Do More!Do Things That Were Previously Impossible!
Tim O’Reilly@timoreilly
wtfeconomy.com
In 1625, they thought California was an island
In 2005, we thought the connected taxicab
looked like this
Will there really be nothing left for people to do?
In 2017, we think AI and
robots will put people out of
work.
When Amazon added 45,000 robots,they added 250,000 human workers
Jeff Bezos calls this “the flywheel”
This is the master design pattern for applying technology: Do more. Do things that were previously unimaginable.
“Framing blindness”
We have to draw a new map of the world
“Gradually, and then suddenly.”
Gradually, then suddenly
1. The world is becoming digital2. Artificial Intelligence and
algorithmic systems are everywhere
3. We are creating new kinds of partnerships between machines and humans
The coming robots are not autonomous
Don’t just recreate what went before. Rethink business models, workflows and
processes!
“A business model is the way that all of the parts of a business work together to create competitive advantage and customer value.”
- Dan and Meredith Beam
Why simply adding an app doesn’t change the game for taxis
A Business Model Map of Uber
§ Magical user experience realizing the power of networked sensors
§ Replacing ownership with access
§ A platform, not just a company
§ An algorithmic matching marketplace
§ Cognitively augmented workers
A Business Model Map of Southwest Airlines
Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?Henry Ford didn’t just rethink the automobile and the factory, he rethought the work week, and the reasons why people might want to drive. Uber and Lyft, Airbnb, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple are all changing who we are and what we expect.
Markets are outcomes. You have to design them.
A service like Uber or Lyft or Airbnb – or, for that matter, Google or Facebook – is a matching marketplace.
How are you going to augment your workers?
Amazon warehouse worker
A matching marketplace has to work for all of its participants, not just for “users” or for the
marketplace owner
Lyft vs Uber Market Share
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“If the students we are training today are going to live to be 120 years old, and their careers are likely to span 90 years, but their training will only make them competitive for 10 years, then we have a problem.”
Jeffrey Bleich, Former US ambassador to Australia
Chair of the Fulbright scholarship board
We are developing new kinds of partnershipsbetween human and machine
“My grandfather wouldn’t recognize what I do as work.”
-Hal Varian
A new kind of management
“It’s the difference between ‘playing Caesar’ (deciding which projects live and die), and ‘playing the scientist’ (being perpetually open to search and discovery.)”
- Eric Ries, The Startup Way
Algorithmic systems all have an “objective function”
§Uber and Lyft: Pick up time§Google: Relevance§Facebook: engagement§Scheduling systems used by Walmart, the Gap, or McDonalds: reduce employee labor costs and benefits
Like the djinn of Arabian mythology, our digital djinn do exactly what we tell them to do
AI is “the most serious threat to the survival of the human race”
Elon Musk
The runaway objective function“Even robots with a seemingly benign task could indifferently harm us. ‘Let’s say you create a self-improving A.I. to pick strawberries,’ Musk said, ‘and it gets better and better at picking strawberries and picks more and more and it is self-improving, so all it really wants to do is pick strawberries. So then it would have all the world be strawberry fields. Strawberry fields forever.’ No room for human beings.”
Elon Musk, quoted in Vanity Fairhttps://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x
The Equinix NY4 data center, where trillions of dollars change hands
We didn’t mean to increase inequality and gut our economy
“The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”
Milton Friedman, 1970
Divergence of productivity and real median family income in the US
“The art of debugging is figuring out what you really told your program to do rather than what you thought you told it to do.”
Andrew Singer
Andrew Singer
It isn’t technology that wants to eliminate jobs
“Prosperity in human societies is best understood as the accumulation of solutions to human problems. We won’t run out of work until we run out of problems.”
Nick Hanauer
Imagine
A world where the fruits of machine productivity are not allocated to a few, but shared by all
Imagine
§ We put people to work tackling the world’s greatest problems§ We treat humans as assets, not liabilities§ We create an economy based on caring and creativity, while machines
focus on repetitive tasks§ We apply on-demand marketplace models to healthcare and education§ We augment community health workers with telemedicine and AI§ We all have access to knowledge on demand, whenever we need it§ We have fresh approaches to public policy based on what is possible now,
rather than picking from the same tired menus
Amazement or dismay?
wtfeconomy.com
WTF??!!Amazement or Dismay
How is work changing?What does technology now make possible that was previously impossible?What work needs doing?How do we make the world prosperous for all?Why aren’t we doing it?
wtfeconomy.com
What’s the Future?It’s Up To us
wtfeconomy.com