Paper for Oxford University (Merton College) course on "Did the Victors lose the Peace?", Summer 2015. (International Relations & Economics, 1945-2015)

1. The Impact of Digital Revolution
Bounty and Spread of Digital Transformation,1945 -2015
DID THE VICTORS LOSE THE PEACE?
History, Politics and Economics: 1945 - 2015
Richard G. Smethurst
Oxford Berkeley Program
Merton College
University of Oxford
August 3, 2015
Jim Mukerjee

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Introduction: History has witnessed three Industrial Revolutions, each
associated with general purposetechnical inventions. The first powered by steam,
in the late 18th century (1778), and the second based on electricity, in the late 19th
century (1878), led to unprecedented increase in productivity, social development,
and standard of living. The third Industrial Revolution fueled by Information &
Communications Technology (ICT), which began during WW II in 1940s, with the
adoption of digital computers and digital record keeping and analyses, launched a
Digital Revolution, which continues to the present day. Like both of the previous
ones it will take decades to unfold and influence our daily lives. Prior revolutions
created disruptions by eliminating jobs to Cartwright’s power looms, and later, to
Edison’s electric lighting, automobiles, and wireless communication. But, those
inventions created new economic opportunities on a mass scale with plenty of new
job creation to replace the job destruction, immeasurably improving people’s lives,
sweeping away old economic structures, and transforming society. The Digital
Revolution has already brought about transformative changes to business and
personal productivity, and social media. But, whether the Digital Revolution will
bring mass job creation to make up for the job destruction remains to be seen. The
“creative destruction” aspectgenerates the “bounty” and the “spread” of the digital
transformation, which may prove far more divisive than previous industrial
revolutions. The unprecedented economic benefits of exponential, digital, and
recombinant innovations represent the “bounty”. The large and growing
differences among people’s income, wealth, and well-being represent the “spread”.
Fig 1: Comparison of GDP changes during successive Industrial Revolutions

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Most of us today share a sense that the digital advances of the past 50 years are
transformative, perhaps even revolutionizing the way we live. Rapid advances of
digital information technology have already opened up a huge amount of rich new
territory and will keep doing so. Around the world, economies, societies, and
people’s lives have been vastly improved by digital tools and high-tech products;
these positive trends will continue, and likely accelerate.
Unlike the economics of traditional goods and services, “information” does not get
used up when it is consumed. Once a bookis read by one person, others can also
read the same bookand benefit from the information. In fact, successive readings
make the bookmore valuable, because all readers can use the same information to
collaboratively generate new ideas and products, creating the “network effect”.
When the bookis digitized, it can be easily copied infinitely, perfectly, and
distributed around the world instantly at no additional cost. Just like Johannes
Gutenberg’s moveable type press marked the beginning of the Printing Revolution
in 1454, a colossalmoment in the history of sharing information and learning, the
digital frontier has further reduced limitations for access and sharing information
with larger audiences and collapsed timelines. At a more personal level, the digital
revolution is transforming our daily lives. With Internet access and a connected
device, it’s free and easy to communicate with people around the world. With
Social Media services like Skype, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube,
WhatsApp, texting, voice and video calls, keeping friends informed of current
status is much easier. These facilities help to flatten the world and promote
unprecedented communication, cooperation and collaboration, generating a
“sharing economy”. Many of us use these resources so often that we take these for
granted, but they are all less than 10 years old. This highlights the phenomenal
velocity, volume, and variety, of technical innovations and the resulting impact of
the digital revolution.
The economics of digital revolution, in short, are the economics of abundance, not
of scarcity! This is a fundamental shift and a beneficial one. To take just one
example, the Internet is now the largest repository of information that has ever
existed. It is also a fast, efficient, and cheap, worldwide distribution network for all
this information. Finally, it is open and accessible so that more people can join it,
access new ideas, and contribute their own.
In the books “Raceagainst the machine” (1), and “The second machine age” (2),
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, of MIT Center of Digital Business, cite an
analysis suggesting that between 1988 and 2003 the effectiveness of computers
increased 43million-fold. Smaller, cheaper, and more powerful microprocessors
accounted for a significant part of this improvement. But, a larger share came from

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more efficient algorithms used in software. However, the promise of higher
employment and better jobs of this rise in computing power have been slow to
materialize. Far from pushing up wages across the board in responseto higher
productivity, the digital economy is keeping them flat for the mass of workers
while extravagantly rewarding the most talented ones.
The reasons are often illustrated by an ancient story about chessboardsand rice.
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil (2) retells the story from the Gupta Empire, 6th
century CE, India, in his book“The age of spiritual machines: when computers
exceed human intelligence”. In one version of the story, the inventor of the game
of chess shows his creation to his king. The king is impressed and offers the
inventor a gift of his choice. The clever inventor asks for one grain of rice for the
first square, two for the second, and four for the third and so on to 64 squares. The
king readily agrees thinking the request to be surprisingly modest. They start
counting out the rice, and at first the amounts are tiny. But they keep doubling,
resulting in very large numbers. The inventor winds up with (264 -1), or more than
18 quintillion, grains of rice – a pile bigger than Mt Everest. The inventor was
lucky to retain his head. Exponential growth, in other words, looks negligible
until it quickly becomes unmanageable, which is frequently referred to as “the
second half of the chessboard”. This is emblematic of the progress in ICT that has
brought computer prowess to the “second half of the chessboard”, allowing
computers to accomplish tasks previously thought impossible. This includes
advances such as Google’s autonomous cars, IBM’s Deep Blue chess grandmaster,
IBM’s Watson Jeopardy champion, high quality language translation and voice
recognition, among others, which encroach on areas, such as complex
communication and pattern recognition, in which people are considered to be
better-suited than machines. And we have only just entered the second half of the
chessboard in 2006, which indicates that serious employment dislocations can
result before this relentless pace of digital innovation is over.
The digital revolution is opening a great divide between a skilled and wealthy few
and the rest of society. In the past, new technologies have usually raised wages by
boosting productivity, with the gains being distributed between capital owners,
workers, and consumers. Now, technology is empowering highly skilled, talented
individuals and opening up yawning gaps between the earnings of skilled and
unskilled, capital owners and labor, creating a large poolof underemployed labor
that is depressing investment.

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The “Bounty”: Exponential, Digital and Recombinant innovations
Almost a century after the pioneering work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace
in the 1830s, the advent of computers was heralded in England and the U.S. by the
drums of war in the 1940s. Visionaries such as Alan Turing, Vannevar Bush, John
Mauchly, PresperEckert, John von Neuman, among others, spearheaded the dawn
of the digital computer age. But the invention of computers did not immediately
launch a revolution. They relied on large, expensive, fragile vacuum tubes that
consumed a lot of power. These were expensive behemoths that only the military,
large corporations and research universities could afford. The true birth of the
Digital Age, in which electronic devices became embedded in every aspectof our
lives, occurred in Bell Labs, NJ, in December, 1947, with the introduction of the
transistor. Complex military and space applications required a large number of
transistors creating a “tyranny of numbers”. Subsequent innovations that allowed
millions of transistors to be etched onto tiny microchips meant that robust
processing power could be nestled inside the nose coneof rockets, in smaller
personal and laptop computers, in calculators, in portable music players, in mobile
phones, and other consumer devices that could easily exchange information or
entertainment with any other node of a networked planet.
Such powerful, ubiquitous computing facility was made possible by the
development of Integrated Circuits (IC) in 1958, at Fairchild Semiconductor and
Texas Instruments. In a 1965 article in Electronics Magazine, GordonMoore, co-
founder of Intel, noted that the number of transistors in a minimum-cost IC had
been doubling every 24 months, and predicted that the same rate of improvement
would continue into the future (3, 4). Later modifications changed the time
required for doubling to occurto 18 months. When this prediction was validated
Moore’s Law was born. This meant that electronic circuits would be 500 times
more powerful in 1975 as they were in 1965. Moore’s Law has proved remarkably
prescient, and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary on April 19, 2015. In a video
commemorating the milestone at the Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley,
California, GordonMoore quipped “if Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented the
Exponential”. Variations of Moore’s Law have been applied to improvements in
disk drive capacity, display resolution, and network bandwidth. This consistent
cadence of improvements has made Moore’s Law the linchpin phenomenon of the
computer age, and acts as a steady drumbeat in the background of the economy.

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Fig 2: Moore’s Law: exponential growth in number of transistors in ICs
So, where are we in the history of business applications of computers? This is an
impossible question to answer precisely, but a reasonable estimate yields an
interesting result, inspired by Kurzweil’s distinction between the first and second
halves of the chessboard. TheU.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) added
“Information Technology” (IT) as a category of business investment in 1958. If we
take that year as the starting point for when Moore’s Law entered the business
world, and use 18 months as the doubling period, after 32 doublings, U.S. business
entered the second half of the chessboard, related to the use of digital tools, in
2006. Changes to these assumptions will yield a different break point. One of the
lessons that set the Digital Revolution apart is how quickly we have arrived at the
second half -- into the phase where exponential growth yields jaw-dropping results
(1) with transformative economic and social impact.

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The exponential growth property of ICs has enabled embedding ever smaller,
better, and cheaper ICs in electronic devices and services, creating transformative
changes in the way computers are used by governments, businesses, and
consumers, and in the intrinsic business of the ICT industry (3, 4). Forexample,
the smartphones carried by consumers around the world have vastly more
processing power than the supercomputers of the 1960s. The results will be felt
across virtually every task, job, and industry. Such versatility is a key feature of
General PurposeTechnology (GPT), a term economists use to describe the
pervasive influence of technological innovations that interrupt, accelerate, or
dislocate the downstream sectors and the normal progression of the overall
economy. ICs and computers are the GPT of the Digital Age, including similar
improvements in network and storage technologies, generically referred to as
“Information & Communications Technology” (ICT). GPTs don’tjust benefit their
“home” industries. Computers, for example, increase productivity not only in the
high-tech sectorbut also in all industries that purchase and use digital gear. These
days, that means essentially all industries; even the least IT-intensive sectors like
agriculture and mining are now spending billions of dollars to digitize their
functions.
Fig 3: Worldwide ICT spending forecast with continuous transformation across all
industries

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Digitization is not a single project providing one-time benefits. Instead, it’s an
ongoing process ofcreative disruption; innovations use bothnew and established
technologies to make sweeping changes at the level of the task, the job, the
process, even the whole organization itself. These changes build and feed each
other so the cumulative effects of “recombinant innovations” are constantly
expanding at a rapid pace.
The personal computer (PC), for example, democratized computing in the 1980s
putting processingpower into the hands of individuals and knowledge workers.
Major innovations appeared in the mid-1990s: the Internet, World Wide Web
(WWW) interface, large scale commercial business software like Enterprise
ResourcePlanning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Fig 4: The age of the Internet, WWW, and New Media
The WWW became more useful to consumers when Google made it easier to
search and conductE-commerce transactions. New waves of Social Media and
Mobile Applications have emerged that allow businesses and customers to stay
connected, provide feedback, complete transactions using smartphones and tablets,
which provide most of the functionalities of PCs, far more convenient and
popular. Mobile phone subscriptions will exceed the world population ; some
people hold multiple accounts, specially in countries with spottyconnections. In
an elaborate survey of telecommunications, Frances Cairncross of The Economist
(5) argues that advances now underway, specially of mobile phones and mobile

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applications, will effectively eliminate distance as a perceptible conceptfrom our
lives. This “death of distance”, a major determinant of the costof communications,
will becomethe single most important economic bounty to reshape society in the
next half century.
Fig 5: Global mobile phone subscriptions outnumber world population
The innovations we are starting to see in the second half of the chessboard are
encroaching into territories that used to be performed by people alone, such as
advanced pattern recognition and complex communication. Fornow, humans still
hold the high ground in each of these areas. But, as we move further into the
second half, and face the torrent of data and information, from Social Media,
Cloud Computing and Big Data sources, we find human cognitive skills
“augmented” by artificial intelligence is a better, and more efficient, alternative.
We are starting to see the evidence that deep Machine Learning is affecting the
business, professional, and personal world. IBM is working with Columbia
University Medical Centre and the University of Maryland Schoolof Medicine to
adapt Watson to the work of medical diagnosis, partnering with voice recognition
software vendor Nuance. GeoFluent offering from Lionbridge has brought
instantaneous machine translation to customer service interactions. California and
Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) are developing regulations
covering autonomous vehicles on the states’ roads. These are a few examples of a
myriad IT-enabled innovations that have the “creative destruction” potential, and
are transforming manufacturing, distribution, retailing, media, finance, law,

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medicine, research, management, marketing, sales, and almost every other
economic sector and business function.
Computers have becomethe “universal machine” that has applications in all
industries and tasks, akin to the “general-purpose machines” envisaged by Ada
Lovelace and Alan Turing in prior centuries, uniting creative skills at the
intersection of the arts and technology, a guiding principle espoused bySteve Jobs.
General purposecomputers are directly relevant for not only the 60% of the labor
force involved in IT processingtasks, but also an ever-increasing extent of the
remaining 40% (2). As the technology moves into the second half, each successive
doubling in power will increase the number of devices and applications, which act
as building blocks of future “recombinant innovations”, which can affect work and
employment. As a result, our skills and institutions will have to work harder to
keep up lest more of the labor force faces technological unemployment.
The “spread” : Current Economic Implications
John Maynard Keynes observed in 1930: “We are being afflicted with a new
disease of which readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will
hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment. This
means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of
labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor” (1, 2).
At least since the followers of Ned Ludd smashed mechanical looms in 1811,
workers have worried about automation destroying jobs. Economists have
reassured them that new jobs would be created even as old ones were eliminated.
For over 200 years, the economists were right. Despite massive automation of
millions of jobs, more Americans had jobs at the end of each decadeup through
the end of the 20th century, but there is no axiom that most people will
automatically benefit from technological progress.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS)
shows a dramatic decrease in hiring since 2000 (2). Lack of hiring, rather than the
increase of layoffs, is what accounts for most of the “jobless recovery” of the early
1990s, which has worsened after each of the two recessions since then. Employers
just don’tseem to have the same demand for labor that they once did. GDP
rebounded, but jobs didn’t.
From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s productivity in America,
measured by output per person, and inflation-adjusted average pay rose more or
less in tandem, each roughly doubling over the period. Since then, and despite a
slowdown in productivity growth, pay has lagged badly behind productivity

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growth. From 2000 to 2011, according to America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics,
real output per personrose by nearly 2.5% a year, whereas real pay increased by
less than 1% per year.
Fig 6: Relative stagnation of median real wages
The historically strong relationship between GDP and employment appears to have
weakened as digital technology has become more powerful. Even as overall wealth
increases, there are winners and losers. The losers are not necessarily a small
segment of the labor force; they can be a majority or even 90% or more of the
population.
Similar effects are evident at the top of the income distribution. The top 10% of the
wage distribution has done much better than the rest of the labor force, but even
within this group there has been growing inequality. At each fractal, the top 0.1%,
and top 0.01% have seen their income grow faster than the top 1%. This is not run-
of-the-mill skill-based technical change, but reflects the unique rewards of
“superstardom”that the exponential technical advances of Digital Revolution
enables. Wages for many Americans fell well short of historical growth rates and
even fell in real terms for many groups as digital technology transformed industries
across the board.

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Fig 7: Effect on real wages, income share, employment by skill
The stagnation in median income is not because of a lack of technological
progress. On the contrary, it is because of our skills and institutions have not kept
up with the rapid advancements in digital technology. In the 19th and 20th centuries,
as each wave of automation eliminated jobs in several occupations, entrepreneurs
identified new opportunities where labor could be redeployed and workers learned
the necessary skills to succeed. Millions of people left agriculture, but an even
larger number found employment in manufacturing and services.
In the 21st century, technological change is both faster and much more pervasive.
While the steam engine, electric motor, and internal combustion engine were

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indeed transforming technologies, they were not subject to an ongoing level of
continuous improvement anywhere near the exponential pace observed in digital
technologies. Already, computers are thousands of times more powerful than they
were 30 years ago. Intel is confident that it will be able to maintain this pace of
improvement in silicon for another 15 years. Recent breakthroughs by researchers
at IBM and Hewlett Packard in molecular electronics lead many experts to believe
that Moore's law will continue to apply for perhaps another 50 years (5). Similarly
dramatic advances in storage and transmission technologies are also in prospect.
Productivity growth has always meant cutting down on labor. In 1900 some 40%
of Americans worked in agriculture, and just over 40% of the typical household
budget was spent on food. Over the next century automation reduced agricultural
employment in most rich countries to below 5%, and food costs dropped steeply.
But in those days excess labor was relatively easily reallocated to new sectors,
thanks in large part to investment in education. That is becoming more difficult. In
America the share of the population with a university degree has been more or less
flat since the 1990s. In other rich economies the proportion of young people going
into tertiary education has gone up, but few have managed to boostit much beyond
the American level.
Fig 8: Medium-skilled workers as % of total employment

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At the same time technological advances are encroaching on tasks that were
previously considered too brainy to be automated, including some legal and
accounting work. In those fields people at the top of their professionwill in future
attract many more clients and higher fees, but white-collar workers with lower
qualifications will find themselves displaced and may in turn displace others with
even lesser skills.
The effect of technological change on trade is also changing the basis of tried-and-
true methods of economic development in poorer economies. More manufacturing
work can be automated, and skilled design work accounts for a larger share of the
value of trade, leading to what economist Dani Rodrik, of the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, calls “premature deindustrialization” in
developing countries (5). No longer can governments count on a growing industrial
sectorto absorb unskilled labor from rural areas. In both the rich and the emerging
world, technology is creating opportunities for those previously held back by
financial or geographical constraints; yet new work for those with modestskill
levels is scarce compared with the bonanza created by earlier technological
revolutions.
This technological revolution could still hold many surprises. It may create vast
numbers of jobs nobodyhas yet imagined, or boostthe productivity of less-skilled
workers in entirely novel ways, perhaps through robotics and augmented
intelligence. But for now, despite the opportunities opened up by some new tech-
based ventures, a generation of workers the world over is facing underemployment
and stagnant pay. The challenge for individuals, companies and policymakers is to
adapt their skills, organizations and institutions more quickly to keep up with ever-
accelerating digital advances.
Income and WealthInequality in the 21st
Century
Thomas Piketty and a handful of other economists in a bookentitled “Capital in
the 21st Century” (7), in more than a decade of research, have detailed historical
changes in the concentration of income and wealth. The data show the evolution of
inequality since the beginning of the industrial revolution (Fig 9). In the 18th and
19th centuries western European society was highly unequal. Private wealth
dwarfed national income and was concentrated in the hands of the rich families
who sat atop a relatively rigid class structure. This system persisted even as
industrialization slowly contributed to rising wages for workers. High taxes,
inflation, bankruptcies, and the growth of sprawling welfare states caused wealth to
shrink dramatically, and ushered in a period in which both income and wealth were

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distributed in relatively egalitarian fashion. But the shocks of the early 20th
century have faded and wealth is now reasserting itself.
Fig 9: Top 10% share of Income and Wealth, 1870 to 2010 (Source:Piketty)

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Central to the book’s argument is “r > g”, where r is the rate of return of capital
and g is the rate of economic growth. In the 21st century, r has been significantly
higher (4% – 5%) than the growth rate of the economy (~ 1.5%). Piketty also
argues that the return on capital can be propped up by innovations in technology,
which could lead to new products and services, substituting machines for people
inspired by the Digital Revolution.
Although Piketty’s empirical observation provides macroeconomic result of
Income and Wealth Inequality, it is composed ofseveral key microeconomic
factors, such as “human capital and specialized skills”, which is in short supply in
relation to the demand. Especially in the ICT industry, technically trained and
skilled employees are in high demand commanding very high incomes contributing
to the income inequality, as evidenced in Silicon Valley, California, and in other
clusters of computer companies worldwide.
The Silver Lining
Following are just a few examples of the way the Digital Revolution is creating
economic opportunities in the new economy to replace at least some of the work it
destroys.
E-entrepreneurship is part of a broad movement that represents one possible
responseto a new and different economy. This began more than a decade ago
when the sortof private transactions previously conducted through classified ads,
yard sales and flea markets moved online, courtesy of companies like Craigslist
and eBay. That move dramatically increased the value of the market for such
goods by increasing its scale and raising the odds ofachieving a match between a
buyer and a seller. This market has since grown dramatically, powered by the pull
of new opportunities and the push of economic strain across the rest of the labor
market.
E-entrepreneurship received a boostin 2008 when Apple launched its App Store,
through which third-party software designers could market their own iPhone
applications. The “app economy” has since grown by leaps and bounds. According
to an estimate by the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank, in 2013 it provided
work for more than 750,000 people in America alone. Many more take part in it
from elsewhere in the world. Apple’s App Store and Google Play, the equivalent
for the Android operating system—which runs on 82% of the world’s
smartphones, as opposedto Apple’s 15%—now offer users more than 3million
apps. Apple alone sold apps worth more than $14 billion in 2014 (6). Amazon and
other e-tailers allow authors and artists to self-publish and market their work

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around the world. YouTube offers a platform to a cast of phenomenally successful
video producers, makers of comedy clips or video-game reviewers who can rack
up billions of views
Mobile apps and networks are also democratizing capital ownership in some
sectors of the economy, including accommodation and passenger travel. Airbnb,
for instance, allows householders to earn money by renting their home while they
are away. The most famous app-based company, Uber, is valued at $41 billion
because of the success it has had in turning the smartphone into a remote control
for taxis. The “sharing economy” is increasingly indistinguishable from the
mainstream economy; things that can now be borrowed via online apps include
server space, home appliances, bicycles and tools. The logistical hurdles to
entrepreneurship are shrinking. Selling surplus goods orputting underused capital
to work is as easy as creating an online profile.
Startups are benefiting as well. New firms can rent computing power from
Amazon Web Services (AWS) through the “cloud”rather than having to buy
expensive servers. Office spaceand supportservices are becoming ever easier to
find, as is finance, thanks to peer-to-peer lenders and crowdfunding platforms like
Kickstarter. Easy and cheap access to all the off-the-shelf components needed for a
startup is fueling the rise of “weightless companies”, firms that can attain
extraordinary valuations with minimal staff and capital.
Informal online educationis a widespread and underappreciated aspectof
modern economic life. Teachers around the world have been putting academic
coursework online for more than a decade, including reading material, syllabuses,
video lectures and practice exams. For the price of a computer and an internet
connection, motivated learners could work their way through several university
degrees and save millions of dollars.
The online education market is now maturing. Massive Open Online Courses, or
MOOCs, have struggled to live up to expectations, but online offerings are
improving and expanding. America’s largest providers of online education—edX,
a non-profit service run by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT); Coursera and Udacity for-profit organizations with Stanford
University roots, and the Khan Academy non-profit organization—have provided
courses for an estimated 12m students so far.
Online education programs have several big advantages over traditional models.
These probably weigh most heavily with people living in developing economies

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who have few other options. It offers flexibility that the bricks-and-mortar sort
cannot match. Busy students can fit it around their job or family schedule, work at
their own pace and sample courses from universities without leaving their homes.
Critically, online courses are significantly cheaper than the in-person kind. Many
are offered free, though providers sometimes charge to certify exam results. A new
online master’s degree in computing at Georgia Tech costs just $7,000, compared
with $25,000 for the on-campus alternative.
A reduced price for higher education would be a boonto many families, since a
university education can take a large bite out of household budgets, or saddle
students with loads of debt. Education is just one of many things that new digital
technology could deliver more cheaply. Over the past couple of decades prices of
many physical goods, including televisions, computers and household appliances,
have tumbled, particularly allowing for improvements in quality.
Yet the costof other items just keeps going up. In 1990 Americans on average
spent 38% of their income on housing, health care and education. By 2010 that
share had risen to 43%. In recent decades prices for all three of those categories
have risen faster than for goods and services as a whole. Even if technology does
not create many new jobs, if it brings down the costof education and medical care
as well as that of other goods and services, workers can breathe a sigh of relief.
As innovation expands outward from ICT, so too should the jobs. Success in many
of the newly available niches will often remain a matter of skill, whether the
producton offer is a versatile mobile phone or a fancy application. But at least
technology is making it easier and cheaper than ever to obtain new skills.
Technology creates possibilities and the potential to change the world, but with it
comes greater responsibility. Ultimately, the future will depend on the choices we
make. We can reap unprecedented bounty and freedom, or greater disaster than
humanity has ever seen by increasing the spread.
But in the long run, the real question will go beyond economic growth. As more
and more work is done by intelligent machines, people can spend more time on
other productive activities. Not just leisure and amusements, but also the deeper
satisfactions that comes from invention and exploration, from creativity and
building, and from love, friendship and community. These qualities will grow in
importance as we satisfy our more basic economic needs. If the previous Industrial
Revolutions helped unlock the forces of energy trapped in physical and chemical
bonds to reshape the physical world, the real promise of the Digital Revolution is

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to help unleash the power of human ingenuity. As we have fewer constraints on
what we can do, it is then inevitable that our values will matter more than ever.
Our generation has inherited more opportunities to transform the world than any
other. That’s a cause for optimism, but only if we are mindful of our choices.
Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny!
References
The Impact of Digital Revolution
Reference # Title, Author, Publisher, Date
(1) Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee,
Digital Frontier Press, 2011
(2) The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee, W.W.
Norton & Co, 2014
(3) The Innovators, Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, 2014
(4) Invention of Integrated Circuits, Arjun N. Saxena, World Scientific, 2009
(5)The Third Great Wave, Special Report on Technology and the World
Economy, The Economist, October 4, 2014
(6) Briefing: Telecoms and Society, The Economist, February 28, 2015
(7) Piketty, Thomas, Capitalin the 21st Century, Harvard University Press,
2014.