 Live from the Congress Center in London, England it's the Cube at MIT and the digital economy the second machine age Brought to you by headline sponsor MIT MIT IDE conference the initial digital economy MIT's two professors Eric Bruny-Alson and Andrew McAfee wrote this great book the second machine age really innovative book The first machine age is basically the premise and was the steam engine And now the second machine age is the computer interestingly it took decades after the steam engine was introduced To act to really have an impact on society It wasn't until the Watt steam engine decades later that productivity really started to pick up and with computing We have now entered according to the authors the second machine age and the second half of the chessboard Google second half of the chessboard Ray Kurzweil and they talk about the power of Exponents of exponential growth and that's really what we've been talking about all day We've been talking about the impact on jobs our machines have always replaced jobs But now they're replacing not only manual labor, but they're replacing cognitive tasks, so I'm here with Stu Miniman We're also happy to welcome Steve Chambers Stevie underscore chambers on Twitter gentlemen. Good day Steve What's your take you were watching all along you're watching the crowd firing questions in from the crowd chat What'd you make today has just blown my mind it's absolutely blown my mind I mean the four main themes which were incredibly well presented mean these guys clearly know that stuff You know you hear about all the deep research they do anything. It's going to be quite dry. Oh my god They're really engaging and they and they came out with Slides and charts and messages. I just kind of made sense of everything you see right why Apple are doing so well Why some companies are struggling we went through pricing went through alternation I mean it was so much to take any one day. I'm just really glad I'm here a technology guy by background. You're in the UK you've seen the the gap between Technology adoption in the United States what happens in Silicon Valley versus sort of rest of world What's your take on the situation in Europe generally the UK specifically in terms of technology adoption and their ability to Capitalize on the second machine. Yeah, and I think What I was thinking before I came here today It also came out in a bunch of questions both on the crowd chat, which was great and I'm from the room You know people are kind of they're excited by this second You know, you know, but they're also worried about their jobs. They're worried about being left behind They're worried about the whole market changing. There was some great charts today showing how I think it was income was Splitting away from gross domestic products, you know, and you see all the and you couldn't they just did such a great job Visualizing what's happening today and why things are going although they're also very honest And they said we don't know where it's going to be in a few years either, right? You know, that's the thing and I and we heard several questions from the floor today saying, you know, what about the people that were kind of You know antagonizing Google about the buses and things like that, you know, these people felt I think the word was disempruntial, you know, so people are clearly feeling this threatened as Excited by what these guys were talking about. So I should have I should have done a proper introduction I'm sorry. Steve is our newest cloud analyst. He's based in the UK with Wikibon and we're really excited to have you on board Thank you. You know, Stu Another fundamental premise was over historically if if productivity increases median income increases That's not been happening in the last several years certainly subsequent to the great Recession we didn't see about we've seen a bounce back as dramatic bounce back in productivity But not in median income since 1999 median income in the United States has dropped from 54,000 to 50,000 Quite stark. What was your take on you know that information and just the day in general? Yeah, so first on the day in general Dave, you know I had kind of high expectations coming in and they were met we were talking as technologists We kind of say understanding technology and being an enthusiast for it means that you're optimistic about the future and what this could bring That being said, you know, I've got kids and I'm worried about jobs From the productivity piece is the one thing that I'm a little bit, you know Still not satisfied with the answers that I heard today We heard that you know free things in the economy aren't measured as well And maybe we're not understanding it as much but that being said I think you've got the you know average kind of middle-class person. They're worried about their job They have many jobs the careers are changing so often and that hollowing out of the middle is a little bit dangerous That being said, I think Eric Brigham, you know, I'm sin gave a great answer as to you know It's not like all jobs are going to be gone in a couple of years I do worry about you know Hey all these great people that are driving ubers today Well is uber just going to be a self-driving car in a few years because I don't know if need that the whole Service industry is going to go through change, but there's lots of room for people to work with people and There should be a shift. There should be retraining, but you know things are changing so fast The closing line that I heard towards the end of this summed it up so great for me We can either protect the future from the past or the past from the future And I always want to be optimistic for where we can go and I think there was a great dialogue started here today And I want to you know chew on it some more Well stew I loved what you were saying to Eric and Andy about you know You drive down the highway you can always tell when somebody's texting They're swerving in your lane. You have to be so careful. I always tell my kids that just got their licenses You got to be so careful and such a defensive driver and you got that guy's sure enough You go by and they're texting or they're hiding their phone or so, you know I think that the day will come where a self-driving car is safer than a human powered vehicle But so many implications of what we talked about today Again, so Steve is a technologist the big thing is digital products are different right if you eat a piece of fruit It disappears if you consume a digital product doesn't disappear I can buy it stew can buy it you can buy it and then millions of other people can buy it You think when you talk to companies when you talk to CIOs IT practitioners CTOs Are they focused on the issue of digitization? Are they? Intensively focused enough on digitizing their businesses and do they understand what that takes what organizational changes what skill sets are required I think I think it's definitely a mixed five right, so you'll meet In some enterprise that they think the chief digital officer is just another name conjure up another fad It's not really real, you know that you hear that you see on Twitter You see it from some clever people as well right though It's just another name, but some other people are really embracing it right some big companies are saying You know this is where we need to move and change our model, and I thought it was really well explored when we went through the platform Presentation today, and I really encourage people to look at that as well because he told us something We all knew you know you talk about Apple and the way they built the eco system And it all looks kind of obvious, but it wasn't obvious a few years ago And I thought the guys did an excellent way of taking that apart why it happened why it made sense They brought in some great knowledge tips from venture capitalists who spend all day thinking about this stuff I don't think they also answer some of the questions. Well, you know, so I think there was one of the questions in the crowd chat When it said well if someone's already got an eco system in place a platform in place Is there no room for anyone else in the market? You know if I come next to the market, right, Stu? Is there any point? Oh, yeah, Steve great point actually John Furrier is banging away in the crowd chat right now I'm talking about some of the dominance of some of the big players Yeah, you know we use the example of ways here a bunch of times ways is some great stuff Up it's bought by Google great platform company Google sucking up a bunch, you know Apple Amazon They talk mostly on the consumer side, but Amazon huge platform obviously in that market I'm curious, you know, we were saying that there's lots of Innovation happening in UK around the world, but a lot of those platforms started in the US What's the viewpoint you see both from this event and just your experience on that? Is there concern about that? We have a whole Snowden effect, you know Sowering some people about about cloud and US based clouds in general on but kind of US based platforms Well interestingly enough one of the one of the attendees today He'd been working with MIT on the platform piece for a few years And they were trying to apply it to their product set in Europe And he said the strange thing strangest thing happened They thought the best way to have a cloud product was to build their own cloud and then go to market without But what they found was that took quite a lot of time to do quite a lot of money to do So they started going to market with services that were kind of running on someone else's cloud But they were kind of owning the billing and the contractual relationship So from the outside they had several cloud services while they were building that you know They were using the platform place saying it was more important to get customers using the kind of platform system Even if all the platform wasn't in place now I wouldn't have thought that would have made sense a few years ago But you know here's obviously a forward-thinking customer which the MIT said this might work and it has So they've got revenue coming in which he's funding them building their new platform Who'd have thought about that a few years ago? Marshall Van Austin gave a talk today talking about the platform Thou shalt have a platform And you think about it think about the companies that we follow and we were talking We're talking off-camera to Eric and Andy about Dell. You know what you think about Dell? But obviously we love what Michael Dell has done to take the company private What's the platform play there and make you think about that? You know what Watson was the big one today got mentioned a lot and of course Watson It's a platform that they're trying to go into lots of verticals IBM's reorganized the company and one of the divisions is platform so Ginny flattened out the organization and whether Watson analytics is under Pitchana, but but Watson is its own division So presumably that's a huge potential for IBM is quite unique in the industry VMware is a platform Amazon has a platform I guess anybody with an API has the potential to be a platform, but It was interesting listening to Marshall you start to think about and evaluate companies in that context and of course This is nothing new, right? I mean Furrier is always talking about Platforms and the Silicon Valley crowd is always talking about it But when you start to evaluate in the context of the digital economy it starts to come into clearer focus The imperative it was a great quote today And I think it was Andy that said it towards the end, but there were so many great Statements out today. I mean my head's just full of them. I think the falling up And he said you know if you think about if you think about your business from the perspective of You know new digital economy you start seeing all the things that just don't work in that new world And I think there are a lot of and I was just talking to another one in attendees today saying You're going to come up against people problems, right? At the end of the day, it's going to be the culture of your company So Kevin a CDO the chief digital officer saying this is the brave new world and you've got 50,000 stuff That's a people problem So It's not just a product problem. So I think there's a lot of words if you don't right sue platforms products We'll give you the final word what you take on today or anything else you want to share So wow, I think that the gentleman we had on from the BBC Summed it up well is What we like about this audience in this discussion here is we don't have all the answers yet What we know is it's changing really fast as we know oftentimes As long as we don't you know come after the computers with hammers because you know, we can't let the Luddites win You know the technology is going to move forward and innovation is you know rampant It's you know, there's always oh we've reached the end of the life cycle of this technology But there's something new it's the combinatorial pieces that are come together So, you know, I'm excited about the opportunities. I'm concerned about things like education You know if people don't understand the basics and have more building blocks, they can't build those combinations You know that the most read article that I ever wrote was about the Nicholas Carbo about Google And it just you know, it shallows their mind and makes it stupid and you know an event like this where we can really dig Deeper and have people that want to debate and discuss it is great And I think Andy McAfee made a great point He's like people always say like oh, you know that security issue I'm not worried about it because I understand it and by the way most people do too They're not sitting there like oh, yeah, we all click the I accept button real easy But that doesn't mean that we don't understand what happens to our information So people do think about it more than we give them credit to the average person You know it can handle it and we think the average person has some good future You know possibilities in the job market if they learn to run with a machine I can see today's got your brain going stew So we'll we'll enjoy talking about this digital imperative It's alive and well it doesn't matter speaking of Nick Carr I just always love to throw that in jump for it. I love that. Yeah Well, I think Andy actually did a debate once with it with Nick Carr because Nick is such the pessimist on all this stuff And Andy is just the ever-optimist, but you know, it's always good debate. All right. Well, Sue Thanks very much for a co-hosting Stevie appreciate you helping us out with the crowd chas today Matthew Collin good job Brendan. Thanks for coming over Andrew great job We ship all this equipment around our ruggedized gear to worship flawlessly other than the crummy internet in London But not much you could do about that, but good stuff We were able to go live all day and that's fantastic. I really appreciate it Bert Lattimore back home John Furrier in the in the crowd chats and the rest of the team Kristen Nicole and her team really appreciate it. So this is the Cube everybody. We love the collaboration with MIT We do a couple of conferences with them a year. We'll be at the chief data officer conference in July Really appreciate MIT inviting us here and hosting the Cube. I mean the content is always fantastic But thanks to you everybody check out wikibonnet.org and premium.wikibonnet.com our new site Silicon Angle TV and as always Silicon Angle.com and As always appreciate the input hit us up on crowd chat net go to crowd chat net slash MIT IDE and you'll see the crowd chat from today and a previous one that we did. Thanks for watching everybody We'll see you next time