Are robots outsmarting us?

Robots are leading the second machine age, automating not just manual labor but cognitive function. Photo by Flickr user Gregory Lee.

Editors Note: The robots are coming? The robots are coming!

Actually, it turns out theyre finally here: humiliating us at Jeopardy, driving us from the Redwood Forest to the Gulfstream waters, running our lives online as software bots. Famous as a someday threat to factory jobs, robots (from the Czech robota drudgery or serf labor) are about to give almost all of us human workers a run for our money. As a result, we live in the The Second Machine Age, according to authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

As far back as 1893, Ambrose Bierce, not exactly known as a science fiction writer, imagined a mechanical man so frustrated, it beat its inventor to death. And machines replacing humans is a theme weve long explored on Making Sense, as in our 2011 report Man vs. Machine. The fear, of course, is that technological advancement, of the kind weve featured from Singularity University, will at last decisively benefit the highly skilled few at the expense of the workaday rest.

Digital advancements, like iPhones and Twitter, are only creating a handful of well-paying jobs, techno-pessimist Tyler Cowen told us in 2011. His take: an innovation drought is now stymying economic growth. He argued, in a tour of his kitchen and major appliances, that no contemporary invention has significantly changed our lives as much as the refrigerator or gas stove of many decades ago.

But Brynjolfsson and McAfee, director and associate director, respectively, of the MIT Center for Digital Business, know of no drought; instead, they see the increasing automation of cognitive tasks as the second great era of technological change.

In this extended conversation, they explain how this latest industrial revolution, with potentially negative repercussions for the labor market that they fully acknowledge, will have any even bigger effect than the first.

In a second post, Brynjolfsson and McAfee explain what kind of educational and infrastructural investment humans need to make in order to stay a step ahead of robots. Their tour of Bostons robots with Paul Solman aired on the NewsHour Thursday. Watch that segment below.

Simone Pathe, Making Sense Editor

630306298762987Second machine age will require more human creativityRobotic technology is increasingly infiltrating our everyday world, and as robots become more capable of human labor, people will likely have to develop new skills for new jobs. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee, who argue in their new book, "The Second Machine Age," that we are facing a radical new industrial revolution.2014-02-13 18:00:00disabled2365179167uYo7S-UDpSMtrue

Original post:
Are robots outsmarting us?