new tech

Economist Debates: Technological progress

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About Economist Debates adapt the Oxford style of debating to an online forum. The format was made famous by the 186-year-old Oxford Union and has been practised by heads of state, prominent intellectuals and galvanising figures from across the cultural spectrum. It revolves around an assertion that is defended on one side (the “proposition”) and assailed on another (the “opposition”) in a contest hosted and overseen by a moderator. Each side has three chances to persuade readers: opening, rebuttal and closing.


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Table of contents The motion 5 Opening statements 6

The moderator 6 The moderator’s opening statement 7 Defending the motion 10 The motion’s opening statement 11 Against the motion 14 The opposition’s opening statement 15

Rebuttal statements 18 The moderator’s rebuttal statement 18 The motion’s rebuttal statement 20 The opposition’s rebuttal statement 24

Closing statements 28 The moderator’s closing statement 28 The motion’s closing statement 31 The opposition’s closing statement 35

Winner announcement 39 Winner announcement 39

Our sponsor’s perspective 41 Interview with Rod Christie, Vice President and CEO, Subsea Systems, GE Oil & Gas 43


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June 4th – 14th 2013

The motion Is technological progress accelerating? The world is suddenly awash in dazzling new technologies. Mobile phones continue their transformation into powerful all-purpose computers. Tesla is turning a profit selling sleek all-electric vehicles, while Google operates a fleet of cars requiring no drivers at all. IBM is developing commercial applications for its Watson artificial intelligence machine. A 3D printer recently produced a working firearm, and America's military has just launched a long-range stealth drone aircraft. Some economists reckon these accomplishments are signs of accelerating technological progress. Yet others argue that these whizzy new gadgets are less impressive, and contribute less to growth, than the technological achievements of the Industrial Revolution era. They cite disappointing productivity growth over the past decade and stagnant wages as evidence. Is technological discovery taking off or do recent innovations amount to more hype than substance?


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Opening statements Opening statements were originally published on June 4th 2013. They can be viewed online

at http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/987

The moderator

Ryan Avent Economics correspondent, The Economist Ryan Avent is economics correspondent for The Economist, covering economics and economic policy. He also edits and contributes to "Free exchange", The Economist's economics blog. Prior to joining The Economist, he was an economics consultant in Washington, DC.

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/987


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The moderator’s opening statement June 4th 2013 In the 1970s a century of revolutionary technological change and torrid economic growth came to a crashing halt. It has since proven remarkably hard to get the innovation machine that powered the Industrial Revolution rolling again. There have been big new inventions since the disco era—the computer age began soon after—but the arrival of snazzy personal electronics and computers amounted to less than the waves of dramatic invention that had come before. Flying cars, moon bases, continued leaps in health and life expectancy, and other dreams of earlier decades failed to materialise. Even worse, slower growth in economic output and productivity contributed to stagnant wages and disappointing employment growth, which have continued right through the Great Recession. There have been tantalising signs of better times ahead over this period. In the late 1990s information technology—including cheaper communications, better computers, mobile phones and the internet—contributed to a surge in productivity growth. America, at the heart of the tech boom, managed its best growth performance in a generation, and the rising tide lifted all boats. The boom then seemed to fade from the economic figures; much of the economy limped into the new millennium and rapid productivity growth, which outlasted the dotcom bubble, was also on the wane by 2004.


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But invention seems to have continued, if not accelerated, despite hard times. Cars that can drive themselves now ply public roads and may be a commercial possibility within a decade, thanks to Google. Google is now developing its autonomous vehicle technology in co-operation with Tesla, a maker of sleek, all-electric sports cars. It is also preparing to market futuristic glasses that will project information available through a smartphone onto a tiny screen just in front of the user's eye. Nanotechnology, 3D printing and robotics seem to be advancing by leaps and bounds. Online commerce is disrupting a growing range of sectors. And perhaps most important, huge declines in the cost of processing power are allowing computers to tackle cognitive work—like voice recognition and translation—that looked almost impossibly hard to automate just a few years ago. But peculiarly, this growing flood of discovery has yet to show up in broader economic numbers. Growth has obviously remained slow, and high unemployment continues in the wake of the crisis. The weakening of productivity growth that preceded the recession has not been reversed by recovery or the latest technological marvels. The rich world is nowhere close to recapturing the tangible improvement in quality of life that was so apparent from the 1850s to the 1960s. This leads some scholars to conclude that accelerating technical change is an illusion. Autonomous vehicles and 3D printers are flashy but lack the transformative power of electricity or the jet engine, some argue. Indeed, the contribution of technology to growth may be weakening rather than strengthening. Others strongly disagree, noting that even in the thick of the Industrial Revolution there were


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periodic slowdowns in growth. Major new innovations do not generate immediate economic results, they reckon, but provide a boost over decades as firms and households learn how to use them to make life easier and better. The impressive inventions of the past decade—including remarkable growth in social networking—have hardly had time to make themselves felt across the economy. Which side is right? Is technological change accelerating, or has most of the benefit from the IT revolution already been realised, leaving the rich world in the grip of continued technical stagnation? To debate these issues we are proud to welcome Andrew McAfee, a technology expert and research scientist at MIT, and Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University who focuses on growth issues. We hope that you too will join the debate in our comments section in the coming days.


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Defending the motion

Andrew McAfee Associate director and principal research scientist, MIT Centre for Digital Business

Andrew McAfee is associate director and principal research scientist at the MIT Centre for Digital Business. His research investigates how information technology (IT) changes the way companies perform, organise themselves and compete. At a higher level, his work also focuses on how computerisation affects competition, society, the economy and the workforce. He is widely published and has several times been named one of the most influential people in technology. He has held appointments as a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society. His recent work includes an e-book, "Race Against the Machine", and a Harvard Business Review article, "Big Data: The Management Revolution", both co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson.


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The motion’s opening statement June 4th 2013

Once again, it seems, you can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics. American labour productivity accelerated sharply in the mid-1990s, but this growth spurt lasted less than a decade. Since 2004, it has been in the doldrums.

Some observers have concluded from these data that the computer revolution has run its course. It built up over several decades, their argument goes, delivered strong benefits between 1996 and 2004, then faded into the background. Hardware, software, networks, robots and other digital gear are still with us, of course, just as electric motors and indoor plumbing still are, but the economic acceleration from all of these innovations is over. They are now infrastructure, not impetus.

There are two problems with this view of the world. The first is that it relies pretty heavily on data from a short time period, and one that included the worst global downturn since the Depression. The numerator for all productivity calculations is output; when it plunges it has a strong tendency to drag productivity growth down with it. Previous stretches of great technological advance, such as the era of electricity and internal combustion, included several years of slow growth. I believe we are seeing something similar


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here—a pause before measures of progress return to healthy levels.

The second problem is that it is a view that seems to ignore what is going on in the world. Since 2004 there has been a steady flow of digital innovations, from smartphones and tablets to novel robots for factories and warehouses to self-driving cars and Jeopardy!-champion supercomputers. These are not gimmicks or toys; they are being deployed to business benefit, or will soon be.

Computers have recently learned to understand and produce human speech, write clean prose, accurately answer questions by combing through a large base of unstructured information, recognise objects, and map the contours and contents of a room. All of these are valuable skills, and all will be put to good use. Work by my co-author, Erik Brynjolfsson, and his colleagues reveals long lags between adoption of information technologies and full benefit from them. This implies that the pay-offs from recent innovations will unfold for many years to come.

We should also keep in mind that many types of recent technological progress are captured only weakly or not at all by economic statistics. Data from online searches and social networks are letting us track outbreaks of cholera, flu and other diseases better and faster than ever before. Several centuries of digitised books are revealing how verbs become regular, how fame has become more fleeting and how long the effects of censorship last. A single plane equipped with


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gear for precise positioning and laser-based mapping recently scanned more than 50 square miles of Central American jungle down to the inch, and found evidence of several previously unknown major archaeological sites.

None of these advances was possible even a decade ago. The constant price declines and performance improvements summarised by Moore's law, the staggering quantities of digital data now available, and the imagination and talent of countless innovators, entrepreneurs and tinkerers are combining to bring us into a second machine age. The first occurred when we harnessed steam and other energy sources to overcome the limitations of our muscles, and it transformed the world like nothing else ever has. This second one is about harnessing silicon and other materials to overcome the limitations of our minds. It will be similarly transformative.

Excellent scholarship has clarified the importance of previous episodes of technological progress. But I believe Ovid left us with the right motto for today: "Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these."


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Against the motion

Robert Gordon Professor, Social Sciences, Northwestern University

Robert J. Gordon is Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences at Northwestern University. He is an expert on inflation, unemployment and productivity growth. His recent work on the rise and fall of the new economy, the revival of US productivity growth, the stalling of European productivity growth and the widening of the US income distribution have been widely cited. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of its Business Cycle Dating Committee, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and the Observatoire Francais des Conjunctures Economiques (OFCE, Paris).


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The opposition’s opening statement

June 4th 2013

"Is technical change accelerating?" A first response is: "Relative to what?" A second response is: "How would we know?" This translates into: "How do we measure the impact of technical change?"

The answer to the second question is that the fruits of technical change, which is also called "innovation", are measured by the rate of growth in productivity, defined as total national output per hour worked. Last year America produced about $75 per hour worked. When productivity grows, we become better off on average, and productivity change is driven by innovation and by improvements in the quality of workers achieved through higher educational attainment.

The graph shows the annual rate of productivity growth for the American economy back to 1891, divided into four intervals of unequal length. The width of the bars is proportional to the length of the time periods. The 81 years between 1891 and 1972, shown by the fat green bar,

http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/debates/Productivity_graph.jpg�


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t

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were the years in which innovation had the greatest impacon productivity. Since 1972 the growth rate has been much slower, except for a brief eight-year hiatus in 1996-2004, heyday of the invention of the internet, web browsing acommerce.

Thus the productivity data provide a clear verdict on the topic of this debate. Technical change is not accelerating if we compare the 2.33% growth rate of the 80 years before 1972 with the 1.55% average growth rate of the bars since 1972. Also, at a shorter horizon, technical change is not accelerating if we compare the record of the past eight years (2004-12) with the previous eight "dotcom" years (1996-2004).

Proponents of the view that technical change is accelerating point to manufacturing, including 3D printing and small inexpensive robots. But this is nothing new; the first industrial robot was installed by General Motors in 1961. The one sector in which America does not face a productivity slowdown is manufacturing, where productivity growth in 2004-12 was as fast as in 1948-96. But the share of manufacturing output and employment in the total economy has declined from 30% in 1953 to 10% last year. "Manufacturing is performing a magnificent ballet on a shrinking stage."

A sobering picture emerges from a look at the official data on personal consumption expenditures. Only about 7% of spending has anything to do with audio, video, or computer-


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related goods and services, including purchases of equipment to paying the bills for cable TV or mobile-phone subscriptions. Fully 70% of consumer spending is on services, and what are the largest categories? Housing rent, water supply, electricity and gas, doctor and dentist bills, hospitals, auto repair, public transport, membership clubs, theatres, museums, spending in restaurants and bars, bank and financial services fees, higher and secondary education, barber shops and nail salons, religious activities, air fares and hotel fees—none of which are being altered appreciably by recent high-tech innovation.

When we look back at the chart and recognise how much faster was progress before 1972, we can appreciate the revolutionary changes that were initially invented in the second industrial revolution of 1875-1900 and required a full century until 1972 to work out all their subsidiary sub-inventions. Electric light and power in 1879 led to the elevator, electric machines in manufacturing as well as portable hand tools, consumer appliances and ultimately air conditioning. The internal combustion engine, also invented in 1879, led to cars, trucks, buses, aviation and the post-war interstate highway system. Communication and entertainment were revolutionised by the telephone, phonograph, radio and motion pictures. Perhaps the biggest technical change of all was the 1875-1940 spread of running water and sanitary sewer pipes throughout urban America, ending centuries of drudgery of carrying water in pails, and leading to the virtual disappearance of infant mortality during 1890-1950.


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Rebuttal statements Rebuttal statements were originally published on June 7th 2013. They can be viewed online at http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/988

The moderator

Ryan Avent Economics correspondent, The Economist

The moderator’s rebuttal statement

June 7th 2013 Our debate is off and running, and our two contributors are staking out the dimensions of the argument. They have somewhat different ideas about just where we should be looking for our answer. Writing for the pro side Andrew McAfee says that a focus on recent productivity numbers is likely to create a distorted



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view. On the one hand, recent economic turmoil has no doubt muddied the messages in the data. But if productivity numbers are going to be the measure of technological progress, then the yawning gap between lacklustre data and surprising technological achievements should tell us something. For a long time, as he notes, the computer age showed up everywhere but in the statistics—until it finally did, from the mid-1990s to 2004. If we observe the spread of new innovations—like the use of powerful and cheap information processing to track epidemics, for instance, or computers capable of answering questions posed in normal human speech—while productivity growth is at low levels, it seems hard to imagine that growth won't soon accelerate. Robert Gordon reckons one cannot avoid a hard look at the numbers. The proof of earlier ages of innovation was in the pudding. It has been a long time since the American economy was able to sustain progress at the rate that prevailed from the 1890s to the early 1970s. Until it shows that it can once more, and especially until technology adds even a little bit to service-sector productivity, scepticism is the sounder viewpoint. Many readers are wondering whether the question's premise is too narrow. Both technological progress and stagnation may be possible, writes Gerald Nanninga, if rapid innovation displaces human workers. fGJsBR9CoV makes a related point, noting that if progress reduces the cost of some services to practically nothing, they will cease to show up in economic data. As many readers note, productivity growth and progress are not the same thing; the effect of technology on welfare is incredibly important.

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/987/CommentKey:2040527



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The motion’s rebuttal statement

June 7th 2013

I'm pleased and privileged to be debating this important topic with Bob Gordon. His excellent scholarship, in fact, has solidified my confidence that we're in the early stages of a great technological flourishing. He himself, of course, sees things quite differently, and points to slower productivity growth since 2004 as prime evidence that the digital revolution has run its course. Yet in his influential recent paper, "Is US Economic Growth Over?", he documents an even longer slowdown during a previous time of great innovation, noting: "The slow growth from 1906 to 1928 is a puzzle and may reflect measurement problems, as this was a period when [the second industrial revolution] had its greatest initial impact in providing electricity, motor cars,


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paved roads, running water, and plumbing to urban America."

So is it reasonable to expect that something similar is taking place now as the third industrial revolution, the digital one, unfolds? Mr Gordon seems certain that it is not, but here again his own insights give me confidence in the other direction. In his opening statement he makes clear that major technologies achieve their full effects only slowly. As he writes, "the revolutionary changes that were initially invented in the second industrial revolution of 1875-1900 … required a full century until 1972 to work out all their subsidiary sub-inventions." As I look at the history of information and communication technologies I see an accelerating series of important sub-inventions: the PC around 1980, the world wide web around 1990, powerful search engines shortly before 2000, online social networks by 2004, smartphones in 2007, self-driving cars in 2010, the Jeopardy!-champion supercomputer Watson in 2011, and so on.

This set will only continue to grow and to cause deep changes not just in the tech sector but throughout the economy. Mr Gordon helpfully lists the main categories of consumer spending and asserts: "None of these are being altered appreciably by recent high-tech innovation." I'm not so sure about that. For example, natural gas prices are at a 20-year low in large part because of fracking, which is not possible without advanced digital sensing and imaging. And Georgia Tech's new $7,000 online-only computer science


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master's degree indicates that price declines are coming to higher education.

But the shifts we've seen so far are nothing compared to what's ahead. I am convinced that Watson-like technologies will soon be the world's best medical diagnosticians and financial advisers. They'll also be the cheapest, since the cost of one additional bit of output from them is essentially zero. As our production and distribution systems become almost completely automated, the prices of everything from restaurant meals to cars will go down. And it's at least plausible that in a future world where a driverless car can be instantly summoned with a couple of taps on a phone, many fewer people will choose to own their own means of transport. It is not going to take anything close to a century for digital technology to transform our economy into something out of science fiction.

To close, I have to challenge Mr Gordon's claim that "the fruits of technical change … are measured by the rate of growth of productivity". No, that is just one of the ways, much beloved by economists. If we look more broadly, we see more fruits. Since turning in my first statement for this debate, for example, I read a report in this newspaper that smartphones are being used in Pakistan to track the progress of anti-dengue-fever spraying campaigns, highlighting local incompetence and corruption and improving compliance. I also read how a supercomputer simulation involving 64m atoms finally revealed the complete structure of a critical part of the AIDS virus, opening up new ways to fight it. If the


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health of a country's people greatly improved thanks to advances like these, its GDP might actually decrease (since health care is a huge industry), taking measured productivity down with it. The country, however, would surely be much better off. So let's not limit ourselves to productivity growth or any other single measure when considering the pace and impact of technological change. It's too big a phenomenon for that.


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Against the motion


The opposition’s rebuttal statement

June 7th 2013

Andrew McAfee and I agree that productivity growth is created by innovation (a synonym for technological change), as well as higher educational attainment. The central question in this debate is whether the pace of innovation is accelerating now, in 2013, compared with the past.

What does the past tell us? My baseline for assessing the pace of innovation is the contrast between the 2.33% annual growth of productivity during 1891-1972 and the slower 1.55% rate for 1972-2012. For the future I predict that innovation will be just as important for the next 40 years as


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for the past 40. But this requires adjusting that 1.55% historical rate downwards for the shift from rapid improvement in educational attainment in the century before 1990, to a much slower rate since.

To arrive at my forecast for future productivity growth, I make a single downward adjustment to the 1.55% rate of productivity growth actually achieved during 1972-2012. Consensus forecasts indicate that the effect of the educational plateau will shave 0.27 points off the future growth rate compared with the past. This implies that a continuation of innovation at the rate of the past 40 years will result in future productivity growth of about 1.3% per year, fully one point slower than in the 80 years before 1972.

This debate is about whether innovation in the future "accelerates" from the past. If it continues at the same pace, I win the debate. For Mr McAfee to win, innovation must achieve more in the next 40 years than in the past 40. But matching the past 40 years would be a stunning achievement, because future inventions would have to be as important as this list of achievements since 1972: the personal computer, the internet, web browsing, all forms of e-commerce, dumb cell phones, smartphones and iPads, Skype, social networking, digital music, digitalisation of library catalogues and parts catalogues, bar-code scanning, the ATM, cable TV, CDs, DVDs, iTunes, movie streaming, safer and more fuel-efficient motor vehicles, and many others, not to mention computers that win at chess and "Jeopardy".


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Mr McAfee wins the debate if the future pace of innovation exceeds the importance of this list. Many of the items he mentions, from smartphones to voice-recognition software to digitalisation of books, have already been invented and don't count in the achievements of the next 40 years. He claims that none of these inventions was possible a decade ago, but our debate is about the future, so that the achievements of the past ten years count as part of my list.

I am not among a phantom group cited by Mr McAfee as believing that "the computer revolution has run its course", since I project innovation proceeding at a steady pace, with the next 40 years matching the past 40. He accuses the phantoms of placing heavy reliance on the "relatively short time period" since 2004; in contrast my baseline is the past 40 years, hardly a short period.

Mr McAfee wrongly claims that part of the poor performance of productivity is due to the post-2007 recession and slow recovery. His view is long out of date, since productivity fluctuations have not been procyclical since the early 1980s. Instead, the most rapid productivity growth happens in the first year of the recovery after the recession is over but while the economy is still weak, the so-called "jobless recovery". Indeed, productivity grew between mid-2009 and mid-2010 at an unsustainable rate of 4.6% but in the past three years has slowed to a miserly 0.2% per year.

The dismal record of the past three years, while a warning, is too short to reach grand conclusions. But facts are a better


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basis for predicting the future than sheer speculation, and the most relevant comparison to the next four decades is the past four.


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Closing statements Closing statements were originally published on June 12th 2013. They can be viewed online at http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/989

The moderator


The moderator’s closing statement

June 12th 2013

Our debate is approaching its end, and is touching upon questions central to all of economics, not just to technological progress: can we predict the future by studying the past? If we wanted to, where would we start?



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Robert Gordon would start with the numbers, and the numbers are clear enough. Productivity growth has been slower over the past decade than it was in the late 1990s or in the long industrial boom that began in the 19th century. There is little sign in the most recent data of an increase in the pace of productivity improvements. If prediction is a matter of extrapolation, he clearly has the edge in this debate. Yet as Andrew McAfee points out, extrapolation has its risks. There were long stretches during the industrial revolution when productivity growth underperformed the average while firms and households learned to use new inventions to boost output. The numbers are informative but not conclusive.

Alternatively, one could tot up key inventions. Mr Gordon is being a bit slippery here in suggesting that very recent impressive inventions can't count towards Mr McAfee's cause—even if they have not yet begun contributing to productivity growth—because they have already occurred. Yet the invention-count metric still seems to favour Mr McAfee if one takes the extrapolation approach. We do seem to observe an acceleration in the production of inventions and business models associated with mobile computing, robotics, powerful information processing, and so on. So long as that continues, the pace of productivity growth seems likely to pick up. Although then Mr Gordon can turn the tables back in saying: past performance is not necessarily predictive of future results.


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And so instead we may need to develop stories and see which sounds the most plausible. Mr Gordon's story is that new inventions are appearing and will continue to boost productivity. But recent history suggests that finding inventions powerful enough to give productivity a big kick is becoming ever harder, and so we should not expect to repeat the industrial revolution. Mr McAfee's story, by contrast, is that the history of discovery is one of unpredictability and "lumpiness" in the pace of progress. The best we can hope to do, then, is to track the creation and deployment of new technologies and see if there is disruptive potential emerging. Mr Gordon's sceptical story is rooted in part in the relentless expansion of moribund sectors like education and health care. But there, perhaps, lies promise; technologies, such as Watson, that can generate health-cost savings could generate powerful productivity gains. One's view of the future may then come down to which force—technology or bureaucracy—seems more likely to triumph in those industries.

Or, as icarus12 puts it: "[W]alk into any public school classroom in America and you'll see essentially the same model of education that existed a century ago … Perhaps then the real issue then is not whether in a deterministic sense technological progress will accelerate but what we can do to reinvent our basic institutions to reflect already existing technological change."

Thanks to all for the comments. Do continue to have your say as the speakers contribute their closing arguments.



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The motion’s closing statement

June 12th 2013

Bob Gordon says that I place him in a "phantom group" of those who believe that "the computer revolution has run its course". For once in this debate, we're in complete agreement. I do place him there after reading statements in his work such as "the productivity impact of [the computer and internet revolution] evaporated after only eight years".

But is anyone else as tired as I am of this debate's near-obsessive focus on labour productivity growth numbers? We don't assess great art solely by counting brushstrokes, and we shouldn't think we can assess technological progress with any single statistic from a single discipline. So I'll end by doing something different.


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Mr Gordon suggests a tidy way to determine the winner here, but I have two problems with his approach. The first is that it requires us to wait 40 years. The second is that by forcing us to attend (or anticipate) the future it misconstrues the question driving this debate. To accurately respond to the query, "Is that rocket accelerating?" you don't need to know anything about what it's going to do next; you simply need to see whether its velocity has been increasing. We were asked: "Is technological change accelerating?" So, to answer, let's look at the recent rate of change in things digital.

A Gordon-favourable starting point for this exercise is 2004, because that's when the productivity doldrums he laments began. How's technological progress been doing since then? Here are a few representative indications.

The previous year, the human genome had been completely sequenced for the first time, at a cost to American taxpayers of $2.7 billion. Individuals can now get their genomes sequenced for about $6,000. This decline of more than five orders of magnitude in a decade outstrips even Moore's Law, and ushers in an entire new era of medicine.

In 2004 DARPA, the research arm of the US defence department, sponsored its first autonomous vehicle challenge in the unpopulated California desert. None of the entrants made it even 5% of the way through the course, and the fastest car averaged less than 3 miles per hour. Six years later, Google announced that it had built completely driverless cars that had safely covered thousands of miles on

http://www.genome.gov/11006943

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/business/knomes-new-machine-to-aid-labs-in-genomic-analysis.html?_r=0


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American roads in traffic. I have ridden in one of these cars; because they work so well, the experience goes from terrifying to boring in a matter of minutes.

Also in 2004 Facebook was launched. It was not the first social network, but it was the one that got the key ingredients right. It now has somewhere close to a billion active users each month, and Twitter (which started two years later) has about 200 million. It's fashionable to disparage these platforms as trivial—the motto of Founders Fund, started by Peter Thiel, is, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" (the length of a Twitter message)—but extremely short-sighted. Data from social networks have been used to accurately predict everything from the spread of cholera in Haiti to housing price changes in America, and Facebook, Twitter and their peers have been important contributors to democratic uprisings such as the Arab Spring.

Africa had 9.1 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people in 2004. By the end of 2012, penetration had skyrocketed to 76.4%. These devices are being used for communications, commerce and credit in places that desperately need them. Their impact has been so great that I agree with The Economist's characterisation of them as "mobile marvels".

Progress in artificial intelligence, wearable computing, industrial robotics, 3D printing and many other areas has been similarly rapid over the past nine years. If you find all of the above less impressive than a decade's worth of late-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/17/facebook-user-numbers_n_3292316.html



http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/Africa_EE2006_e.pdf

http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/Africa_EE2006_e.pdf

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/28/abi-africas-mobile-market-to-pass-80-subscriber-penetration-in-q1-next-year-13-9-of-global-cellular-market-by-2017/

http://www.economist.com/node/14483896


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19th century advances in electricity, internal combustion, communication and plumbing then you're on Mr Gordon's side here. If you find what's above more impressive then you believe that technical progress is accelerating, and I welcome your vote in support of the motion.


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Against the motion


The opposition’s closing statement

June 12th 2013

The question "Is technological change accelerating?" asks whether the pace of innovation is speeding up now in 2013. The question is not whether innovation has been speeding up over the past decade or two. For Andrew McAfee to convince us of the affirmative, he has to demonstrate that innovation over the next several decades will create more important changes in human lives than over the past several decades. If the pace of innovation continues unchanged, without an acceleration then Mr McAfee's case fails.

My forecast is that innovation in America will continue over the next four decades at roughly the same rate as in the past


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four decades since 1972. The past sets a very high hurdle for Mr McAfee's set of projected innovations to leap over. Not only have the last four decades witnessed the invention of the personal computer, the web, e-commerce, mobile phones and smart phones, but they have produced such basic tools of business productivity as bar-code scanning, ATM machines, electronic catalogues and airport check-in kiosks.

Mr McAfee faces a tough task for two main reasons. First, he faces the awkward fact that productivity growth in America in the past nine years has grown slower, not faster, than in the previous three decades. His optimism is based on faith, not facts, as he hopes without evidence that the disappointments of the past decade are just temporary.

The second reason strikes at the heart of his case. He enthuses that the price of computing has fallen to almost nothing, making possible the analysis of huge amounts of data. Yet basic economics teaches that marginal cost equals marginal benefit. As the cost of computing power approaches zero, so the benefit of the additional computations approaches zero as well.

The mantra of "big data" disguises the churning of massive data troves to uncover relationships of ever declining social value. Yes, computers can win at chess and "Jeopardy". But much of this data mining is occurring as corporate marketing departments study patterns of consumer spending to gain incremental market share from their competitors, a "zero-sum game" for the economy as a whole.


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Indeed, Mr McAfee provides his own examples demonstrating the low marginal value of big data analyses: "several centuries of digitalised books are revealing how verbs become regular, how fame has become more fleeting, and how long the effects of censorship last". How can these pursuits be compared in importance with the invention of the PC, web and e-commerce?

Mr McAfee's future includes more than big data. On the horizon is the driverless car, of dubious importance since people travelling in cars can already listen to their iPods and speak to anyone in the world with both hands firmly on the steering wheel. The marginal contribution of the driverless car would be to let them watch TV or do web browsing, hardly as significant as the invention of the car and retirement of the horse.

Mr McAfee's faith in the future is based on Moore's Law, the exponential increase in the computing power that can be squeezed onto a computer chip. His faith in technology acceleration implies that Moore's Law itself must accelerate, not continue at the same rate. But this ignores both the past and the future. There was a temporary acceleration in the pace of Moore's Law during 1995–2000, leading to price declines for computing power in that short interval much faster than anything observed before or since.

And one reads in the Technology Review of Mr McAfee's very own MIT a 2012 interview with a famous supercomputing expert titled "Moore's Law Over, Supercomputing in Triage".


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Faith in faster future innovation is not enough. Sometimes the future can disappoint, as in the saying: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters".


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Winner announcement The winner announcement was originally published on June 14th 2013. It can be viewed online at http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/990

The moderator


Winner announcement

June 14th 2013

Robert Gordon chipped away at Andrew McAfee's lead over the course of the debate, but at its end readers strongly favour Mr McAfee's view, that technological progress is in fact accelerating. The multiplying marvels around the world, from driverless cars to the plunging price of genome sequencing, seem to be a testament to the idea that better times are ahead.



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Mr Gordon sounded sensible notes of scepticism, arguing that it is much harder to speed up progress than merely sustain its pace and pointing out that—however marvellous—new innovations have yet to appear in productivity statistics. But, as he has himself noted, it often takes a while for invention to translate into cold, hard data, and I think it is safe to conclude that Mr McAfee's optimism is built on more than sheer faith.

Many thanks to both of our speakers for a well-argued debate, and thanks to you, readers, for your participation.


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Our sponsor’s perspective

GE Oil & Gas's perspective

Henry Ford said that real progress only occurs when the advantages of a new technology become accessible to everyone. Looking at today's demographic and socio-economic trends, we must find better ways to bring energy to more people across the world. The global market will require 80m more barrels a day by 2020. For the oil and gas industry to deliver that, it means operating in ever deeper, hotter and harsher environments, and facing more difficult challenges all the time. Accelerating technology innovation and developing smart solutions bringing in innovation from aviation and health care is the answer to meeting these growing needs in the most sustainable way possible.

GE Oil & Gas has invested over $1 billion in research and development in the last three years; that investment is increasing and resulted in 90 new product launches in 2012 alone. We've invested in technologies for newer markets like Angola, Brazil and Nigeria, and also in technologies for developed markets that present new opportunities, like Australia, Canada and the United States. Underscoring this commitment for the future we have just announced the opening of a new GE Global Research Centre dedicated to research in oil and gas in Oklahoma City. Through our continued focus on delivering smarter solutions using the power of the industrial internet and lessons we have learnt


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from aviation and health care, we are increasing our ability to innovate more and deliver better technologies that ultimately benefit more people around the world.

Learn more at www.geoilandgas.com

http://www.ge-energy.com/about/oil_and_gas.jsp


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Interview with Rod Christie, Vice President and CEO, Subsea Systems, GE Oil & Gas

June 4th 2013

Q: What areas of innovation is GE focusing on?

A: With the increase in energy demand over the next few years, the oil and gas industry will need to operate in harsher environments to unlock natural resources. In my business, this will drive innovation in the delivery of subsea power and processing. We are placing rotating machinery, such as pumps, compressors and separation technology, up to 3,000 metres under the sea, which requires a high level of system engineering, monitoring and new techniques for maintaining the equipment. As operations progress and the conditions of the reservoir change, our technologies must adapt accordingly. The ability to monitor and control subsea equipment at all times is fundamental.


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Q: What are examples of recent innovations?

A: We have evolved our control systems from monitoring simple indicators to being platforms that collect significant amount of data from the installed technology, measuring pressure and temperature and even detecting leaks. Early this year GE Oil & Gas acquired a business that has acoustic leak-detection capabilities, a technology so sensitive that during testing it identified a leak in the hydraulic system of a passing boat within the harbour, some distance away.

Q: How important is innovation for energy at GE?

A: Innovation is fundamental to the way we work. We look for opportunities to work closely with customers and really understand the challenges they are facing, and develop technologies or solutions that meet their needs. Through joint industry programmes and close and ongoing interaction, we aim to ensure that our customers will be able to safely and efficiently deliver energy to the world. We are also leveraging GE's Global Research Centres, enabling GE Oil & Gas to benefit from technological innovation across all sectors within the company.

Q: What core developments in energy innovation are predicted in the future?

A: The oil and gas space industry over the next 20 years is going to continue to evolve from both a technology and a geographical standpoint. It will seek a number of


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innovations—moving into higher end monitoring and diagnostics, for example—and design and maintainability of equipment will become more critical. These changes offer a huge opportunity to design engineers to really build their skill sets. We project 20 years of growth from today and that is going to drive technology and innovation. But beyond just recovering oil and gas reserves for the world, the one thing that really binds the industry together is a passion for safety, for ensuring that our people work in the best possible conditions, and that the environment is protected. This focus on the safety of people and the environment unifies our industry.

Rod Christie is Vice President and CEO, Subsea Systems, GE Oil & Gas, based in Aberdeen, Scotland. In this role, he is responsible for growing the Subsea Systems business and integrating the acquisition of Wellstream. He was formerly president, GE Energy for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the CIS, where he had operational responsibility for GE Energy's entire range of products and services in the region. He joined GE in 1999 in Power Systems, Slough, UK, as operations manager. After several roles in sales and services, in 2002 he was promoted to lead the Service Operations for Energy Services in Europe. In 2004, he became president of the Eastern European region.


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