4 questions for Byron Reese on innovation, the future of the economy, and America’s AI race with China

Byron Reese, author of the new book “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity,” organizes human history so far by framing it around three main inventions. We entered the first age when we learned to harness fire and language, the second when we mastered agriculture, and the third came with the invention of writing and the wheel. Now we are on the verge of a fourth age, thanks to developments in artificial intelligence, and to hear Reese tell it, this fourth age promises to be just as transformative as its predecessors.

Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. You can follow him on Twitter @ByronReese.

What follows is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation (read our full talk here). You can download the episode by clicking the link below, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

PETHOKOUKIS: The obvious question people have picking up the book is, what are the three other ages and how does this fourth one fit in? If the first stage, as you write, is about harnessing fire and language, and the second age is discovering agriculture, and the third age takes up us up till now but began with the invention of the wheel and the invention of writing — all of these are pretty significant inventions and innovations and technologies. If the fourth age is AI and robots, can innovations there ever compare to those other three human advances? They are pretty monumental.

That is a fantastic question. You’re right. We’ve had technological innovation as long as we’ve been a species and I kind of arbitrarily divide that up into these ages. When a technology comes along, sometimes it just helps us out, like penicillin for example. But sometimes something happens that is so profound that it just changes the course of human history forever. Speech was the first one; it’s hard to imagine humans without speech. That’s a technology in its own class.

Now to your question: Is it fair to say AI and robots could be of that caliber? My thinking was that we are number one on this planet because we’re the smartest things on it. And AI is a technology that makes us smarter. And so if we all went to bed tonight and woke up tomorrow with 10 more IQ points or 20 more IQ points, would that alter human history? I think it would.

And I kind of think that because the internet came along and it was a really simple technology — all it did was say wouldn’t it be great if computers could talk to each other using common protocols. They’re not smart. They can just communicate to each other, and just by connecting computers that gave us something like $25 trillion in new wealth. It transformed society and all of the rest. The question is what would happen if technology suddenly made us smarter? If we could outsource what our brains do to a machine and what our bodies do to a machine through robotics, won’t that alter the trajectory of the planet in a meaningful way? That’s the proposition I explore.

There are different flavors of artificial intelligence. What are you talking about?

I use a reasonably constrained definition, but you’re right. It’s an unfortunate term because it means two completely different things. On the one hand what we call more formally narrow AI is a computer program that does just one thing. That would be like your spam filter in your inbox. Or what routes you through traffic. And that’s what we’re getting good at and that’s really what I’m talking about. The other kind of AI is what you see in science fiction: general intelligence, a creative computer and all of the rest. Nobody knows how to build that, or at least nobody has demonstrated they know how to build it. It may be centuries off. It may be impossible.

But I don’t think you need that. I think just the simple idea is enough: that we as a species are learning how to save the data our lives generate, that we’re learning how to study that in a systematic way, and that we’re learning how to use that data to make better decisions. Better decisions are these amazing things because they compound in value over time. If every day I make a thousand decisions and I just do like 10 percent better than somebody else, over the course of time that compounds and you pull away exponentially eventually. That is what I think we can do with just simple AI.

The job loss scenario seems to be very prevalent in people’s minds. I think people can very easily understand how they can lose their jobs to AI. They find it much harder, I think, to understand the other scenario where they work with the robots and we enter a society of abundance.

I think you’re right. I think we have seen enough movies where what you just described happens — that people, including myself, do something known as reasoning from fictional evidence, and it’s all very compelling. But let me paint you a not-even-rose-colored-glass view of the past. Without taking into account the Great Depression, which was not caused by technology, over the course of two hundred and fifty years in this country, unemployment has always been between 4 and 10 percent. Now, I’ve tried very hard to figure out what the half-life of a job is, and I think it is 50 years. I think every 50 years one of every two jobs are lost. 1850 to 1900, half of all the jobs vanished; they were largely agricultural. 1900 to 1950, same thing. 1950 to 2000, half the jobs vanished; a lot of manufacturing jobs.

So you have to ask, did we maintain full employment and see rising wages while losing half the jobs every 50 years? And I’ll push it further: If I gave you a graph of 250 years of unemployment data and I said look at that graph and find where the assembly line was invented, find where we replaced all animal power with steam power in 22 years, you can’t see it anywhere in the data. So what we know empirically is that we can have these amazing new technologies, we can destroy vast numbers of jobs, and it isn’t that we recover — it is that you cannot even see it happening.

Now, is AI somehow different? Most people agree technology is great. It makes awesome new jobs like a geneticist but then it destroys these low-end, low-skill jobs like order-taker at fast food restaurants. And then people say this: Do you really think that order-taker is going to become a geneticist? Do they really have the skills to do these new jobs? And the answer is no, not at all. What happens is a college biology professor becomes a geneticist, and the high school biology teacher gets the college job, then a substitute teacher gets hired on at the high school, all the way down the line.

The question isn’t if the displaced people do all the new jobs. The question is, can everybody do a job a little harder than the job they have today? That is 250 years of economic history in this country; technology makes great new jobs, and it destroys bad ones, and everybody shifts up one notch. Technology, AI included, is by definition good. It’s like adding a third arm. It makes people more productive. It increases productivity, which by definition will increase wages for everyone.

There are a lot of policymakers who are very concerned that America is losing the AI race to China. Can we look at it as a race like the Space Race, that one country needs to become dominant in AI or else it will lag the other country and be less powerful?

I don’t really buy that narrative that China is ahead, to start with. I would say it this way: I don’t know that China is ahead of America in AI — it’s like, Google does AI, and Baidu does AI, and Facebook does AI, and to compartmentalize it by nation I think is just not really how it happens. It would be akin to saying, “Oh, China is ahead of America in electricity.” Everything’s going to be electrified. Everything is going to be AI. This is not going to be like a giant Space Race to Mars. Everything is going to be made smart, and it’s going to be made smart in a million different ways by a million different companies in all corners of the world.

And to directly discuss the business environment in the US, I think if you’re going to start a business anywhere, this is still the best place in the world to do it. And so if you ask in the larger sense how the US is doing in terms of its economy, I think you only have to look at the internet and you have to say: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Etsy — just rattle down all of them and each one of those companies is a testament to the amount of innovation that happens.

Now there are big, impressive companies all over the world and in China as well. And that’s a testament to them, but innovation is by no means somehow impaired or maimed in this country right now. There are so many things you can invent. You can take any business that exists on this Earth and say, “How can I apply AI to that?” And that’s it. That’s like a whole new industry, right there.