Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Andrew McAfee on Digital Innovation, Employment and Productivity

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Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business, discusses his new book, co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson, entitled, “Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.” The book looks at the interplay between unemployment and fast-paced technological innovation. In the book, McAfee and Brynjolfsson propose that technology is outpacing humans, and they discuss whether humans can keep up. According to McAfee, technology is encroaching on skills that once belonged exclusively to humans. He believes that entrepreneurial thinking, different institutions, and new organizational structures can prevent humans from being left behind by the machines.

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Johnny Ryan on the history of the Internet and its future

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Johnny Ryan, Senior Researcher at the Institute of International and European Affairs, discusses his recent book, “A History of the Internet and the Digital Future.” The book is a comprehensive overview of the Internet and where it came from. Ryan discusses some of the core concepts, including what made the Internet revolutionary, and how many of these ideas came from RAND Corporation researcher Paul Baran. He explains that the initial concept for packet switching did come from the need to build a communications system to withstand nuclear attack. The discussion then turns to the advent of communication between computers, which sprang from a group of graduate students who used a collaborative process to create the network. Finally, Ryan discusses Web 2.0, and how technologies like cloud computing and 3-D printing will disrupt industries in the future.

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Sonia Arrison on technology and longevity

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Sonia Arrison, writer, futurist, and senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, discusses her new book entitled 100+, How the Coming of Age of Longevity Will Change Everything from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith. The process of aging, according to Arrison, is not set in stone, and the way humans experience age can be changed as technology evolves. She discusses the different types of technology including tissue engineering and gene therapy, which are poised to change numerous aspects of human life by improving health and increasing lifespan to 150 years and beyond. She also talks about how increased lifespans will affect institutions in society and addresses concerns, such as overpopulation and depletion of resources, raised by critics of this technology.

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Michael Nelson on digital preservation

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Michael Nelson, Associate Professor at Old Dominion University, developed, along with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, “Memento,” a technical framework aimed at better integrating the current and the past web. In the past, archiving history involved collecting tangible things such as letters and newspapers. Now, Nelson points out, the web has become a primary medium with no serious preservation system in place. He discusses how the web is stuck in the perpetual now, making it difficult to view past information. The goal behind Memento, according to Nelson, is to create an all-inclusive Internet archive system, which will allow users to engage in a form of Internet time travel, surpassing the current archive systems such as the Wayback Machine.

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Ryan Calo on personal robots

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Ryan Calo, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, discusses his new article in the Maryland Law Review entitled “Open Robotics.” Robots are frequently used in war, manufacturing, warehouse management, and even in surgery. Now, personal robots are poised to be the new explosive technology, and Calo anticipates their social effect to be on par with that of the personal computer. He discusses why he believes personal robots are more likely to thrive if they are built on an open model–rather than closed or proprietary system–even though robots open to third-party tinkering may be subject to greater legal liability than closed, discrete-function robots. To protect open-model innovation, Calo recommends immunity for manufacturers of open robotic platforms for what end users do with these platforms, akin to the immunity enjoyed under federal law by firearms manufacturers and websites.

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Tim Harford on adapting and prospering in a complex world

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Tim Harford, economist and senior columnist for the Financial Times, discusses his new book, Adapt: Why Success Starts With Failure. He argues that people and organizations have a poor record of getting things right the first time; therefore, the evolutionary process of trial and error is a difficult yet necessary process needed to solve problems in our complex world. Harford emphasizes the importance of embracing failure in a society focused on perfection. According to Harford, one can implement this process by trying different things in small doses and developing the ability to distinguish success and failures while experimenting. A design with failure in mind, according to Harford, is a design capable of adaptation.

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Steven Levy on how Google works

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Steven Levy, a columnist for Wired and author of the tech classic Hackers, among many other books, discusses his latest book, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. Levy talks about Googliness, the attribute of silliness and dedication embodied by Google employees, and whether it’s diminishing. He discusses Google’s privacy council, which discusses and manages the company’s privacy issues, and the evolution of how the company has dealt with issues like scanning Gmail users’ emails, scanning books for the Google Books project, and deciding whether to incorporate facial recognition technology in Google Goggles. Levy also talks about prospects for a Google antitrust suit and the future of Google’s relationship with China.

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Gavin Andresen on Bitcoin

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Gavin Andresen, project lead of the open source, decentralized, and anonymous virtual currency project Bitcoin, talks about the project. Andresen explains how the peer-to-peer currency functions and talks about what allows Bitcoin to operate without a central bank, why it doesn’t have to rely on intermediaries, and how it overcomes the double-spending problem. He also discusses the project’s implications for government regulation, what attracted him to the project, and Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakomoto’s motivation for creating the currency.

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Rob Carlson on biological technology

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Rob Carlson, principal at Biodesic, an engineering, consulting, and design firm in Seattle, and author of the book, Biology is Technology: the promise, peril, and new business of engineering life, discusses his book. Carlson explains what he means by “biology is technology” and gives a few examples of how humans have been using biology as technology for thousands of years. He then discusses a few modern biotechnology applications, like antibiotics, biologics, genetically modified organisms, fuels, and plastics. Carlson also talks about why more biotech garage innovators are needed, what the industry might be able to learn from open source software and hardware, and how legal and regulatory barriers to innovation in biotechnology might be minimized.

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Mark Stevenson on his tour of the future

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Mark Stevenson, writer, comedian, and author of the new book An Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer “What’s Next?”, discusses his book. Stevenson calls An Optimist’s Tour of the Future a travelogue about science written for non-scientists, and he talks about why he traveled the world to try to draw conclusions about where human innovation is headed. He discusses his investigation of nanotechnology and the industrial revolution 2.0, transhumanism, information and communication technologies, and the ultimate frontier: space. Stevenson also discusses why he’s hopeful about the future and why he wants to encourage others to have optimism about the future.

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