Here is the Prof Robert Gordon TED2013 talk on the end of growth which was answered by the Erik Brynjolfsson counter view (posted on last week.) Then the two of them had a 12 minute debate. The first point I noted is that instead of the 6 headwinds the presentation is now about 4 headwinds. ( Losing 2 headwinds seems odd to me*.)

“So I started wondering and pondering, could it be that the best years of American economic growth are behind us? And that leads to the suggestion, maybe economic growth is almost over. Some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial.

There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face. They’re demographics, education, debt and inequality.

They’re powerful enough to cut growth in half. So we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline. And here’s my theme: Because of the headwinds, if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years, growth is cut in half. If innovation is less powerful, invents less great, wonderful things, then growth is going to be even lower than half of history.” ….

“The problem we face is that all these great inventions, we have to match them in the future, and my prediction that we’re not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2, the fanciful curve that I drew you at the beginning.” ….

“If so, that’s going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years.”

Twelve minutes is not long enough for this kind of argument but so far most viewers of the clip seem to think that Gordon is unconvincing. Note: * The 2 headwinds Gordon left out of this updated version of his thesis were environmental impacts and the twin deficits of government and consumer debt.

I wonder if this is because we all want to be more optimistic in the face of some grim economic news and we just hope that the economy will improve or we really do believe in the brave new world of technology driven change.

Brynjolfsson makes a couple of telling points in his talk on how the impacts of change are measured. GDP doesn’t do that at all for the “weightless economy” and also that for a number of key innovations it took a time lag of decades before we not only worked them out but before we changed the work paradigms we were used to.

Zero pricing for “free products & services” and huge price reductions don’t show up in GDP measurements which undermeasures the economic growth and related changes.

It is highly probable that Gordon and Brynjolfsson are both right.

Innovation is very hard to measure because as a species we don’t really like change but the irony here is that some of the headwinds Gordon refers to as slowing innovation are exactly the same ones which will stimulate more innovation.

In the education space ( where I work part time) the increasing costs of tertiary qualifications and the globalisation of markets means that educators are very much looking at ways to improve the learning ecosystems all round. I think the quality of education will improve and that the cost will go down because of technology innovations which are here but not yet well understood.

The real kicker though is that my 11 year old daughter may train for a job that hasn’t been invented yet in only a few years time. These future jobs will have a connection to current ones but measuring the impact of that kind of technological change is too difficult for most of us to imagine.

Here is a clip from one of the masters of innovation on how we have to start with the customer experience rather than the technology because it is not the technology itself that brings the real changes.

When innovation comes along there is a very well known dynamic which sees early adopters and tech users who can make use of new products and services but it is not until they mainstream ( “crossing the chasm”) that they truly become useful products.

I remember the Apple Newton from 1993 to about 1998 and it failed then for various reasons but look around today at tablet computing including iPads and it is a very different world.

An iPad now is a consumer device for all whereas the Newton was a geek toy which was innovative but not really that useful but perhaps without that product evolution we wouldn’t have got to where we are today.

To be fair to Gordon – many innovation stories are hard to measure well in the GDP numbers but the journey from idea to product is one that is gaining in velocity and usefulness.

There are also other localised innovations which are being held up because of finance or political will. These innovations that may not seem hugely significant in terms of GDP impact will have a huge impact in quality of life terms.

The examples I’m thinking of are wider availability of malaria nets and cleaner (less smoke) cooking techniques in parts of the world outside the U.S. Equivalent quality of life innovations happened many years ago in the U.S which is where Gordon’s data is focussed.

Progress Enigma was the title of a debate shared at TED 2013 a few hours ago. Economists Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson debated the future of work. The paradox of our technology enabled times is that (despite the writing having been on the wall for decades ) we are still surprised, shocked and disappointed when jobs disappear.

This is a global issue and even as workers get more educated and technology enabled there still does not seem to be the jobs to go around.

Sadly this debate does not seem to have come up with any answers. It does highlight the paradox though.

We appear to be in a jobless recovery but at the same time we love the technology that is contributing to these job losses.

An example – at Sydney airport last year while stuck in another long ticketing queue I asked one of the staff why that airport doesn’t have ticket kiosks like Auckland does. I wondered if anyone in the queue or anyone doing the ticketing really liked the existing ticketing process which includes some technology but is held up by the human work processes still in place. The ticketing person said if kiosks came in that would likely be the end of her job and that she had been at the airport for many years and she wasn’t that keen on the idea.

We both know those ticket kiosks will be deployed at some point as as passengers we love anything that speeds up the queue but as workers and parents of future workers it is hard to see a way to manage the transition to new jobs.

Any time we can save time by using technology – chances are that we will do that. The real challenge is to see if we can do something else with that time and all of the people resource that is no longer needed. This is a difficult and sensitive topic and bravo to TED2013 for pitching the question so early in the conference

“Gordon asked again about the purpose of all this progress, asking: “What good is a world in which we can listening to a bunch of free music, but no one has any jobs?” The crowd went wild.

Indeed, the two agreed that the main issue we face is that growth isn’t happening for the bottom 99 percent. Brynjolfsson argued that we are innovating at an insane rate, while Gordon’s consistent response was, What’s the point, if people don’t have jobs? Chris posed the question to the audience: Would you rather live for a year without the Internet, but without plumbing, or with plumbing and without Internet? Yet after an undoubtedly exciting debate, at the close the audience’s vote remained 6-1 in favor of accelerated growth.”

Part of the issue with many of the new online services and products that are available is that the price of them is free or at least substantially reduced over the previous prices. This presents problems for conventional economists like Gordon who are looking at GDP for clues on the impact.

As Brynjolfsson has argued before much of the new tech economy does not register with the same level of impact because network pricing and ubiquity brings prices down. The economic impact is still there but we have trouble measuring it in a meaningful way. Bynjolfsson followed the debate with his talk on augmented reality.

I hope that the debate on the future of work is renewed when this video gets published. It would have been great to have had Hazel Henderson on the stage as well.

Hazel Henderson famously wrote about (how GDP misses too much) many years ago and so I was delighted to catch up on a recent clip where she notes we have reached the end of the fossil fuelled early industrial era. She goes on to talk about the idea of shipping “recipes rather than cakes”.

Even in New Zealand global trade is increasingly more about IP, services and software. A recent TV news item on the NZ tech sector noted that the local IT sector is now worth $NZ7.28b of which 5.2b of that is export revenues. For more data on the NZ economy check out the TIN 100 Report The report is published annually and provides a unique and valuable reference on New Zealand’s technology export sector by measuring the performance of the country’s 200 largest export-focused companies in the ITC, Biotech and high tech manufacturing sector.

Hazel notes “we have to re-perceive everything… we have a crisis of perception”…

Hazel Henderson on the design revolution

What we need is as design revolution and to see the technology as an opportunity for change for the better but that doesn’t make an easy discussion to have.

Today 70+ speakers were announced for TED 2013 to be held at the end of Feb in Long Beach.

“This line-up features the largest number of speakers in TED’s history — more than 70. That’s because many of the talks this year are shorter. Often 12 minutes or less, instead of 18. And nearly half of the program comes from our first-ever global auditions. They were held in 14 countries and attracted thousands of applicants, including some truly astounding youngsters.”

I was in Sydney back in May when some of the auditions were held, so I have seen the 2 Australian speakers on the list.

However for New Zealanders the inclusion of Prof Jim Flynn is very welcome. Jim is well known because of his discovery of the Flynn effect, the continued year-after-year increase of IQ scores in all parts of the world. It is a great honour for Jim to be recognised by the TED speaker panel.

I’m guessing that his talk will have something to do with his latest book How To Improve Your Mind: 20 Keys to Unlock the Modern World The book is part of a toolket approach by him to help us make more sense of the vast amount of knowledge that we are inundated with on a daily basis. It is “thinking about thinking” and helps us to explore the insights from that knowledge rather than just the knowledge itself.

Note: I have seen a review of Flynns book which says he misses out any discussion of Bayesian theory which to me seems like a huge area to neglect. I have been reading Nate Silvers signal & noise book and we live in an age when “show me the data” is an important key to understanding most of that. If this is correct then Flynn’s book has a hole in it.

Now that there are some thing like 30,000 TED and TEDx videos out there along with a myriad of other great resources we all need better ways of making sense of all this new knowledge at an applied level.

As Nir Eydal writes in his posted HOW TECHNOLOGY IS LIKE BUG SEX

“Our insatiable curiosity is perhaps humanity’s greatest virtue, but it is also the source of many of our weaknesses…
Our salvation, as Dr. Barrett writes, comes from understanding. “Once we recognize how supernormal stimuli operate, we can craft new approaches to modern predicaments. Humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen’s birds — a giant brain.
This gives us the unique ability to exercise self-control, override instincts that lead us astray, and extricate ourselves from civilization’s gaudy traps.” Indeed, we begin to free ourselves from the pull of supernormal stimulus when we recognize it as such.”

From that group of Australian and a couple of NZ speakers 2 where chosen and they are:

Leyla Acaroglu: Paper or plastic? Debunking an environmental myth
Leyla Acaroglu is the Founder and Director of Eco Innovators and a lecturer at RMIT University in Industrial Design. She is a proponent of systemic and life-cycle-based thinking in sustainability decision making.

Adam Spencer: A lifelong passion for prime numbers
Adam Spencer, a comedian and radio personality with a passion for mathematics, cohosted the Triple J Breakfast Show and is a patron of various science events and programs.

For more background on some of the other speakers the audition videos for the 14 countries are over here.

Some of the other speakers you may have heard of are Bono, Amanda Palmer, Peter Gabriel and Eric Whiteacre from the world of music. From tech – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Vint Cerf. Lawrence Lessig also gets to speak.

For me one of the most keenly anticipated speakers will be economist Robert J Gordon. I wrote about his The Six Headwinds slowing Innovation down idea back in June last year.

Generally I agree with his insight on the big bang nature of many key developments but I think he has very much underestimated the ability of new factors to influence wide spread change in our society.

As I wrote in an updated note for that post: After some thought I have identified 2 areas where NZ does have some new innovation drivers currently. The first one is the Kiwisaver superannuation fund. In 2012 it reached $14b but will be at $60b relatively soon and that capital will help more NZ businesses to grow as well as helping some companies to stay locally owned.
The second area is energy from renewables. Germany has benefitted from $US31b of investment in renewable energy as at 2011. That has created more than 300,000 jobs which is a big plus for them. Much of that is solar energy which we in NZ would do well to follow.

I hope that opening session at TED 2013 called Progress Enigma which includes Erik Brynjolfsson, Bono, Peter Thiel, Nilofer Merchant and others challenges Gordons theory because he like the veritable curates egg – he is wrong in parts.

Like the Sydney talent search my overall impression ( apart from the big names) is that many of the speakers are very young and exciting.

At the end of the conference is a special musical treat from Eric Whiteacre. Eric was at TED 2011 when he presented a virtual choir of 2000 voices all patched together on video.

For a trip down memory lane, this is the talk I gave at TED two years ago. youtube.com/watch?v=2NENlX…

— Eric Whitacre (@EricWhitacre) January 10, 2013

Eric is also right now on Kickstarter half way towards raising $100k to do the virtual choir 4. I love music but sadly in the classical world most times in my experience it is done badly but Eric’s projects inspire me.