How the future turns out is up to us.

Unlocking use cases, creating value, and sharing the fruits of productivity.

Next:Economy Newsletter Keep traveling the pathway to a “Next Economy” that brings greater prosperity to all. Generated with Adobe Firefly.   To endings and new beginnings This issue marks the conclusion of Next Economy as a weekly newsletter, but it's not the end of the road. I started this newsletter almost 10 years ago to explore what technology teaches us about where the modern economy went wrong and to help businesses, policymakers, and technologists chart a course to a "Next Economy" that brings greater prosperity to all. For nearly a decade, I've been sharing stories that shed light on the tough problems we're facing—and the innovative solutions being brought to bear upon them to ensure that our future is better than our past. We've made great progress in that time (and have also had our share of setbacks). But the journey isn't done. I'll continue exploring and sharing the patterns of possibility I see (albeit in a more limited fashion) at The WTF Economy. I hope you join me.   Make-work, skilled work, and the fruits of productivity The International Longshoremen's Association strike is on a hundred-day pause after the union and owners reached agreement on increasing wages, but this has only nudged the more consequential fight against automation past the upcoming election. Writing just before the strike was suspended, Noah Smith had some thoughts about automation and the future of work . "The future of work isn't make-work," he argues. "It's higher-skilled work." Smith contends that the ILA's anti-automation posture is based on the faulty assumption "that while the technologies of the past mostly complemented human labor, the technologies of the future will replace it." Calling attention to the "potential upsides [of automation]—not just for the economy as a whole, but for longshoremen's jobs in particular"—Smith suggests that automation might actually "raise capacity at America's ports." And he's not wrong. As Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson explained to The Hill, an "increase [in port automation] could stand to benefit workers, consumers and companies": " Automation creates value," he notes. "It makes the pie bigger. And in theory that should be, there should be room for a win-win there." (Research on automation at the Ports of Los Angeles & Long Beach bears this out: "Jobs lost to automation [there] have been replaced by new jobs .") For his part, Smith holds that the ILA "should allow automation, but to use their labor power to harness the technology for their own gain" in part by "insist[ing] that the shipping companies pay for worker training, so that longshoremen can learn to use the new technologies." It's an insightful defense of the ways technology can be used to improve work rather than replace it. But of course, the union's opposition to automation isn't simply a case of dockworkers prioritizing difficult (but dependable) "make-work" over the promise of more-productive, less-taxing technology-augmented labor. It's a dispute about where (and to whom) the value created through automation flows. (It's also worth noting that the advantages of automation aren't a sure thing, something Smith also emphasizes.) Hamilton Nolan astutely observed that "strikes, for the most part, are caused by employers, not workers . The employers want to check and see if the workers are still willing to fight for their share. Then you have to show them. It's all part of the process." The ILA will likely make concessions on automation, but only if they're assured that they—and not just port owners—benefit from these changes. And that's been true from the very beginning. As I pointed out in WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us: During the industrial revolution, the fruits of automation were first used solely to enrich the owners of the machines. Workers were often treated as cogs in the machine, to be used up and thrown away. But Victorian England figured out how to do without child labor, with reduced working hours, and their society became more prosperous. We saw the same thing here in the United States during the twentieth century. We look back now on the good middle-class jobs of the postwar era as something of an anomaly. But they didn't just happen by chance. It took generations of struggle on the part of workers and activists, and growing wisdom on the part of capitalists, policy makers, political leaders, and the voting public. In the end we made choices as a society to share the fruits of productivity more widely.   Unlocking AI's latent expertise Generative AI is similarly rousing dismay among knowledge workers who fear they're in danger of being replaced or that their work will be devalued. (Last year's Hollywood writers strike rested on just this concern.) This fear is overblown , particularly in the short term. However, just because the limitations of our current crop of AI tools may be holding back widespread acceptance, it doesn't mean that individual workers aren't already using those tools to make their jobs more efficient. But it will take time to discover (and communicate) the use cases that actually make work more productive in general. Taking a cue from the Industrial Revolution might help , maintains Wharton professor Ethan Mollick. After all, it wasn't just the technological marvels like the steam engine that powered progress during this era but the way that this "work [was] adjusted and made real by people who altered the technology for different industries and factories, and then further refined by the people who implemented it for specific uses." And the same holds true for GenAI, insists Mollick: "For large companies, the source of any real advantage in AI will come from the expertise of their employees, which is needed to unlock the expertise latent in AI." Here's Mollick: The AI labs themselves don't know what they have built, or what tasks LLMs are best suited for. Bad actors will find bad uses for AI regardless of what we do. We need to work at least as hard to not just mitigate the damage they will do, but also to find good uses that help humans thrive using these new tools. + The real trick, as Mollick notes in another post (about OpenAI's "Strawberry" model), will be figuring out how to keep humans in the loop and "evolve our collaboration with AI as it evolves." + More from Mollick: "AI in Organizations—Some Tactics" + From Brian Merchant: "Yes, the Striking Dockworkers Were Luddites. And They Won."   Creating value, not disruption As I stressed in WTF? (back in 2017, long before the emergence of GenAI, although the sentiment still holds true today), "AI is not some kind of radical discontinuity" or "the machine from the future that is hostile to human values and will put us all out of work." Rather, "AI is the next step in the spread and usefulness of knowledge, which is the true source of the wealth of nations." But we still need to figure out how to "put it to work. . .in ways that create more value for society than they disrupt." Ethan Mollick's One Useful Thing newsletter is a good place to start exploring the ways AI might be used (and perhaps some ways it shouldn't). Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor's AI Snake Oil is another. And Ilan Strauss and I are doing our own thinking about how to best align AI with the public good at Asimov's Addendum. I've also been working to bring these use cases and success stories to light through my company, O'Reilly Media. You can watch my talks with Mollick (on "Living and Working with AI") and with HCLTech's Alan Flower (on "AI in Business") on YouTube—they're excerpted from O'Reilly's Generative AI Success Stories event last June. O'Reilly has also just unveiled its AI Academy to help workers learn how to put GenAI to work, no matter their role. And on November 19, we'll be hosting AI for Everyone, a two-hour event highlighting how end users augmented with AI are improving productivity, boosting creativity, and solving the problems they encounter in their day-to-day. If you're not an O'Reilly member, you can sign up for a free 10-day trial and attend. (Just be sure you don't start your trial until November 10 or later.) The guiding light of Next Economy has been that technology can make everyone richer, but it's only when everyone is richer, not just a few, that an economy truly thrives. It's our opportunity—not just our responsibility—to make the economy enjoyed by the rich into the economy for everyone. Thank you for being a fellow traveler on the road to getting there.   —Tim O’Reilly and Peyton Joyce This message was sent to alexvarboffin.abbb@blogger.com. You are receiving this because you've signed up to receive email from us. 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