of various forms of cancer.  But, can AI help address broad, open-ended and ambiguous problems like developing and executing a competitive business strategy?

The Increasing Demand for Hybrid, “T-Shaped” Workers

A recent article in The Atlantic used the USS Gabrielle Giffords to illustrate the important changes taking place in the US Navy, - and in the world of work in general.  After discussing various features of its advanced design, the article noted that the ship’s most futuristic aspect is its crew.  “It was designed to operate with a mere 40 souls on board - one-fifth the number aboard comparably sized legacy ships and a far cry from the 350 aboard a World War II destroyer.  The small size of the crew means that each sailor must be like the ship itself: a jack of many trades and not, as 240 years of tradition have prescribed, a master of just one,” noted the article.  Due to increasingly sophisticated technologies and the high cost of personnel, the USS Gabrielle Giffords is among a new class of Navy ships that’s turned away from specialists in favor of so-called hybrid sailors who are able to handle multiple tasks and rapidly acquire new skills.

The replacement of highly specialized workers with problem-solving generalists who are able to handle and quickly learn new tasks has been taking place across a wide variety of  occupations and industries.  Increased productivity and lower costs, i.e., doing more with less, are some of the reasons for this change.  But, the increased complexity of products, applications and systems, and the unanticipated problems that often follow are other important reasons.

The concept of hybrid or T-shaped workers was first introduced around 25 years ago as a metaphor to describe the kind of individuals that the Navy and many other organizations are looking for.  The vertical stroke in the letter T represents a depth of skills and expertise in one or more specific fields; the horizontal bar implies broad multidisciplinary and social skills, as well as the ability to collaborate with experts across disciplines to jointly solve complex problems.

Impact of AI on Government - Opportunities and Challenges

A few weeks ago I wrote about Leveraging AI to Transform Government based on a 2018 report by the Partnership for Public Service and the IBM Center for the Business of Government.  The report illustrates how government is using AI by describing four use cases being pursued by different agencies.  In 2019, the Partnership and IBM collaborated on two additional reports, Assessing the Impact of AI on the Work of Government, and Building Trust, Managing Risks.

This first report is focused on the impact of AI on the federal workforce, based on an analysis of the jobs and tasks most susceptible to automation, as well as on roundtables and interviews with over 40 AI experts.  The overriding conclusion is that, over time, AI will have a deep impact on how government works.  More than 80 different federal occupations, employing over 130,000 workers, are likely be significantly transformed, including 30,000 in the Treasury Department, 16,000 in Defense, and 5,000 in Transportation, as well as a variety of occupations in independent agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Government Publishing Office.

In particular, AI will have a major impact in three key areas: the transformation of the federal workday, the potential for personalized customer service and the increased importance of technical and data skills.  Let me summarize the findings and recommendations in each of these areas.

Leveraging AI to Transform Government

“AI has the potential to help address many of our country’s pervasive problems and advance our safety, health and well-being,” said The Future Has Begun, a report on the impact of AI on government by the Partnership for Public Service and the IBM Center for the Business of Government.  “That promise has great potential to transform government.”

 “The most challenging problems AI may help us solve - from fighting terrorists to serving vulnerable populations - will involve government.  More immediately, though not less consequentially, AI will change the way public servants do their jobs.  Because of the impact AI could have on how governments ensure our safety and further our well-being, government leaders are likely to play a significant role in dictating future directions for AI.”

To illustrate how government is using AI, the report is focused on four concrete use cases being pursued by different agencies.  In-depth interviews were conducted with 14 people from 10 organizations, including the various government agencies involved, as well as their collaborators in non profits and universities.  Let me briefly summarize each of these four case studies.

The MIT Work of the Future Report

“The world now stands on the cusp of a technological revolution in artificial intelligence and robotics that may prove as transformative for economic growth and human potential as were electrification, mass production, and electronic telecommunications in their eras,” said the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future in its recently released interim report.  The final report will be issued after conducting additional research over the next year.

The Task Force was convened in the spring of 2018 by MIT President Rafael Reif to address what may well be the most critical question of the digital economy: as emerging technologies raise aggregate economic output and the wealth of nations, will they also enable people to attain higher living standards, better working conditions, greater economic security, and improved health and longevity?

The report’s overriding conclusion is that the likelihood that AI and automation will wipe out major workforce sectors in the near future is exaggerated.  However, we’ve already seen important reasons for concern, especially the rising polarization of employment and wage distribution over the past few decades, which has disproportionately benefited high-skilled professionals while reducing opportunities for mid- and low-skilled workers.

“[A] critical challenge is not necessarily a lack of jobs, but the low quality of many jobs and the resulting lack of viable careers for many people, particularly workers without college degrees.  With this in mind, the work of the future can be shaped beneficially by new policies, renewed support for labor, and reformed institutions, not just new technologies. Broadly, the task force concludes, capitalism in the U.S. must address the interests of workers as well as shareholders.”

How to Support the Widespread Adoption of AI

“Artificial intelligence is reshaping business - though not at the blistering pace many assume,” notes Building the AI-Powered Organization, an article in Harvard Business Review by McKinsey partners Tim Fountaine, Brian McCarthy, and Tamim Saleh in its opening sentence.  A number of studies agree that AI is the biggest commercial opportunity for companies and industries over the next 10-15 years.  Two recent reports by McKinsey and PwC respectively concluded that AI has the potential to incrementally increase global economic output between now and 2030 by an additional $13 to $15 trillion.

“Yet, despite the promise of AI, many organizations’ efforts with it are falling short,” adds the HBR article.  Surveys with thousands of executives, showed that most firms are only using AI in ad hoc pilots or applying it to a single business process.  Only 8% of firms are engaged in practices that support widespread adoption.

Why the slow progress?  “At the highest level, it’s a reflection of a failure to rewire the organization.  In our surveys and our work with hundreds of clients, we’ve seen that AI initiatives face formidable cultural and organizational barriers…  at most businesses that aren’t born digital, traditional mindsets and ways of working run counter to those needed for AI.”

To support the widespread adoption of AI, companies must make three fundamental shifts.

The State of AI in the Enterprise

A few months ago, Babson College professor Tom Davenport gave a talk on the state of AI in the enterprise at the annual conference of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.  His talk was based on two recent US surveys conducted by Deloitte, the first one in 2017 followed by a second in 2018.  Davenport was a co-author of both reports.

The 2017 survey was focused on the responses of 250 US executives who were leading the applications of AI in their companies.  The larger 2018 survey reached out to 1,100 IT (46%) and line-of-business (54%) executives from US-based companies (64% at the C-level) and 10 different industries.  All of these respondents were early AI adopters compared with their counterparts in an average company, - 90% were directly involved in their company’s AI projects, and 75% said that they had an excellent understanding of AI.

Davenport started his talk by summarizing the key findings in the Deloitte surveys:

• 20-30% of enterprises are early adopters, having implemented at least one AI prototype or production application;
  
• Many projects are in pilots but some are already in production;
• Relatively simple low hanging fruit projects prevail over more ambitious and complex moon shots;
  
• Only 24% cited “reducing headcount through automation” as one of their top AI priorities;
• The great majority of respondents believe that AI leads to moderate or substantial changes in job roles and skills;
• Implementation, integration, data issues and talent top the list of challenges faced by early adopters;
  
• Further AI growth is inevitable.

Using Agile Processes to Develop AI-Based Solutions

In the waterfall development model, a project is broken down into a set of sequential phases, - e.g., conception, analysis, design, construction, testing, deployment, maintenance, - each dependent on the completion of the previous phase.  Such a model is most appropriate for complex engineering projects, like bridges, airplanes and computer hardware.  It’s also quite applicable for mission critical software and infrastructure projects where security, availability, scalability and other ilities are paramount.

But, a serial, orderly approach isn’t appropriate for projects where time-to-market, usability, and flexibility are the highest priorities.  For such projects, an agile development approach is much more suitable.  Key to the agile approach is the involvement of the product’s target end-users early in the process to make sure that the product under development is responsive to their requirements. 

Agile development is evolutionary in nature, based on the early availability of experimental prototypes, user feedback, continuous improvements, and rapid responses to technology, market and user requirements.  It’s not surprising that agile software development took off in the 1990s, when the explosive rise of the Internet brought millions and millions of users online, lots of new user-oriented applications, and short time-to-market cycles in response to fierce competition.

Our increasingly sophisticated smart machines bring with them a whole new set of development challenges.  These AI-based systems are generally software-intensive, user-centric, and data-driven.  Their complexity goes way up the smarter we want the systems to be.  The behavior of an AI system based on machine learning depends on the information we use to train its algorithms rather than on the precise set of software instructions that tell the computer what to do.

AI systems are designed to sense, respond and adapt to a changing environment.  Their development feels sort of like bringing up and sending a teen-ager into the world.  Given that we want them to be able to handle unanticipated situations, they must have a fair degree of flexibility and autonomy.  But, it’s hard to be sure that the system (or the teen-ager) will always behave the way we’d like them to.

A Quarter Century into the Digital Age

The digital age was born around 25 years ago with the public release of the Netscape browser in 1994.  The browser made it much, much easier for the average person to access information over the Internet, sparking the explosive growth of users, websites and online applications.  This was a truly historical point, marking the transition from the industrial economy of the past couple of centuries to a new kind of digital economy.   Ever since those days, the digital age has continued to advance driven by a stream of new technologies, and business models, from smartphones and cloud to big data and machine learning.

A few months ago, the McKinsey Global Institute published Twenty-five Years of Digitization, a report offering ten insights to help business leaders navigate this still relatively new digital world.  Let me first list the ten insights, and then briefly comment on a few of them.

• Large economic potential is linked to digitization - and much of it is yet to be captured;
• Digital superstars are rising far beyond the US big four and China’s big three;
• Digital natives are calling the shots;
• Digital changes everything - even industry boundaries;
• Agile is the new way to compete;
• Playing the platform economy is an in-the-money option;
• Self-cannibalization and innovation are a necessity for digital reinvention;
• Going after the right M&A is key;
• Effective management of digital transformation is vital - but challenging; and
  
• Leveraging, and transitioning from, digital to new frontier technologies is an imperative.

The Challenges of Automation in a Fast Changing Economy

“Technological innovation should be embraced,” notes Automation and a Changing Economy, a recently published report by The Aspen Institute.  “Automation has been a largely positive economic and social force, and looking forward,   automation will be necessary to feed, house, and raise the living standards of a growing and aging population.” 

But, “While it is important to note that automation’s overall, long-run effect on the economy has been positive - more jobs, more growth, higher living standards - this does not negate the disruptive impact of automation on individuals and communities, which results from displacements, changing skill needs, and income inequality.”

The report is divided into two sections: The Case for Action, which explores how automation impacts the economic security and opportunity of American workers, and Policies for Shared Prosperity, which outlines a policy agenda for addressing automation’s challenges and opportunities.  Let me summarize the key conclusions and recommendations in each of the report’s two sections.

AI and the Evolution of History

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the event I attended on February 28 to celebrate the launch of MIT’s new Schwarzman College of Computing, - MIT’s strategic response to the rise of artificial intelligence, - a technology that will reshape “geopolitics, our economy, our daily lives and the very definition of work” in the decades to come.  The all-day celebration featured talks and panels on a wide variety of topics, some focused on innovative applications of AI technologies, others on the challenging issues raised by these powerful technologies.

A few weeks later I wrote about one of these challenging issues, the impact of AI on our social interactions, based on the talk by MIT professor Sherry Turkle on Rethinking Friction in Digital Culture, and a related article by Yale professor Nicholas Christakis on How AI Will Rewire US.

I now want to discuss the interview conducted by NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman with former US Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger at the February 28 event.  The interview, - which can be seen in this video, - was based on a June, 2018 article by Dr. Kissinger in The Atlantic, - How the Enlightenment Ends: “Philosophically, intellectually - in every way - human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.”

The Third Wave of the Digital Economy - Promises and Challenges

“The next wave of digital innovation is coming.  Countries can welcome it, prepare for it, and ride it to new heights of innovation and prosperity, or they can ignore the changing tide and miss the wave,” writes Robert Atkinson in The Task Ahead of Us.  Atkinson is founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a think tank focused on science and technology policy.

We’re now entering the third wave of the digital economy, says Atkinson.  The first was based on personal computing, the Internet, Web 1.0, and e-commerce.  The second brought us Web 2.0, big data, smartphones and cloud computing.  The emerging third wave promises to be significantly more connected, - including higher bandwidth and a wide variety of devices; more automated, - with more work being done by machines while integrating the physical and digital worlds; and more intelligent, - leveraging huge volumes of data and advanced algorithms to help us understand and deal with our increasingly complex world.

“Building and adopting the new connected, automated, and intelligent technology system will lead to enormous benefits globally, not least of which will be robust rates of productivity growth and improvements in living standards.  Moreover, these technologies will help address pressing global challenges related to the environment, public health, and transportation, among others.”

We’re in the early stages of this third wave.  5G, IoT, robotics, AI and other promising technologies are being embraced by early marketplace adopters, but their full-scale impact is still 5 to 10 years away.  We’re in a period not unlike the late 1980s, when it was clear that IT was on the brink of a major transition, but the Internet revolution didn’t arrive until the mid-1990s.

The Top Ten Emerging Technologies of 2018

For the past several years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has published an annual list of the Top Ten Emerging Technologies that would be potentially disruptive over the next three to five years while also providing significant benefits to economies and societies.  Starting in 2017, the Top Ten list has been chosen in collaboration with Scientific American and published in an issue of the magazine.

The Top Ten Emerging Technologies 2018 was released in September, 2018.  The final list was selected by a steering group of experts from an initial list with more than 50 submissions.  Here are the 10 technologies comprising the 2018 list, along with the reasons cited in the report for their selection:

What Might Work Look Like in 2030?

A number of recent studies have taken a close look at the the future of work over the next 10 to 15 years.  For example, a December, 2017 report by McKinsey examined which jobs will likely be displaced by automation through 2030, as well as which jobs are likely to be created over the same period, based on data from 46 countries.

McKinsey’s overall conclusion was that a growing technology-based economy will create a significant number of new occupations which will more than offset declines in occupations displaced by automation.  However, “while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030 under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging - matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.”

Another report, The Changing Nature of Work, - published by the World Bank in October, 2018, - concluded that our problem is not that there won’t be enough work in the future.  The key problem is that, in many countries, the workforce isn’t prepared for a fast unfolding future. Neglecting investments in human capital, - i.e., the sum total of a population’s health, skills, knowledge, and experience, - will dramatically weaken a country’s competitiveness.

Let me now discuss Eight Futures of Work Scenarios and their Implications, a white paper published in January, 2018 by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).  The paper considered eight distinct scenarios on what work might be like by 2030, based on different combinations of three of the most impactful and uncertain variables affecting the future of work: the rate of technological change; the evolution of learning in the workforce; and the magnitude of talent mobility across geographies.

AI and our Social Interactions

I recently wrote about the event I attended on February 28 to celebrate the launch of MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing.  This new interdisciplinary College is MIT’s response to the rise of artificial intelligence, - a profoundly powerful technology that will likely reshape our economy, society and personal lives in the decades to come.  But, attaining AI’s broad potential will require not only a continuing slew of technological innovations, but equally important research on the challenges our society must get ready for, including ethical issues, workplace disruptions, and human interactions.

The event included keynotes and panels on a wide variety of topics. One of the talks I found most interesting was Rethinking Friction in Digital Culture by Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology.

In her many writings and seminars, - including her 2011 best-seller Alone Together, -  Professor Turkle has long been warning about the impact of technology on our social interactions.  “Most of us here today were introduced to the idea of friction free as a really good thing,” she said at the start of her keynote.  “It’s an aesthetic of engineering efficiency, so why shouldn’t it be a really good thing?”  This idea that technical things should be friction free and smooth easily bleeds into other domains. “Efficiency becomes aspirational - in politics, in business, in education, and in our thinking about relationships.”

She cited a few examples of the kinds of friction free interactions she’s come across in her research on technology and social relationships.  People of all ages have told her that they prefer to text rather than talk, - even when interacting with a colleague in the next cubicle or office.  People have said to her that they prefer to text their spouse rather than have a face-to-face conversation.  Friction free, she explained, “is usually tied up with a hope for greater efficiency and less vulnerability.”

The Productivity Paradox: Digital Abundance and Scarce Genius

Despite the relentless advances of digital technologies, productivity growth has been declining over the past decade.  Investment and interest rates have remained low, and income has continued to stagnate for the majority of workers in the US and other developed economies. The world seems to be stuck in a period of slow growth and no one is quite sure what’s causing this apparent contradiction.

Opinions abound.  Harvard economist Larry Summers has argued that secular stagnation is the reason behind this unusual situation, caused primarily by a reluctance of companies to invest and of consumers to spend, with the ensuing excessive savings acting as a drag on economic growth.

Some contend, - most prominently Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, - that over the past few decades there’s been a fundamental decline in innovation and productivity.  Perhaps our current technologies, advanced and exciting as they might be, aren’t as transformative as the technologies from the period between 1870 and 1970, when we experienced high productivity growth and a rising standard of living. 

Demographic change, namely, the declining population and labor force growth around the world, is another potential cause for slow economic growth.  The global labor force grew at an average of 1.8% per year between 1960 and 2005, but since then it’s been growing at just 1.1% per year, and it’s already shrinking in a number of countries, including Japan, Germany and China.

Another possible explanation, - advanced by Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson in AI and the Modern Productivity Paradox, - is that the paradox is primarily due to a time lag between technology advances and their impact on the economy.  We’ve been living in a time of major transformative technologies, - the Internet, smartphones, IoT, big data, AI - whose deployment and impact on productivity growth are still lagging.

While technologies may advance rapidly, humans and our institutions change slowly.  Moreover, the more transformative the technologies, the longer it takes for them to be embraced by companies and industries across the economy.  Leading edge firms are already benefiting from these advances, but most are still in the early learning stages.  Translating technological advances into productivity gains requires major transformations in business processes, organization and culture, - and these take time.

Impact of an Aging Population on Economic Growth and Automation

The world has been stuck in an era of slow economic growth over the past decade.  Top economists and policy makers have proposed a number of explanations for the economic slowdown, but in the end, there’s no consensus on the reasons, on how long the slowdown will likely last, or on what to do about it.

Economic growth has two main components, productivity growth and the growth of the labor force.  One potential theory for our stagnant economic growth is demographics, namely, the rapidly declining population and labor force growth around the world.

The current world’s population is 7.7 billion.  The UN Population Division estimates that global population will reach 9.8 billion with a growth rate of 0.5% in 2050, and will peak around 2100 at roughly 11.2 billion with a growth rate of 0.1%.  Other projections estimate that the population will grow slower, peak at 9.4 billion around 2070 and then decline to around 9 billion in 2100.  Some project that after reaching a peak of 9 billion, the world’s population will decline back to today’s levels, - around 7 billion, - by 2100.

Japan and a few other countries are already experiencing population declines.  The US population is currently around 330 million, and is projected to reach 390 million in 2050 and 450 million in 2100.  While the US birthrate hit a historic low in 2017, the population has continued to grow due to immigration.  The US growth rate is 0.71% including immigration and 0.43% without.

The global labor force grew at an average of 1.8% per year between 1960 and 2005, but since then it’s been growing at just 1.1% per year.  The labor force is still growing in some developing countries like India, Nigeria and the Philippines, but it’s already shrinking in China, Japan and Germany.  In the US, the labor force is growing very slowly, - 0.5 percent per year over the past decade, compared with 1.7 percent from 1960 to 2005.  Given the continuing decline in fertility rates in most parts of the world, the global labor force is expected to slip further in the coming decades.

The New, Interdisciplinary, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

A few months ago, MIT president Rafael Reif announced the launch of the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing in an e-mail to the MIT community.  “This new College is our strategic response to a global phenomenon – the ubiquity of computing and the rise of AI…” wrote President Reif.  “To state the obvious, AI in particular is reshaping geopolitics, our economy, our daily lives and the very definition of work.  It is rapidly enabling new research in every discipline and new solutions to daunting problems.  At the same time, it is creating ethical strains and human consequences our society is not yet equipped to control or withstand.”

The new College of Computing is made possible by a $350 million foundational gift from Stephen Schwarzman, - chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, one of the world’s leading investment firms.  The gift is part of a  $1 billion commitment to reshape MIT to help it better address the continuing advances in technology in our 21st century digital economy, as well as their many applications , - both the exciting opportunities and the difficult challenges.

The College is envisioned as an interdisciplinary hub across all five of MIT’s existing schools: Engineering; Science; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Architecture and Planning; and the Sloan School of Management.  This MIT News announcement succinctly summarized the key objectives of the new College:

• reorient MIT to bring the power of computing and AI to all fields of study at MIT, allowing the future of computing and AI to be shaped by insights from all other disciplines

• create 50 new faculty positions that will be located both within the College and jointly with other departments across MIT - nearly doubling MIT’s academic capability in computing and AI

• give MIT’s five schools a shared structure for collaborative education, research, and innovation in computing and AI

• educate students in every discipline to responsibly use and develop AI and computing technologies to help make a better world; and

• transform education and research in public policy and ethical considerations relevant to computing and AI.

The Current State of AI Adoption

AI is seemingly everywhere.  In the past few years, the necessary ingredients have finally come together to propel AI beyond early adopters to a broader marketplace: powerful, inexpensive computer technologies; advanced algorithms; and huge amounts of data on almost any subject.  Newspapers and magazines are full of articles about the latest advances in machine learning and related AI technologies.

Two recent reports concluded that, over the next few decades, AI will be the biggest commercial opportunity for companies and nations.  AI advances have the potential to increase global GDP by up to 14% between now and 2030, the equivalent of an additional $14-15 trillion contribution to the world’s economy, and an annual average contribution to productivity growth of about 1.2 percent.

Over time, AI could become a transformative, general purpose technology like the steam engine, electricity, and the Internet. AI marketplace adoption will likely follow a typical S curve pattern, - that is, a relatively slow start in the early years, followed by a steep acceleration as the technology matures and firms learn how to best leverage AI for business value.

To get a better sense of the current state of AI adoption, McKinsey recently conducted a global online survey on the topic, garnering responses from over 2,000 participants across 10 industry sectors, 8 business functions and a wide range of regions and company sizes.  The survey asked about their progress in deploying nine major AI capabilities, including machine learning, computer vision, natural language text and speech processing, and robotic process automation.

Will Humans Be Better Off in an Increasingly AI-Based Future?

After decades of promise and hype, artificial intelligence is finally becoming one of the most important technologies of our era.  As AI continues to both spread and advance, will it enhance human capacities or will it lessen human autonomy and agency?  By 2030, will most people be better or worse off than they’re today?

To shed light on these very important questions, the Pew Research Center canvassed AI experts this past summer, including technologists developers, and business and policy leaders.  It received almost 1,000 responses, which formed the basis for its recently published report Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans.

Overall, 63% of respondents were optimistic, predicting that most individuals will mostly be better off, while 37% thought otherwise.  But optimistic or not, most experts expressed concerns about the long-term impact of AI on “the essential elements of being human.”

The survey further asked the experts to explain their hopes and fears, to sketch out how they envision human-machine interactions over the coming decade, and what actions should be taken to assure the best possible future. Many answered, and their detailed comments are organized into the report’s three main sections: concerns; suggested solutions; and expectations for the future.  Let me briefly discuss the key points in each section.

Beyond Machine Learning: Capturing Cause-and-Effect Relationships

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most important technologies of our era.  Every day we can read about the latest AI advances from startups and large companies.  AI technologies  are approaching or surpassing human levels of performance in vision, speech recognition, language translation, and other human domains. Machine learning advances, like deep learning, have played a central role in AI’s recent achievements, giving computers the ability to be trained by ingesting and analyzing large amounts of data instead of being explicitly programmed.

Deep learning is a powerful statistical technique for classifying patterns using large training data sets and multi-layer AI neural networks.  It’s essentially a method for machines to learn from all kinds of data, whether structured or unstructured, that’s loosely modeled on the way a biological brain learns new capabilities.  Each artificial neural unit is connected to many other such units, and the links can be statistically strengthened or decreased based on the data used to train the system.  Each successive layer in a multi-layer network uses the output from the previous layer as input.

Machine learning can be applied to just about any domain of knowledge given our ability to gather valuable data in almost any area of interest.  But, machine learning methods are significantly narrower and more specialized than humans.  There are many tasks for which they’re not effective given the current state-of-the-art.  In an article recently published in Science, professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Tom Mitchell identified the key criteria that help distinguish tasks that are particularly suitable for machine learning from those that are not.  These include:

• Tasks that map well-defined inputs to well-defined outputs, - e.g., labeling images of specific animals, the probability of cancer in medical record, the likelihood of defaulting on a loan application;
• Large data sets exist or can be created containing such input-output pairs, - the bigger the training data sets the more accurate the learning;
• The capability being learned should be relatively static, - If the function changes rapidly, retraining is typically required, including the acquisition of new training data; and
• No need for detailed explanation of how the decision was made, - the methods behind a machine  learning recommendation, - subtle adjustments to the numerical weights that interconnect its huge number of artificial neurons, - are difficult to explain because they’re so different from those used by humans.

Redefining Work - Leveraging Human Capabilities in a Future of Expanding Automation

How will labor markets evolve in our 21st century digital economy?  What’s the likely future of jobs, given that our increasingly smart machines are now being applied to activities requiring intelligence and cognitive capabilities that not long ago were viewed as the exclusive domain of humans?  How will AI, robotics and other advanced technologies transform the very nature of work?

Over the past few years, a number of papers, reports and books have addressed these very important questions.  They generally conclude that AI will have a major impact on jobs and the very nature of work.  For the most part,  they view AI as mostly augmenting rather than replacing human capabilities, automating the more routine parts of a job and increasing the productivity and quality of workers, so they can focus on those aspect of the job that most require human attention.  Overall, few jobs will be entirely automated, but automation will likely transform the vast majority of occupations. 

A recent McKinsey report noted while there will likely be enough work to maintain full employment by 2030, the transition will be very challenging, “on a scale not seen since the transition of the labor force out of agriculture in the early 1900s in the United States and Europe, and more recently in in China.”  The report estimated that “up to 375 million workers, or 14 percent of the global workforce, may need to change occupations - and virtually all workers may need to adapt to work alongside machines in new ways.”

Given these predictions about the changing nature of work, what should companies do?  How should firms prepare for a brave new world where we can expect major economic dislocations along with the creation of new jobs, new business models and whole new industries, and where many people will be working alongside smart machines in whole new ways?

The Jobs Outlook for 2022

A few weeks ago, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released The Future of Jobs Report 2018.  The report takes an in-depth look at the world of work in what the WEF calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The report is based on a survey of over 300 chief human resource officers and top strategy executives from large global companies across 12 industry sectors.  These companies collectively represent more than 15 million employees, and conduct business in 20 developed and emerging economies which collectively account for about 70% of global GDP.

First introduced at its 2016 annual Davos Forum, the WEF positions the Fourth Industrial Revolution within the historical context of three previous industrial revolutions.  The First, - in the last third of the 18th century, - ushered the transition from hand-made goods to mechanized, machine-based production based on based on steam and water power.  The Second, - a century later, - revolved around steel, railroads, cars, chemicals, petroleum, electricity, the telephone and radio, leading to the age of mass production.  The Third, - starting in the 1960s, - saw the advent of digital technologies, computers, the IT industry, and the automation of process in just about all industries.

“Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third…” wrote WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab in a December, 2015 Foreign Affairs article.  “The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited.  And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.”

The Future of Jobs 2018 examines the potential of these advanced technologies to eliminate and create new jobs, as well as to improve the current workplace and prepare people for emerging jobs. Rather than looking at the future of work over the longer term, the report chose to examine the 2018-2022 period, which is within the planning horizon of the companies and executives that participated in the survey.