The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine - Event Materials

Washington, DC – Last week, The Hamilton Project at Brookings convened academic experts and government and business leaders for a forum at the National Press Club to discuss the future of work in the age of the machine. In advance of the forum, The Hamilton Project released a new framing paper describing these trends and the potential implications for broad-based economic growth in the United States.

Introduction and Framing Remarks

Opening remarks were delivered by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Evercore Founder and Chairman Roger C. Altman. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and authors of the best-selling book “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies” gave opening remarks about their cutting edge research and findings on this topic.

Select Quotes:

• “Growth is necessary but not sufficient for the purpose of aiding and enhancing the economic position of middle income and lower income workers.” Robert E. Rubin
• “Is it imaginable that we will raise education levels in this country in proportion to these rising skills premiums and in proportion to…the pace of digital technology?” Roger C. Altman
• “America has never been richer. Private wealth is over $80 trillion; our national income…is at record levels. American workers have never been more productive than they are right now. And the reason for much of this bounty is because of recent advances in technology.” Erik Brynjolfsson
• “Ultimately, what's going to determine how we distribute this bounty is our choice, our choices in tax policy, in education, in health and welfare—technology doesn't determine the distribution, it's our own choices." Erik Brynjolfsson

The forum also included two panel discussions focusing on labor market issues, including the changing nature of work and its implications for workers of various skill types, organizational innovation and the importance of business dynamism in the face of such challenges.

Panel 1: The Future of Jobs

Participants in the second panel discussion included Erik Brynjolfsson; David Autor, Professor of Economics and Associate Department Head, MIT Department of Economics; Aneesh Chopra, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, Hunch Analytics and Former Chief Technology Officer, The White House; and Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University and former U.S. Treasury Secretary. Hamilton Project Director Melissa Kearney moderated the panel discussion.

Audio: Download and Listen to Panel 1 Audio

Video: Watch the Panel 1 Video

Select Quotes:

• “The idea that you can just have better training and then there are all of these jobs; despite all of these places where there are shortages, that we just need to train people is an evasion of the problem. Second, what we need is more demand— and that goes to short-run cyclical policy and the enormous importance of having tighter markets. Then firms have an incentive to reach for workers, rather than workers having to reach for firms.” Lawrence H. Summers
• “About wages, if I could say one other thing. I think that the broad empowerment of labor in a world where an increasing share of an increasing part of the economy is generating income that has a kind of rent aspect to it: the question of who’s going to share in it becomes very large.” Lawrence H. Summers
• “There is reason for some skepticism about how fast some things are moving and there is a lot of aggregate data that don’t support the idea that the labor market is changing or the economy is changing nearly as rapidly as the very dramatic stories, though the premium to higher education has plateaued over the past 10 years.” David Autor
• “A lot of the employment growth we have seen in the last 15 years has been in relatively low-education, in-person service occupations, which has a technological element to it.” David Autor
• “We are in the midst of a big reorganization of the economy, yes it is disruptive, yes people see that these people have to be laid off and these other people are hired and these other people have to be re-skilled, and as you are doing that, you don’t instantly get the full productivity gain, but you do get a lot of disruption.” Erik Brynjolfsson
• “If you think about the American economy, what sectors are the functional level of that equivalent level of darkness, as it relates to the impact that the Internet has had on the sector? Healthcare, energy, and education have not necessarily been plugged into the Internet, especially around data sets constrained by regulatory policy.” Aneesh Chopra
• “Is there a way to imagine that a sufficient number of people in our population will acquire the skills or the talents that are needed to economically prosper in the second machine age? What would that take? Is our education system, broadly defined, up to the task of delivering those skills and talents? What about workers who simply can’t acquire those skills or don’t possess those talents—or the fact that there might not be enough well-paying jobs for everyone who does? I admit that I am in part worried about a scenario where a small share of the population commands increasingly high wages, and a larger share is relegated to low paying service jobs, presumably providing services to the higher-wage folks.” Melissa S. Kearney

Panel 2: The Future of Business Innovation

Participants in the second panel included Andrew McAfee; John Haltiwanger, Professor of Economics and Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland; and Arati Prabhakar, Director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Laura Tyson, Professor of Business Administration and Economics and Director, Institute for Business and Social Impact, Berkeley-Haas School of Business, moderated the panel discussion.

Audio: Download and Listen to Panel 2 Audio

Video: Watch the Panel 2 Video

Select Quotes:

• “Maybe the goal now is not to become the next Google, but to be bought by Google. The question is: what’s Google’s goal in that? Is it actually to take advantage of new technology or actually to shut down competition?” John Haltiwanger
• “Innovation and productivity growth is a very noisy and complex process…at least historically for the United States, and when we have booming times and booming sectors we see a very high pace of entrepreneurship and volatility.” John Haltiwanger
• "I don't think we know, but my hope is that technology will create a plethora of different kinds of opportunities. Because in the information technology world, if the only answer to the challenge is that everyone needs to go back to school and learn how to code, that's going to be really good for some people but it's not going to get everyone in a 300 million person society." Arati Prabhakar
• "As we do this work, of course, we also understand that we have opened the door that could free the brain from the limitations of the body. As we start thinking about what else is possible beyond restoration of function, we actually open the door to many possibilities. Some will be great and many of them will be terrifying. The societal issues will make the work issues we're dealing with today look simple." Arati Prabhakar
• “I really don’t understand why, at a time when the tools of entrepreneurship are really good, more widely available than ever, and getting better all the time…[entrepreneurship] is on the decline in this country. This is a deep, deep puzzle and we better spend some time figuring it out.” Andrew McAfee
• “In the face of rapid technological change – let’s assume that is happening – the benefit will not go to labor, and it will not go to capital as we traditionally know it. It will go to entrepreneurial people and entrepreneurial organizations that can create new products, and new services, and new business models.” Laura Tyson
• “I’ve heard someone say, and there’s a kernel of truth in this… ‘We have great incentives to do the research in the United States; we have weak incentives to do the employment in the United States; and very weak incentives to keep your profits in the United States. So basically you have a situation, in which all of the incentive structure around our tax law and a bunch of other things say, yes, yes, yes, locate around great universities and start the Google, Apples, apps, everything of the world there. Don’t worry too much about employment, except for the people you have to employ on your premises because you can actually do most of the work some other place. And don’t worry about your revenues, because you can put them in places that are not highly taxed.’’ Laura Tyson

A full event transcript can be found here. Photographs from the forum can be found here.