jobs – Technology Liberation Front https://techliberation.com Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology Thu, 03 Apr 2025 23:20:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 6772528 Podcast: “Who’s Afraid of Artificial Intelligence?” https://techliberation.com/2023/06/12/podcast-whos-afraid-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://techliberation.com/2023/06/12/podcast-whos-afraid-of-artificial-intelligence/#comments Mon, 12 Jun 2023 17:30:32 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=77136

This week, I appeared on the Tech Freedom Tech Policy Podcast to discuss “Who’s Afraid of Artificial Intelligence?” It’s an in-depth, wide-ranging conversation about all things AI related. Here’s a summary of what host what Corbin Barthold and I discussed:

  1. The “little miracles happening every day” thanks to AI

  2. Is AI a “born free” technology?

  3. Potential anti-competitive effects of AI regulation

  4. The flurry of joint letters

  5. new AI regulatory agency political realities

  6. the EU’s Precautionary Principle tech policy disaster

  7. The looming “war on computation” & open source

  8. The role of common law for AI

  9. Is Sam Altman breaking the very laws he proposes?

  10. Do we need an IAEA for AI or an “AI Island”

  11. Nick Bostrom’s global control & surveillance model

  12. Why “doom porn” dominates in academic circles

  13. Will AI take all the jobs?

  14. Smart regulation of algorithmic technology

  15. How the “pacing problem” is sometimes the “pacing benefit”

 

]]> https://techliberation.com/2023/06/12/podcast-whos-afraid-of-artificial-intelligence/feed/ 5 77136 Podcast: Should We Regulate AI? https://techliberation.com/2023/05/08/podcast-should-we-regulate-ai/ https://techliberation.com/2023/05/08/podcast-should-we-regulate-ai/#comments Mon, 08 May 2023 12:15:12 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=77120

It was my pleasure to recently join Matthew Lesh, Director of Public Policy and Communications for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), for the IEA podcast discussion, “Should We Regulate AI?” In our wide-ranging 30-minute conversation, we discuss how artificial intelligence policy is playing out across nations and I explained why I feel the UK has positioned itself smartly relative to the US & EU on AI policy. I argued that the UK approach encourages a better ‘innovation culture’ than the new US model being formulated by the Biden Administration.

We also went through some of the many concerns driving calls to regulate AI today, including: fears about job dislocations, privacy and security issues, national security and existential risks, and much more.

Additional reading:

]]> https://techliberation.com/2023/05/08/podcast-should-we-regulate-ai/feed/ 6 77120 Why Isn’t Everyone Already Unemployed Due to Automation? https://techliberation.com/2023/03/11/why-isnt-everyone-already-unemployed-due-to-automation/ https://techliberation.com/2023/03/11/why-isnt-everyone-already-unemployed-due-to-automation/#comments Sat, 11 Mar 2023 14:16:41 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=77099

I have a new R Street Institute policy study out this week doing a deep dive into the question: “Can We Predict the Jobs and Skills Needed for the AI Era?” There’s lots of hand-wringing going on today about AI and the future of employment, but that’s really nothing new. In fact, in light of past automation panics, we might want to step back and ask: Why isn’t everyone already unemployed due to technological innovation?

To get my answers, please read the paper! In the meantime, here’s the executive summary:

To better plan for the economy of the future, many academics and policymakers regularly attempt to forecast the jobs and worker skills that will be needed going forward. Driving these efforts are fears about how technological automation might disrupt workers, skills, professions, firms and entire industrial sectors. The continued growth of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other computational technologies exacerbate these anxieties. Yet the limits of both our collective knowledge and our individual imaginations constrain well-intentioned efforts to plan for the workforce of the future. Past attempts to assist workers or industries have often failed for various reasons. However, dystopian predictions about mass technological unemployment persist, as do retraining or reskilling programs that typically fail to produce much of value for workers or society. As public efforts to assist or train workers move from general to more specific, the potential for policy missteps grows greater. While transitional-support mechanisms can help alleviate some of the pain associated with fast-moving technological disruption, the most important thing policymakers can do is clear away barriers to economic dynamism and new opportunities for workers.

I do discuss some things that government can do to address automation fears at the end of the paper, but it’s important that policymakers first understand all the mistakes we’ve made with past retraining and reskilling efforts. The easiest thing to do to help in the short-term is clear away barriers to labor mobility and economic dynamism, I argue. Again, read the study for details.

For more info on other AI policy developments, check out my running list of research on AI, ML robotics policy.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2023/03/11/why-isnt-everyone-already-unemployed-due-to-automation/feed/ 3 77099 Running List of My Research on AI, ML & Robotics Policy https://techliberation.com/2022/07/29/running-list-of-my-research-on-ai-ml-robotics-policy/ https://techliberation.com/2022/07/29/running-list-of-my-research-on-ai-ml-robotics-policy/#respond Fri, 29 Jul 2022 12:51:54 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=77020

[last updated 4/3/2025 – Check my Medium page for latest posts]

This a running list of all the essays and reports I’ve already rolled out on the governance of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotics. Why have I decided to spend so much time on this issue? Because this will become the most important technological revolution of our lifetimes. Every segment of the economy will be touched in some fashion by AI, ML, robotics, and the power of computational science. It should be equally clear that public policy will be radically transformed along the way.

Eventually, all policy will involve AI policy and computational considerations. As AI “eats the world,” it eats the world of public policy along with it. The stakes here are profound for individuals, economies, and nations. As a result, AI policy will be the most important technology policy fight of the next decade, and perhaps next quarter century. Those who are passionate about the freedom to innovate need to prepare to meet the challenge as proposals to regulate AI proliferate.

There are many socio-technical concerns surrounding algorithmic systems that deserve serious consideration and appropriate governance steps to ensure that these systems are beneficial to society. However, there is an equally compelling public interest in ensuring that AI innovations are developed and made widely available to help improve human well-being across many dimensions. And that’s the case that I’ll be dedicating my life to making in coming years.

Here’s the list of what I’ve done so far. I will continue to update this as new material is released:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021 (and earlier)

]]> https://techliberation.com/2022/07/29/running-list-of-my-research-on-ai-ml-robotics-policy/feed/ 0 77020 San Francisco, Entrepreneurs & the Cost of Doing Business https://techliberation.com/2019/10/24/san-francisco-entrepreneurs-the-cost-of-doing-business/ https://techliberation.com/2019/10/24/san-francisco-entrepreneurs-the-cost-of-doing-business/#comments Thu, 24 Oct 2019 20:26:19 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=76624

2019 Doing Business North America Report CoverOne of the keys to improving the standard of living for citizens is to make sure it isn’t too difficult for them to form new businesses or find good jobs. Unfortunately, some governments make that process harder than it should be. San Francisco serves as a prime example. An important new report just out from Arizona State University proves that.

“Doing Business North America,” is a wide-ranging comparison of six types of business regulations in Canada, Mexico and the United States. The almost 200-page report was released by the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty, a joint endeavor of the W. P. Carey School of Business and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. The effort was spearheaded by my old colleague Stephen Slivinski and a team of other scholars and students at the Center.

The report is a major undertaking that examines how 115 North American cities rank overall, as measured by six categories: starting a business, employing workers, getting electricity, registering property, paying taxes, and resolving insolvency. Among all U.S. cities, San Francisco ranks dead last with a score of 59.04 out of a 100. Of the 115 cities evaluated in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., San Fran ranked 77th. By comparison, Oklahoma City ranked first in overall ease of doing business with a score of 85.22.

Shockingly, things appear ready to get a lot worse for the citizens of San Francisco. In my latest column for the American Institute for Economic Research, I discuss the city’s newly proposed Office of Emerging Technology.  This new bureaucracy, which would be within the city’s public works department, would impose a new permitting system on anyone looking to launch new technologies that might somehow use public rights-of-way, such as sidewalks and roads. Innovators who fail to pursue and receive the appropriate permission slips will face civil and criminal penalties.

As I note in my column, this new permitting office “would discourage entrepreneurial efforts, consumer choice, and new employment opportunities,” because:

Whenever bureaucrats are in charge of an innovation-by-permission-slip regime, a line will form to get permits on the best terms possible. Whoever is the most clever and well-connected will get access first. Scrappy start-ups won’t have the resources to play the lobbying game or navigate the costly and complicated permitting system. Innovation will suffer.

Citizens respond to incentives and when laws and regulations raise the cost of doing business it stifles the entrepreneurial spirit. The problem with our ever-expanding “permission society,” as Goldwater Institute attorney Timothy Sandefur describes it in his latest book, is that “when told that they will have to undergo expensive and time-consuming permit processes before being allowed to pursue a new idea, many simply give up without trying.”

Or, they relocate. As I note in my column,

Innovation arbitrage is a phenomenon that the city should be worried about. It refers to the movement of ideas, innovations, or operations to jurisdictions that provide a legal and regulatory environment more hospitable to entrepreneurial activity. Innovation arbitrage is becoming easier in the Internet Age than it was in the past. Many cities and states are experiencing an outflow of talent because of onerous policy regimes that prioritize red tape and vague notions of the public interest over worker opportunities and consumer choice. If San Fran’s new anti-innovation office is established, it wouldn’t be surprising to see many firms and individuals relocate to areas with greater freedom to experiment.

It may already be happening for other reasons. For example, Stripe, one of the world’s most valuable startups, is apparently considering moving out of the city. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “The payments processing company, valued at $35 billion, is considering moving about 10 miles away to South San Francisco, said two people familiar with the company’s potential plans.” Apparently, Stripe is considering the move due largely to the lack of available office space and the seeming unwillingness of the City to address chronic office and housing shortages.

So, if you add together burdensome permitting processes, high costs of housing and office space, and high taxes (with new ones being proposed all the time), you get a recipe for economic stagnation and a lowered standard of living for your citizenry. What makes this particularly sad in San Francisco’s case is that the city is, at once, brimming with entrepreneurial potential but also chock full of serious social problems. Economic opportunity can be part of the solution to some of those problems, but opportunities of entrepreneurial dynamism won’t happen so long as the city makes it so costly to form new businesses and pursue new jobs. Hopefully, San Francisco and other cities learn this lesson and relax burdens to innovation and new business formation.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2019/10/24/san-francisco-entrepreneurs-the-cost-of-doing-business/feed/ 1 76624 On Robot Taxes and Workplace Automation Permission Slips https://techliberation.com/2019/09/09/on-robot-taxes-and-workplace-automation-permission-slips/ https://techliberation.com/2019/09/09/on-robot-taxes-and-workplace-automation-permission-slips/#comments Mon, 09 Sep 2019 18:31:30 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=76587

Originally published on the AIER blog on 9/8/19 as “The Worst Regulation Ever Proposed.”

Imagine a competition to design the most onerous and destructive economic regulation ever conceived. A mandate that would make all other mandates blush with embarrassment for not being burdensome or costly enough. What would that Worst Regulation Ever look like?

Unfortunately, Bill de Blasio has just floated a few proposals that could take first and second place prize in that hypothetical contest. In a new Wired essay, the New York City mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate explains, “Why American Workers Need to Be Protected From Automation,” and aims to accomplish that through a new agency with vast enforcement powers, and a new tax.

Taken together, these ideas represent one of the most radical regulatory plans any America politician has yet concocted.

Politicians, academics, and many others have been panicking over automation at least since the days when the Luddites were smashing machines in protest over growing factory mechanization. With the growth of more sophisticated forms of robotics, artificial intelligence, and workplace automation today, there has been a resurgence of these fears and a renewed push for sweeping regulations to throw a wrench in the gears of progress. Mayor de Blasio is looking to outflank his fellow Democratic candidates for president with an anti-automation plan that may be the most extreme proposal of its kind.

First, de Blasio proposes a new federal agency, the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency (FAWPA), to “oversee automation and safeguard jobs and communities.” He continues:

FAWPA would create a permitting process for any company seeking to increase automation that would displace workers. Approval of those plans would be conditioned on protecting workers; if their jobs are eliminated through automation, the company would be required to offer their workers new jobs with equal pay, or a severance package in line with their tenure at the company.

Second, de Blasio proposed a “robot tax” that would be imposed on large companies “that eliminate jobs through increased automation and fail to provide adequate replacement jobs.” Those firms would “be required to pay five years of payroll taxes up front for each employee eliminated” and that revenue would be used to fund new infrastructure projects or jobs in new areas, including health care and green energy. “Displaced workers would be guaranteed new jobs created in these fields at comparable salaries,” he says.

Mayor de Blasio’s first idea would be one of the most far-reaching and destructive regulations in American history. A federal agency with “a permitting process for any company seeking to increase automation that would displace workers,” is essentially a political veto over workplace innovations at nearly every business in America. The result would be a de facto ban on productivity improvements across all professions.

After all, there aren’t too many sectors in the modern economy where automation isn’t playing at least a limited role. Even the oldest agricultural and industrial sectors and professions have undergone a certain amount of automation over time, and continue to do so today. These automation improvements have been essential to growing businesses and the economy more generally.

These automation advancements also create new and better jobs. It isn’t always clear initially how automation will affect workers, but the evolution of markets and innovations always provides interesting, and usually beneficial, surprises.

For example, in the early 1980s, many feared ATMs would make all bank tellers irrelevant. Instead, we got more bank workers, but they are now doing different jobs. How would de Blasio’s plan have worked back then? Would his regulatory permitting process have vetoed banking innovations such as ATMs or online banking in the name of protecting workers from automation and potential job losses, which never even materialized?

Now magnify this challenge across the entire American economy and ask how these decisions will be made for every business that is considering some form of workplace automation that could theoretically affect workers, but in ways that are difficult to foresee.

This is one reason why de Blasio’s proposal would quality for the Worst Regulation prize. It would let bureaucrats at the new Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency sit in judgment of what constitutes beneficial forms of innovation and ask them to predict or plan our technological future.

This is a recipe for economic stagnation because these new FAWPA regulators would, like most other regulators, be incentivized to play it safe and disallow more automations than they approve. The precautionary principle would triumph over permissionless innovation; innovators would be treated as guilty until proven innocent in the resulting political circus.

Mayor de Blasio’s proposed robot tax is equally misguided. Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and Robert Seamans, associate professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, have both written about the dangers of the idea.

“The last thing policymakers should do is reduce the incentive for companies to invest in new machinery and equipment, as that would slow down needed productivity growth,” argues Atkinson in his study on, “The Case against Taxing Robots.” Likewise, Seamans notes that, in many cases, “robots are complements to labor, not substitutes for labor.” Therefore, “a robot tax would make it harder to achieve productivity growth,” and, he says, “may perversely lead to fewer rather than more jobs.”

Both scholars also point out the definitional difficulty associated with efforts to define what constitutes a “robot,” or “automation.” That problem will only be compounded once regulatory proceedings begin and various special interests begin lobbying lawmakers and regulators for favorable classifications and exemptions to avoid new rules and taxes—or get them imposed on potential competitors. Rather than helping consumers and workers, this will limit choices and drive up prices.

Importantly, regulating robots also means regulating their underlying software algorithms, which means Washington will need to send in teams of code cops to control programmers. At some point that could raise serious free speech issues since computer code can be a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. Practically speaking, however, we may not have to worry about that result because de Blasio’s command-and-control scheme would discourage many people from becoming programmers or roboticists in the first place. All those jobs and businesses would move offshore pretty quickly and America’s competitive standing would suffer globally.

It is tempting to dismiss Mayor de Blasio’s extreme proposals as a desperate move to appeal to the far-left wing of the Democratic Party base and win some more possible votes for the nomination. He likely won’t get the nomination, but his call for radical regulation of robotics in the name of protecting workers may move the party further toward the fringe by encouraging other candidates to concoct similar plans. Of course, it would be nearly impossible for any other candidate to outdo de Blasio’s plan without essentially just calling for an outright ban on robotics and all forms of automation altogether. Let’s hope that’s not next up in the competition for Worst Regulation Ever.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2019/09/09/on-robot-taxes-and-workplace-automation-permission-slips/feed/ 2 76587 The Challenge of Retraining Workers for an Uncertain Future https://techliberation.com/2018/07/18/the-challenge-of-retraining-workers-for-an-uncertain-future/ https://techliberation.com/2018/07/18/the-challenge-of-retraining-workers-for-an-uncertain-future/#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2018 18:49:32 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=76318

The White House has announced a new effort to help prepare workers for the challenges they will face in the future. While it’s a well-intentioned effort, and one that I hope succeeds, I’m skeptical about it for a simple reason: It’s just really hard to plan for the workforce needs of the future and train people for jobs that we cannot possibly envision today.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Ivanka Trump, senior adviser to the president, outlines the elements of new Executive Order that President Trump is issuing “to prioritize and expand workforce development so that we can create and fill American jobs with American workers.” Toward that end, the Administration plans on:

  • establishing a National Council for the American Worker, “composed of senior administration officials, who will develop a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries.” This is meant to bring more efficiency and effectiveness to the “more than 40 workforce-training programs in more than a dozen agencies, and too many have produced meager results.”
  • “facilitat[ing] the use of data to connect American businesses, workers and educational institutions.” This is meant to help workers find “what jobs are available, where they are, what skills are required to fill them, and where the best training is available.”
  • launching a nationwide campaign “to highlight the growing vocational crisis and promote careers in the skilled trades, technology and manufacturing.”
The Administration also plans on creating a new advisory board of experts to address these issues, and the administration is also “asking companies and trade groups throughout the country to sign our new Pledge to America’s Workers—a commitment to invest in the current and future workforce.” They hope to encourage companies to take additional steps “to educate, train and reskill American students and workers.” Perhaps some of these steps make sense, and perhaps a few will even help workers deal with the challenges of our more complex, fast-evolving, global economy. But I doubt it. The reality is, most worker retraining plans are little better than a dice-roll on the professions and job needs of the future. As I noted in my last book as well as in a paper with Andrea O’Sullivan and Raymond Russell, concerns about automation, AI, and robots taking all our jobs have put worker retraining concerns back in the spotlight in a major way. That has led many scholars, pundits, and policymakers to suggest that more needs to be done to address the skills workers will need going forward. That impulse is completely understandable. But it doesn’t mean we can magically predict the jobs of the future or what skills workers will need to fill them. It’s not that I am opposed to efforts to  try to figure out answers to those questions, or perhaps even craft some programs to try to address them (although I agree with my colleague Matt Mitchell that many past worker training programs “seem indistinguishable from corporate welfare.”) But worker retraining or reskilling usually fails because it’s like trying to centrally plan the economy of the future. It’s a fool’s errand. In my book, I pointed out that, when you look back at past predictions regarding the job needs of the future that we now live it, those predictions were off-the-mark. The fact is, an “expert” writing in the early 1980s about the job needs of the future didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe or understand the jobs of the technological era we now live in. Here’s how I put it in my book:
It’s also worth noting how difficult it is to predict future labor market trends. In early 2015, Glassdoor, an online jobs and recruiting site, published a report on the 25 highest paying jobs in demand today. Many of the job titles identified in the report probably weren’t considered a top priority 40 years ago, and some of these job descriptions wouldn’t even have made sense to an observer from the past. For example, some those hotly demanded jobs on Glassdoor’s list include[1] software architect (#3), software development manager (#4), solutions architect (#6), analytics manager (#8), IT manager (#9), data scientist (#15), security engineer (#16), quality assurance manager (#17), computer hardware engineer (#18), database administrator (#20), UX designer (#21), and software engineer (#23). Looking back at reports from the 1970s and ’80s published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency that monitors labor market trends, one finds no mention of these computing and information technology–related professions because they had not yet been created or even envisioned.[2] So, what will the most important and well-paying jobs be 30 to 40 years from now? If history is any guide, we probably can’t even imagine many of them right now. Of course, as with previous periods of turbulent technological change, many of today’s jobs and business models will be rendered obsolete, and workers and businesses will need to adjust to new marketplace realities. That transition takes time, but as James Bessen points out in his book Learning by Doing, for technological revolutions to take hold and have a meaningful impact on economic growth and worker conditions, large numbers of ordinary workers must acquire new knowledge and skills. But “that is a slow and difficult process, and history suggests that it often requires social changes supported by accommodating institutions and culture.”[3] Luckily, however, history also suggests that, time and time again, society has adjusted to technological change and the standard of living for workers and average citizens alike improve at the same time.

Bessen’s point is really important, and too often forgotten in discussions about reskilling for the future. When I think about the sort of skills that I picked up the early 1980 as a teenager using a clunky old Commodore 128 computer, or that my own teenage kids pick up today just by tinkering with their gadgets (computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, etc), I think about how those skills were not centrally planned for by anyone. It was mostly just learning by doing. A lot of the coding skills people use today they learned by trial and error and without taking any course to do so.

In his book, Bessen uses the example of bank tellers to illustrate how convention wisdom about future trends is often wildly off the mark. With the rise of ATMs a few decades ago, many thought the days of bank tellers were numbered. But Bessen’s research shows that we have more bank tellers today than we did 40 years ago because once the ATMs could handle the menial tasks of counting and distributing money, the tellers were freed up to do other things.

I’m not saying we can just leave the future of workers to chance and hope everyone can learn on the fly like that. Some government programs will be needed, and many could even help. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that we somehow have a crystal ball that we can stare into and, like a technological Nostradamus, somehow divine the jobs and skills of a radically uncertain future.

Our better hope lies in creating an innovation culture that is open to new types of ideas, jobs, and entrepreneurialism. We might better serve the workers of the future by ensuring that they are not encumbered by mountains of accumulated red tape in the form of archaic rules, licenses, permitting schemes, and other obstacles to progress. My colleague Michael Farren also testified last year and offered some concrete near-term reform proposals to help bridge the skills gap by “revis[ing] the federal tax code to allow tax deductions for all forms of productivity-enhancing investments, including investment in training workers to perform new jobs,” and also addressing government aid programs “that might be lowering the supply of workers, thereby contributing to the lack of skilled workers available.”

[1]     Glassdoor, “25 Highest Paying Jobs In Demand,” Glassdoor Blog, February 17, 2015, http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/highest-paying-jobs-demand. [2]     John Tschetter, “An Evaluation of BLS’ Projections of 1980 Industry Employment,” Monthly Labor Review, August 1984, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1984/08/art3full.pdf. [3]     Bessen, Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 223.
]]> https://techliberation.com/2018/07/18/the-challenge-of-retraining-workers-for-an-uncertain-future/feed/ 2 76318 Shouldn’t the Robots Have Eaten All the Jobs at Amazon By Now? https://techliberation.com/2017/07/26/shouldnt-the-robots-have-eaten-all-the-jobs-at-amazon-by-now/ https://techliberation.com/2017/07/26/shouldnt-the-robots-have-eaten-all-the-jobs-at-amazon-by-now/#comments Wed, 26 Jul 2017 21:41:24 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=76166

If the techno-pessimists are right and robots are set to take all the jobs, shouldn’t employment in Amazon warehouses be plummeting right now? After all, Amazon’s sorting and fulfillment centers have been automated at a rapid pace, with robotic technologies now being integrated into almost every facet of the process. (Just watch the video below to see it all in action.)

And yet according to this Wall Street Journal story by Laura Stevens, Amazon is looking to immediately fill 50,000 new jobs, which would mean that its U.S. workforce “would swell to around 300,000, compared with 30,000 in 2011.”  According to the article, “Nearly 40,000 of the promised jobs are full-time at the company’s fulfillment centers, including some facilities that will open in the coming months. Most of the remainder are part-time positions available at Amazon’s more than 30 sorting centers.”

How can this be? Shouldn’t the robots have eaten all those jobs by now?

The reality is that we suffer from a serious poverty of imagination when it comes to thinking about the future, and future job opportunities in particular. “One thing automation alarmists sometimes miss is that the simplistic ‘machines steal jobs’ story tells an incomplete tale,” observes James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute. “How machines can complement what humans do and create increased demand should not be overlooked when evaluating the rise of the robots. Yet it seems like it often is,” he notes.

Bank tellers are the paradigmatic example. With the rise of ATMs a few decades ago, many thought the days of bank tellers were numbered. But research by economist James Bessen of Boston University shows that we have more bank tellers today than we did 40 years ago. (See chart below). How’s that? Because once the ATMs could handle the menial tasks of counting and distributing money, the tellers were freed up to do other things.

This is a part of the story of technological change that is often ignored, as Pethokoukis suggests. Old jobs and skills are indeed often replaced by mechanization and new technological processes. But that in turn opens the door to people to take on new opportunities — often in new sectors and new firms, but sometimes even within the same industries and companies. And because human needs and wants are essentially infinite, this process just goes on and on and on as we search for new and better ways of doing things. And that’s how, in the long run, robots and automation are actually employment-enhancing rather than employment-reducing. (For a historical overview of this process, see this paper on “Does Productivity Growth Threaten Employment?” by David Autor and Anna Salomons as well as Autor’s 2015 paper, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.” Also see this McKinsey report on “Four fundamentals of workplace automation.” from 2015.)

Of course, in the short-run, that process of creative destruction isn’t always pretty. In fact, it can be gut-wrenching for some professions and workers. But the long arc of history, this is how progress happens.

 

 

]]> https://techliberation.com/2017/07/26/shouldnt-the-robots-have-eaten-all-the-jobs-at-amazon-by-now/feed/ 4 76166 Book Review: Calestous Juma’s “Innovation and Its Enemies” https://techliberation.com/2016/07/29/book-review-calestous-jumas-innovation-and-its-enemies/ https://techliberation.com/2016/07/29/book-review-calestous-jumas-innovation-and-its-enemies/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2016 15:32:42 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=76052

Juma book cover

“The quickest way to find out who your enemies are is to try doing something new.” Thus begins Innovation and Its Enemies, an ambitious new book by Calestous Juma that will go down as one of the decade’s most important works on innovation policy.

Juma, who is affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has written a book that is rich in history and insights about the social and economic forces and factors that have, again and again, lead various groups and individuals to oppose technological change. Juma’s extensive research documents how “technological controversies often arise from tensions between the need to innovate and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order, and stability” (p. 5) and how this tension is “one of today’s biggest policy challenges.” (p. 8)

What Juma does better than any other technology policy scholar to date is that he identifies how these tensions develop out of deep-seated psychological biases that eventually come to affect attitudes about innovations among individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. “Public perceptions about the benefits and risks of new technologies cannot be fully understood without paying attention to intuitive aspects of human psychology,” he correctly observes. (p. 24)

Opposition to Change: It’s All in Your Head

Juma documents, for example, how “status quo bias,” loss aversion, and other psychological tendencies tend to encourage resistance to technological change. [Note: I discussed these and other “root-cause” explanations of opposition to technological change in Chapter 2 of my book, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, as well as in my 2012 law review article on “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.”]  Juma notes, for example, that “society is most likely to oppose a new technology if it perceives that the risks are likely to occur in the short run and the benefits will only accrue in the long run.” (p. 5) Moreover, “much of the concern is driven by perception of loss, not necessarily by concrete evidence of loss.” (p. 11)

Juma’s approach to innovation policy studies is strongly influenced by the path-breaking work of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who long ago documented how entrepreneurial activity and the “perennial gales of creative destruction” were the prime forces that spurred innovation and propelled society forward. But Schumpeter was also one of the first scholars to realize that psychological fears about such turbulent change was what ultimately lead to much of the short-term opposition to new technologies that, in due time, we eventually come to see as life-enriching or even life-essential innovations.  Juma uses Schumpeter’s insight as the launching point for his exploration and he successfully verifies it using meticulously-detailed case studies.

Case Study-Driven Analysis

Juma
Short-term opposition to change is particularly acute among incumbent industries and interest groups, who often feel they have the most to lose. In this regard, Innovation and Its Enemies contains some spectacular histories of how special interests have resisted new technologies and developments throughout the centuries. Those case studies include: coffee and coffeehouses, the printing press, margarine, farm machinery, electricity, mechanical refrigeration, recorded music, transgenic crops, and genetically engineered salmon. These case studies are remarkably detailed histories that offer engaging and enlightening accounts of “the tensions between innovation and incumbency.”

My favorite case study in the book discusses how the dairy industry fought the creation and spread of margarine (excuse the pun!). I had no idea how ugly that situation got, but Juma provides all the gory details in what I consider one of the very best crony capitalist case studies ever penned.

In particular, in a subsection of that chapter entitled “The Laws against Margarine,” he provides a litany of examples of how effective the dairy industry was in convincing lawmakers to enact ridiculous anti-consumer regulations to stop margarine, even though the product offered the public a much-needed, and much more affordable, substitute for traditional butter. At one point, the daily industry successfully lobbied five states to adopt rules mandating that any imitation butter product had to be dyed pink! Other states enacted labelling laws that required butter substitutes to come in ominous-looking black packaging. Again, all this was done at the request of the incumbent dairy industry and the National Dairy Council, which would resort to almost any sort of deceptive tactic to keep a cheaper competing product out of the hands of consumers.

And so it goes in chapter after chapter of Juma’s book. The amount of detail in each of these unique case studies is absolutely stunning, but they nonetheless remain highly readable accounts of sectoral protectionism, special interest rent-seeking, and regulatory capture. In this way, Juma is plowing some familiar ground already covered by other economic historians and political scientists, such as Joel Mokyr and Mancur Olson, both of whom are mentioned in the book, as well as a long line of public choice scholars who are, somewhat surprisingly, not discussed in the text. Nonetheless, Juma’s approach is still fresh, unique, and highly informative. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many distinct and highly detailed case studies assembled in one place by a single scholar.  What Juma has done here is truly impressive.

Related Innovation Policy Paradigms

Beyond Schumpeter’s clear influence, Juma’s approach to studying innovation policy also shares a great deal in common with two other unmentioned innovation policy scholars, Virginia Postrel and Robert D. Atkinson.

Postrel’s 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, contrasted the conflicting worldviews of “dynamism” and “stasis” and showed how the tensions between these two visions would affect the course of human affairs. She made the case for embracing dynamism — “a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition” — over the “regulated, engineered world” of the stasis mentality. Similarly, in his 2004 book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy, Atkinson documented how “American history is rife with resistance to change,” and in recounting some of the heated battles over previous technological revolutions he showed how two camps were always evident: “preservationists” and “modernizers.”

When Juma repeatedly recounts the fight between “innovation and incumbency” in his case studies, he is essentially describing the same paradigmatic divide that Postrel and Atkinson highlight in their works when they discuss “dynamist” vs. “stasis” tensions and the “modernizers” vs. “preservationists” battles that we have seen throughout history. [Note: In my 2014 essay on, “Thinking about Innovation Policy Debates: 4 Related Paradigms,” I discussed Postrel and Atkinson’s books and other approaches to understanding tech policy divisions and then related them to the paradigms I contrast in my work: the so-called “precautionary principle” vs. “permissionless Innovation” mindsets.]

Finally, Juma’s book could also be compared to another freshly released book, The Politics of Innovation, by Mark Zachary Taylor. Taylor’s book is also essential reading on this lamentable history of industrial protectionism and the resulting political opposition to change we have seen over time. [Note: Brent Skorup and provided many other high-tech cronyist case studies like these in our 2013 law review article, “A History of Cronyism and Capture in the Information Technology Sector.”]

To counter the prevalence of special interest influence and poor policymaking more generally, Juma stresses the need for evidence-based analysis and a corresponding rejection of fear-mongering and deceptive tactics by public officials and activist groups. He’s particularly concerned with “the use of demonization and false analogies to amplify the perception of risks associated with a new product.”

Accordingly, he would like to see improved educational and risk communication efforts aimed at better informing the public about risk trade-offs and the many potential future benefits of emerging technologies. “Learning how to communicate to the general public is an important aspect of reducing distrust [in new technologies],” Juma argues. (p. 312)

On the Pacing Problem

But Juma never really adequately squares that recommendation with another point he makes throughout the text about how “the pace of technological innovation is discernibly fast,” (p. 5) and how it is accelerating in an exponential fashion. “The implications of exponential growth will continue to elude political leaders if they persist in operating with linear worldviews.” (p. 14) But if it is indeed the case that things are moving that fast, then are we not potentially doomed to live in never-ending cycles of technopanics and misinformation campaigns about new technologies no matter how much education we try to do?

Regardless, Juma’s argument about the speed of modern technological change is quite valid and shared by many other scholars. He is essentially making the same case that Larry Downes did in his excellent 2009 book, The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age. Downes argued that lawmaking in the information age is inexorably governed by the “law of disruption” or the fact that “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.”  This law, Downes said, is “a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life,” and it will have profound implications for the way businesses, government, and culture evolve going forward.  “As the gap between the old world and the new gets wider,” he argued, “conflicts between social, economic, political, and legal systems” will intensify and “nothing can stop the chaos that will follow.”

Again, Juma makes that same point repeatedly throughout the chapters of his book. This is also a restatement of the so-called “pacing problem,” as it is called in the field of the philosophy of technology. I discussed the pacing problem at length in my recent review of Wendell Wallach’s important new book, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping beyond Our Control. Wallach nicely defined the pacing problem as “the gap between the introduction of a new technology and the establishment of laws, regulations, and oversight mechanisms for shaping its safe development.” “There has always been a pacing problem,” he noted but, like Juma, Wallach believes that modern technological innovation is occurring at an unprecedented pace, making it harder than ever to “govern” using traditional legal and regulatory mechanisms.

New Approaches to Technological Governance Needed

Both Wallach in A Dangerous Master and Juma in Innovation and Its Enemies struggle with how to solve this problem. Wallach advocates “soft law” mechanisms or even informal “Governance Coordinating Committees,” which would oversee the development of new technology policies and advise existing governmental institutions. Juma is somewhat ambiguous regarding potential solutions, but he does stress the general need for a flexible approach to policy, as he notes on pg. 252:

It is important to make clear distinctions between hazards and risks. It is necessary to find a legal framework for addressing hazards. But such a framework should not take the form of rigid laws whose adoption needs to be guided by evidence of harm. More flexible standards that allow continuous assessment of emerging safety issues related to a new product are another way to address hazards. This approach would allow for evidence-based regulation.

Beyond that Juma wants to see “entrepreneurialism exercised in the public arena” (p. 282) and calls for “decisive leaders to champion the application of new technologies.” (p. 283) He argues such leadership is needed to ensure that life-enriching technologies are not derailed by opponents of change.

On the other hand, Juma sees a broader role for policymakers in helping to counter some of the potential side effects associated with many emerging technologies. He highlights three primary areas of concern. First, he suggests political leaders might need to find ways “to help balance the benefits and risks of automation” due to the rapid rise of robotics and artificial intelligence. Second, he notes that synthetic biology and gene-editing will give rise to many thorny issues that require policymakers to balance “potentially extraordinary benefits and the risk of catastrophic consequences.” (p. 284)  Finally, he points out that medicine and healthcare are set to be radically transformed by emerging technologies, but they are also threatened by archaic policies and practices in many countries.

In each case, Juma hopes that “decisive,” “adaptive” and “flexible” leaders will steer a sensible policy course with an eye toward limiting “the spread of political unrest and resentment toward technological innovation.” (p. 284)  That’s a noble goal, but Juma remains a bit vague on the steps needed to accomplish that balancing act without tipping public policy in favor a full-blown precautionary principle-based regime for new technologies. Juma clearly wants to avoid that result, but it remains unclear how or where he would draw clear lines in the sand to prevent it from occurring while at the same time achieving “decisive leadership” aimed at balancing potential risks and benefits.

Similarly, his repeated calls in the closing chapter for “inclusive innovation” efforts and strategies sounds sensible in theory, but Juma speaks in abstract generalities about what the term means and doesn’t provide a clear vision for how that would translate into concrete actions that would not end up giving vested interests a veto over new forms of technological innovation that they disfavor.

[CARTOON] Consider Every Risk Except

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

Generally speaking, however, Juma wants this balance struck in favor of greater openness to change and an ongoing freedom to experiment with new technological capabilities. As he notes in his concluding chapter:

The biggest risk that society faces by adopting approaches that suppress innovation is that they amplify the activities of those who want to preserve the status quo by silencing those arguing for a more open future. […] Keeping the future open and experimenting in an inclusive and transparent way is more rewarding that imposing the dictum of old patterns. (pgs. 289, 316)

In that regard, the thing I liked most about Innovation and Its Enemies is the way throughout the text that Juma stressed the symbiotic relationship between risk-taking and progress. One of the ways he does so is by kicking off every chapter with a fun quote on that theme from some notable figure. He includes gems like these:

  • “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.” – Samuel Johnson
  • “Only those will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T.S. Eliot
  • “If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.” – Geena Davis
  • “Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.” – Tom Peters

Of course, I was bound to enjoy his repeated discussion of this theme because that was the central thesis of my latest book, in which I made the argument that, “if we spend all our time living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy upon such fears—then many best-case scenarios will never come about.” Or more simply, as the old saying goes: “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

CARTOON - Protesting Against New Technology - the Early Days

On Pastoral Myths

I also liked the way that Juma used his case studies to remind us how “the topics may have changed, but the tactics have not.” (p. 143) For example, much of the fear-mongering and deceptive tactics we have seen through the years are based on “pastoral ideals,” i.e., appeals to nature, farm life, old traditions, of just the proverbial “good old days,” whenever those supposedly were! “Demonizing innovation is often associated with campaigns to romanticize past products and practices,” Juma notes. “Opponents of innovation hark back to traditions as if traditions themselves were not inventions at some point in the past.” (p. 309)  So very true!

That was especially the case in battles over new farming methods and technologies, when opponents of change were frequently “championing a moral cause to preserve a way of life,” as Juma discusses in several chapters. (p. 129) New products or methods of production were repeatedly but wrongly characterized as dangerous simply because they were not supposedly “natural” or “traditional” enough in character.

Of course, if all farming and other work was to remain frozen in some past “natural” state, we’d all still be hunters and gathers struggling to find the next meal to put in our bellies. Or, if we were all still on the farms of the “good old days,” then we’d still be stuck using an ox and plow in the name of preserving the “traditional” ways of doing things.

Humanity has made amazing strides—including being able to feed more people more easily and cheaply than ever before—precisely because we broke with those old, “natural” traditions. Alas, many vested interests and even quite a few academics today still employ these same pastoral appeals and myths to oppose new forms of technological change. Juma’s case studies powerfully illustrate why that dynamic continues to be a driving force in innovation policy debates and how it has delayed the diffusion of many important new goods and services throughout history. When the opponents of change rest their case on pastoral myths and nostalgic arguments about the good old days we should remind them that the good old days weren’t really that great after all.

Conclusion

In closing, Innovation and Its Enemies earns my highest recommendation. Even though 2016 is only half done as I write this, Professor Juma’s book is probably already a shoo-in as my choice for best innovation policy book of the year. And I am certain that it will also go down as one of the decade’s most important innovation policy books. Buy the book now and read every word of it. It is well worth your time.

 

Additional material related to Juma’s book:

Other Related Books

In addition to the books that I already mentioned throughout this review, readers who find Juma’s book and the issues he discusses in it of interest should also consider reading these other books on innovation policy, technological governance, and regulatory capture.  Although many of them are more squarely focused on the information technology sector or other emerging technology fields, they all relate to the general subject matter and approach found throughout Juma’s book. [NOTE: Links, where provided, are to my reviews of these books.]

 

]]> https://techliberation.com/2016/07/29/book-review-calestous-jumas-innovation-and-its-enemies/feed/ 1 76052 The Folly of Forecasting Future Tech Innovations and Professions https://techliberation.com/2016/07/07/the-folly-of-forecasting-future-tech-innovations-and-professions/ https://techliberation.com/2016/07/07/the-folly-of-forecasting-future-tech-innovations-and-professions/#comments Thu, 07 Jul 2016 14:28:09 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=76049

In a terrific little essay on “Local Economic Revival and The Unpredictability of Technological Innovation,” Michael Mandel, the chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, makes several important points regarding the fundamental folly for future forecasting efforts as it pertains to new innovations. He notes, for example:

There are plenty of candidates for the “next big thing,” ranging from the Internet of Things to additive manufacturing to artificial organ factories to autonomous cars to space commerce to Elon Musk’s hyperloop. Each of these has the potential to revolutionize an industry, and to create many thousands or even millions of jobs in the process–not just for the highly-educated, but a whole range of workers. Yet the problem–and the beauty–is that technological innovation is fundamentally unpredictable, even at close range. Consider this: The two most important innovations of the past decade, economically, have been the smartphone and fracking. The smartphone transformed the way that we communicate and hydraulic fracturing has driven down the price of energy, not to mention shifting the geopolitical balance of power.

But few saw the smartphone and fracking revolutions coming, he notes. The pundits and the press were too focused on technologies of the past.

In fact, as I noted in a case study in the 2nd edition of my book,  Permissionless Innovation (p. 50-51), various pundits denigrated Apple and Google’s entry into the smartphone business because many industry analysts believed the market was mature. After all, in the early and mid-2000s, the big names of the mobile world were Palm, Blackberry, Motorola, and Nokia. And their market power seemed unassailable. Thus, as perplexing as it sounds now, the common wisdom in the mid-2000s regarding Apple and Google’s potential entry into the smartphone business was that, if they dare tried, they were destined to fail miserably!

For example, in December 2006, Palm CEO Ed Colligan summarily dismissed the idea that a traditional personal computing company could compete in the smartphone business. “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” Similarly, in January 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed off the prospect of an expensive smartphone without a keyboard having a chance in the marketplace: “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that’s the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.” (Quotes from John Paczkowski, “Apple: How Do You Say ‘Eat My Dust’ in Finnish?” All Things D, November 11, 2009.)

Even better, in March 2007, computing industry pundit John C. Dvorak insisted that “Apple Should Pull the Plug on the iPhone,” because he believed the mobile handset business was already locked up by the era’s major players. “This is not an emerging business,” Dvorak said. “In fact it’s gone so far that it’s in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.”

Just a few years later, of course, Nokia’s profits and market share plummeted, and Google had purchased the struggling Motorola. Meanwhile, Palm was dead, Blackberry was languishing, and Microsoft continued to struggle to win back market share lost to Apple and Google. So much for tech prophecy!

Tech pundits also usually fail when forecasting the professions of the future. As I noted in Chapter 5 of my  Permissionless Innovation book (p. 101-2):

It’s also worth noting how difficult it is to predict future labor market trends. In early 2015, Glassdoor, an online jobs and recruiting site, published a report on the 25 highest paying jobs in demand today. Many of the job titles identified in the report probably weren’t considered a top priority 40 years ago, and some of these job descriptions wouldn’t even have made sense to an observer from the past. For example, some those hotly demanded jobs on Glassdoor’s list include software architect (#3), software development manager (#4), solutions architect (#6), analytics manager (#8), IT manager (#9), data scientist (#15), security engineer (#16), quality assurance manager (#17), computer hardware engineer (#18), database administrator (#20), UX designer (#21), and software engineer (#23). Looking back at reports from the 1970s and ’80s published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency that monitors labor market trends, one finds no mention of these computing and information technology-related professions because they had not yet been created or even envisioned. So, what will the most important and well-paying jobs be 30 to 40 years from now? If history is any guide, we probably can’t even imagine many of them right now.

Indeed, as Mandel concludes in his new essay, history tells us that, “the next big job-creating innovation isn’t likely to announce itself in bold letters before it arrives. Just because the next big thing isn’t obvious today doesn’t mean it won’t be obvious a year from now.”

Today’s tech pundits would be wise to remember that insight when making forecasts about a future that is, as Mandel suggests, so “fundamentally unpredictable, even at close range.”

 

]]> https://techliberation.com/2016/07/07/the-folly-of-forecasting-future-tech-innovations-and-professions/feed/ 1 76049 “Learning by Doing,” the Process of Innovation & the Future of Employment https://techliberation.com/2015/09/25/learning-by-doing-the-process-of-innovation-the-future-of-employment/ https://techliberation.com/2015/09/25/learning-by-doing-the-process-of-innovation-the-future-of-employment/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2015 19:08:37 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=75807

I recently finished  Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth , by James Bessen of the Boston University Law School. It’s a good book to check out if you are worried about whether workers will be able to weather this latest wave of technological innovation.  One of the key insights of Bessen’s book is that, as with previous periods of turbulent technological change, today’s workers and businesses will obviously need find ways to adapt to rapidly-changing marketplace realities brought on by the Information Revolution, robotics, and automated systems.

That sort of adaptation takes time, but for technological revolutions to take hold and have meaningful impact on economic growth and worker conditions, it requires that large numbers of ordinary workers acquire new knowledge and skills, Bessen notes. But, “that is a slow and difficult process, and history suggests that it often requires social changes supported by accommodating institutions and culture.” (p 223) That is not a reason to resist disruptive forms of technological change, however. To the contrary, Bessen says, it is crucial to allow ongoing trial-and-error experimentation and innovation to continue precisely because it represents a learning process which helps people (and workers in particular) adapt to changing circumstances and acquire new skills to deal with them. That, in a nutshell, is “learning by doing.” As he elaborates elsewhere in the book:

Major new technologies become ‘revolutionary’ only after a long process of learning by doing and incremental improvement. Having the breakthrough idea is not enough. But learning through experience and experimentation is expensive and slow. Experimentation involves a search for productive techniques: testing and eliminating bad techniques in order to find good ones. This means that workers and equipment typically operate for extended periods at low levels of productivity using poor techniques and are able to eliminate those poor practices only when they find something better. (p. 50)

Luckily, however, history also suggests that, time and time again, that process has happened and the standard of living for workers and average citizens alike improved at the same time.

Of course, that won’t stop some from proclaiming that,  This time it’s different! Indeed, we’re hearing increasing concerns today about the “rise of the robots,” and the general negative impact of automation on the workforce.

But these concerns are really nothing new. “There have been periodic warnings in the last two centuries that automation and new technology were going to wipe out large numbers of middle class jobs,” notes MIT economist David H. Autor. Luckily, those dire predictions have not come to pass. The reason was because short-sighted skeptics failed to appreciate how as new technologies obliterated old businesses and jobs, it simultaneously opened up many more opportunities that were impossible to predict in advance. For every factory worker that lost a job due to technological innovation, new jobs opened up in entirely new sectors that usually offered workers better wages, a safer work environment, and more leisure time. And society clearly benefited in many other ways.

In a new essay for  The Journal of Economic Perspectives on “The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth: Is This Time Different?” Joel Mokyr, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth, note that “Discussions of how technology may affect labor demand are often focused on existing jobs, which can offer insights about which occupations may suffer the greatest dislocation, but offer much less insight about the emergence of as-yet-nonexistent occupations of the future.” They continue on to note that:

In the end, the fears of the Luddites that machinery would impoverish workers were not realized, and the main reason is well understood. The mechanization of the early 19th century could only replace a limited number of human activities. At the same time, technological change increased the demand for other types of labor that were complementary to the capital goods embodied in the new technologies. This increased demand for labor included such obvious jobs as mechanics to fix the new machines, but it extended to jobs for supervisors to oversee the new factory system and accountants to manage enterprises operating on an unprecedented scale. More importantly, technological progress also took the form of product innovation, and thus created entirely new sectors for the economy, a development that was essentially missed in the discussions of economists of this time.

And despite a resurgence of automation anxiety in recent years, that historic trend still generally holds true. In late 2014, economists at Deloitte LLP published a sweeping survey of the impact of technology and jobs over the past 200 years and found that “Technology has transformed productivity and living standards, and, in the process, created new employment in new sectors.” This is because human needs and wants constantly change and, therefore, “The stock of work in the economy is not fixed; the last 200 years demonstrates that when a machine replaces a human, the result, paradoxically, is faster growth and, in time, rising employment.” And they conclude that: “Machines will take on more repetitive and laborious tasks, but seem no closer to eliminating the need for human labour than at any time in the last 150 years. It is not hard to think of pressing, unmet needs even in the rich world: the care of the elderly and the frail, lifetime education and retraining, health care, physical and mental well-being.”

While it is easy for critics to highlight disruptions in some notable sectors where machines replaced human labor, fewer news reports or panicky books discuss the many new sectors where people have found new opportunities. Again, the historical evidence suggests that there are good reasons to have faith that humans will once again muddle through and prevail in the face of turbulent, disruptive change. As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has noted when addressing the fear that automation is running amuck and that robots will eat all our jobs,

We have no idea what the fields, industries, businesses, and jobs of the future will be. We just know we will create an enormous number of them. Because if robots and AI replace people for many of the things we do today, the new fields we create will be built on the huge number of people those robots and AI systems made available. To argue that huge numbers of people will be available but we will find nothing for them (us) to do is to dramatically short human creativity. And I am way long human creativity.

Some tech critics may reject Andreessen’s bullish optimism about human resiliency, but real-world evidence already supports that his conclusion that we’ll learn to adapt to a world full of robots and robotic systems. A 2015 economic analysis from Colin Lewis, a behavioral economist who runs Robotenomics, showed that “despite the headlines, companies that have installed industrial robots are actually increasingly employing more people whilst at the same time adding more robots.” His research revealed that 1.25 million new jobs had been added by companies that make extensive use of industrial robots over the previous 6 years. He also found that this trend held among more recent disruptive firms like Amazon and Tesla Motors, but also older and more established companies like Chrysler, Daimler, Philips Electronics and others.

So, it’s worth keeping these facts in mind next time you read an article or book that declares that the sky is falling and that technological innovation is going to destroy labor markets and living standards. The entirety of human history points in the opposite direction. We should be bullish about our ability to muddle through tough times of technological change and flourish in the long run.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2015/09/25/learning-by-doing-the-process-of-innovation-the-future-of-employment/feed/ 2 75807 Europe’s Choice on Innovation https://techliberation.com/2014/12/03/europes-choice-on-innovation/ https://techliberation.com/2014/12/03/europes-choice-on-innovation/#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2014 18:26:18 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=75006

Writing last week in The Wall Street Journal, Matt Moffett noted how many European countries continue to struggle with chronic unemployment and general economic malaise.  (“New Entrepreneurs Find Pain in Spain“) It’s a dismal but highly instructive tale about how much policy incentives matter when it comes to innovation and job creation–especially the sort of entrepreneurial activity from small start-ups that is so essential for economic growth. Here’s the key takeaway:

Scarce capital, dense bureaucracy, a culture deeply averse to risk and a cratered consumer market all suppress startups in Europe. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a survey of startup activity, found the percentage of the adult population involved in early stage entrepreneurial activity last year was just 5% in Germany, 4.6% in France and 3.4% in Italy. That compares with 12.7% in the U.S. Even once they are established, European businesses are, on average, smaller and slower growing than those in the U.S.  The problems of entrepreneurs are one reason Europe’s economy continues to struggle after six years of crisis. The European Union this month cut its growth forecasts for the region for this year and next, citing weaker than expected performance in the eurozone’s biggest economies, Germany, France and Italy. This week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development delivered its own pessimistic appraisal, with chief economist Catherine Mann saying, “The eurozone is the locus of the weakness in the global economy.” […] Europe’s unemployment crisis may be eroding a deeply ingrained fear of failure that is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship on the Continent than in other regions, according to academic surveys. “Fear of failure is less of an issue because the whole country is a failure, and most of us are out of business or have a hard time paying our bills,” said Nick Drandakis of Athens, who in 2011 founded Taxibeat, an app that provides passenger ratings on taxi drivers.

I found Moffett’s article interesting because I write a lot about entrepreneurialism, innovation, long-term economic growth, and the public policies that facilitate all these things. This has also been the subject of an excellent Cato Institute online forum about “Reviving Economic Growth,” which asked leading economists and policy experts to answer the following question: “If you could wave a magic wand and make one or two policy or institutional changes to brighten the U.S. economy’s long-term growth prospects, what would you change and why?”

Many of the entries in that forum dealt with the importance of removing barriers to new start-ups so that entrepreneurs can help spark new innovations and spur economic growth. My entry, which was entitled, “Embracing a Culture of Permissionless Innovation,” kicked off with a quote from the great Joel Mokyr: “Why does economic growth… occur in some societies and not in others?” I noted that “debate has raged among generations of economists, historians, and business theorists about that question and the specific forces and policies that prompt long-term growth.” Generally speaking, however, there actually exists a great deal of consensus about the importance of small business entrepreneurship and the need for openness to change if an economy is going to grow. (See the studies from Ian Hathaway and Robert E. Litan that I cite in my essay among many others.)

Which brings us back to the situation in Europe. It seems clear that strong cultural and legal impediments to change exist in many European countries and that they discourage risk-taking and prevent the formation of new ventures. Many of us here in the United States worry about similar impediments and their impact on entrepreneurialism, but as those statistics in Moffett’s article make clear, the situation in Europe is far more grim. While some European policymakers seem willing to acknowledge that the deck has been stacked against innovators across the continent, few seem willing to embrace a comprehensive liberalization agenda to begin clearing away the legal and regulatory impediments that are negatively affecting startups and creating economic stagnation there. The primary reason for that goes back to the values and attitudes problem that Moffett highlighted in his article: When a country or continent’s culture is so deeply averse to risk and the possibility of disruptions or failures, then the exact sort of risk-taking that is so essential to economic growth will become increasingly difficult.

This was the focus of my Cato essay and it is what I meant by embracing a culture of permissionless innovation. As I noted in my essay, “many scholars and policymakers [often] speak of innovation policy as if it is simply a Goldilocks-like formula that entails tweaking various policy dials to get innovation just right,” which leads them to propose an endless litany of programs and policies to jump-start innovation and economic growth. But this puts the cart before the horse. Getting values right first is what really matters. Here is how I put it in my essay:

For innovation and growth to blossom, entrepreneurs need a clear green light from policymakers that signals a general acceptance of risk-taking—especially risk-taking that challenges existing business models and traditional ways of doing things. We can think of this disposition as permissionless innovation and if there was one thing every policymaker could do to help advance long-term growth, it is to first commit themselves to advancing this ethic and making it the lodestar for all their future policy pronouncements and decisions.

While there are limits to how much policymakers can influence these attitudes and values, any serious effort to foster the positive factors that give rise to expanded entrepreneurial opportunities must begin with an appreciation of how growth-oriented innovation policy begins with the proper policy disposition toward risk-taking and the possibility of significant economic and cultural disruption. As I put it in my recent book on the importance  Permissionless Innovation as a vision for innovation and growth, “living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy upon them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about. When public policy is shaped by precautionary principle reasoning, it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, social adaptation, and long-run prosperity.”

But let’s be clear about what the “permissionless innovation” vision is all about, because it is not the same as anarchy. As I noted in the Cato essay:

Permissionless innovation is not an absolutist position that rejects any role for government. Rather, it is an aspirational goal that stresses the benefit of “innovation allowed” as the default position to begin policy debates. It switches the burden of proof to those who favor preemptive regulation and asks them to explain why ongoing trial-and-error experimentation with new technologies or business models should be disallowed.

Again, it’s about getting attitudes and incentives right. Specifically, it’s about being willing to embrace risk-taking and even failure, because that is the only way you get growth. As the old adage goes, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”  And our recent experience with the Internet and the Information Revolution offers the perfect case study of why getting values right and embracing a culture of permissionless innovation matters so much. As I noted in my Cato essay,

permissionless innovation powered the explosive growth of the Internet and America’s information technology sectors (computing, software, Internet services, etc.) over the past two decades. Those sectors have ushered in a generation of innovations and innovators that are now the envy of the world. This happened because the default position for the digital economy was permissionless innovation. No one had to ask anyone for the right to develop these new technologies and platforms.

The U.S. got policy right by getting our values right first. Thanks to a series of very smart pronouncements and decisions in the early and mid-1990s (all detailed in my essay and this Medium essay), digital age entrepreneurs were given a clear green light to take risks without fear of a political backlash.

Unfortunately for European innovators, a different message was sent from the start, with layers of “data directives” and other red tape encumbering new ventures. As a result, it’s hard today to name many innovators in this arena which originated in Europe. Instead, Europe’s household Internet names are mostly American companies. Europe is hoping to reverse that with the rise of the Internet of Things, since many European companies appear poised to become global leaders on that front. For that happen, however, the continent’s attitudes toward risk-taking will have to evolve to accommodate these highly disruptive technologies.

In particular, the Internet of Things will raise a variety of privacy and security-related concern (see my new 93-page paper on this), as well as economic-related fears associated with automation and job disruption. These are serious issues that deserve serious consideration and constructive solutions. But if Europe decides to put the Internet of Things revolution on hold in an attempt to preemptively plan for every theoretical downside, then they will miss the boat again and potentially lose many of the amazing benefits that will accompany these new innovations. Again, if you live in fear of the future, then an innovative future won’t happen. And looking backwards and holding onto the past is no way to grow an economy or achieve long-term prosperity.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2014/12/03/europes-choice-on-innovation/feed/ 3 75006 How to Destroy American Innovation: The FAA & Commercial Drones https://techliberation.com/2014/10/06/how-to-destroy-american-innovation-the-faa-commercial-drones/ https://techliberation.com/2014/10/06/how-to-destroy-american-innovation-the-faa-commercial-drones/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2014 14:56:38 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=74839

DroneIf you want a devastating portrait of how well-intentioned regulation sometimes has profoundly deleterious unintended consequences, look no further than the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) current ban on commercial drones in domestic airspace. As Jack Nicas reports in a story in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Regulation Clips Wings of U.S. Drone Makers“), the FAA’s heavy-handed regulatory regime is stifling America’s ability to innovate in this space and remain competitive internationally. As Nicas notes:

as unmanned aircraft enter private industry—for purposes as varied as filming movies, inspecting wind farms and herding cattle—many U.S. drone entrepreneurs are finding it hard to get off the ground, even as rivals in Europe, Canada, Australia and China are taking off. The reason, according to interviews with two-dozen drone makers, sellers and users across the world: regulation. The FAA has banned all but a handful of private-sector drones in the U.S. while it completes rules for them, expected in the next several years. That policy has stifled the U.S. drone market and driven operators underground, where it is difficult to find funding, insurance and customers. Outside the U.S., relatively accommodating policies have fueled a commercial-drone boom. Foreign drone makers have fed those markets, while U.S. export rules have generally kept many American manufacturers from serving them.

Of course, the FAA simply responds that they are looking out for the safety of the skies and that we shouldn’t blame them. Again, there’s no doubt that the agency’s hyper-cautious approach to commercial drone integration is based on the best of intentions. But as we’ve noted here again and again, all the best of intentions don’t count for much–or at least shouldn’t count for much–when stacked against real-world evidence and results. And the results in this case are quite troubling.

An article last week from Alan McQuinn of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (“Commercial Drone Companies Fly Away from FAA Regulations, Go Abroad“) documented how problematic this situation has become:

With no certainty surrounding a timeline, limited access to exemptions, and a dithering pace for setting its rules, the FAA is slowing innovation. . . .  These overbearing rules have pushed U.S. companies to move their drone research and development projects to more permissive nations, such as Australia, where Google chose to test its drones. Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority, the agency in charge of commercial drones, offers a great example of unrestrictive regulations. While it has not yet finalized its drone laws, it still allows companies and citizens to test and use these technologies under certain rules. Instead of forcing companies to reveal their technologies at government test sites, it allows them to test outdoors if they receive an operator’s certificate and submit their test area for approval. Australia’s more permissive nature shows how a country can allow innovation to thrive while simultaneously examining it for potential safety concerns.

The Wall Street Journal’s Nicas similarly observes that foreign innovators are already taking advantage of America’s regulatory mistakes to leapfrog us in drone innovation. He reports that Germany, Canada, Australia and China are starting to move ahead of us. Nicas quotes Steve Klindworth, head of a DJI drone retailer in Liberty Hill, Texas, who says that if the United States doesn’t move soon to adopt a more sensible policy position for drones that, “It’ll reach a point of no return where American companies won’t ever be able to catch up.”

In essence, the United States is adopting the exact opposite  approach we did a generation ago for the Internet and digital technology.  I’ve written recently about how “permissionless innovation” powered the Information Revolution and helped American companies become the envy of the globe. (See my essay, “Why Permissionless Innovation Matters,” for more details and data.) That happened because America got policy right, whereas other countries either tried to micromanage the Information Revolution into existence or they adopted policies that instead actively stifled it. (See my recent book on this subject for more discussion.)

In essence, we see this story playing out in reverse with commercial drones. The FAA is adopting a hyper-precautionary principle position that is holding back innovation based on worse-case scenarios. Certainly the safety of the national airspace is a vital matter. But to shut down all other aerial innovation in the meantime is completely unreasonable. As I wrote in a filing to the FAA with my Mercatus Center colleagues Eli Dourado and Jerry Brito last year:

Like the Internet, airspace is a platform for commercial and social innovation. We cannot accurately predict to what uses it will be put when restrictions on commercial use of UASs are lifted. Nevertheless, experience shows that it is vital that innovation and entrepreneurship be allowed to proceed without ex ante barriers imposed by regulators. We therefore urge the FAA not to impose  any  prospective restrictions on the use of commercial UASs without clear evidence of actual, not merely hypothesized, harm.

Countless life-enriching innovations are being sacrificed because of the FAA’s draconian policy. (Below I have embedded a video of me discussing those innovations with John Stossel, which was taped earlier this year.) New industry sectors and many jobs are also being forgone. It’s time for the FAA to get moving to open up the skies to drone innovation. Congress should be pushing the agency harder on this front since the agency seems determined to ignore the law, which requires the agency to integrate commercial drones into the nation’s airspace.

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/embed.js?id=3402036832001&w=466&h=263 Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

Additional  Reading

]]> https://techliberation.com/2014/10/06/how-to-destroy-american-innovation-the-faa-commercial-drones/feed/ 1 74839 So You Want to Be an Internet Policy Analyst? https://techliberation.com/2012/12/03/so-you-want-to-be-an-internet-policy-analyst/ https://techliberation.com/2012/12/03/so-you-want-to-be-an-internet-policy-analyst/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:22:08 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=42996

[Updated 7/10/14: See new addendum at bottom. Updated 4/28/13: Included links to several things + started list of additional resources at end.]

Each year I am contacted by dozens of people who are looking to break into the field of information technology policy as a think tank analyst, a research fellow at an academic institution, or even as an activist. Some of the people who contact me I already know; most of them I don’t. Some are free-marketeers, but a surprising number of them are independent analysts or even activist-minded Lefties. Some of them are students; others are current professionals looking to change fields (usually because they are stuck in boring job that doesn’t let them channel their intellectual energies in a positive way). Some are lawyers; others are economists, and a growing number are computer science or engineering grads. In sum, it’s a crazy assortment of inquiries I get from people, unified only by their shared desire to move into this exciting field of public policy.

I always do my best to answer their emails, calls, and requests for meetings. Unfortunately, there’s only so much time in the day and I am sometimes not able to get back to all of them. I always feel bad about that, so, this essay is an effort to gather my thoughts and advice and put it all one place so that I will at least have something to send these folks. Perhaps I’ll try to update it over time.

#1) Understand that Specialization Matters

I don’t want to bury the lede here, so let me start with the most important piece of advice I share with everyone who contacts me: specialization matters. When I got started in the sleepy field of information technology policy back in 1991, it was possible to be a jack-of-all-trades. There were only a few issues that really mattered, and most of them were tied up with traditional communications and media policy. If you knew a little something about telephony, universal service subsidies, spectrum policy, and broadcast regulation, then you could be an analyst in this field. There were only a handful of people in the think tank world back then who even cared about such issues.

But then came the Internet. It really did change everything, including this field of policy study. In the old days, people in this field were called telecom policy analysts or media policy analysts. We had titles like “Director of Telecommunications Studies” or “Fellow in Media Studies.” But when the Net came along, it almost instantly made such titles seem archaic. Today, this field is more appropriately labelled “information technology policy studies.” That term incorporates those old telecom and media policy issues, but it includes much more now.

That’s why specialization matters more than ever. In essence, over the past 15 years, the information technology policy world underwent a metamorphosis similar to the one that occurred in the field of environmental policy a decade or two before. In the early days of environmental policy, it was enough to say you were interested in environmental policy at all. That could probably win you a job (or at least an activist role) somewhere in that field. By the mid-1980s, however, the field of environmental policy had become remarkably specialized. Academic programs and public policy jobs started developing around very targeted issues: water, air, waste management, nuclear issues, endangered species, farming / sustainable development, climate change, etc, etc. Today, therefore, if you are looking for a career in the environmental policy arena, you are generally expected to first develop a more finely-honed specialization in one of its many sub-issue areas.

This is exactly what has been happening in the field of information technology policy since the mid-1990s. If you want a career in the field of information technology policy studies today, you need to be thinking about a very specific area of expertise. Do you already have that expertise? Great, then skip to step #5 below. If not, read on.

#2) The Major Areas of Specialization in the Modern Information Technology Policy Arena

OK, so you understand that specialization matters. What specific topic / field should you choose as your particular area of focus? Well, that’s up to you and your particular interests. Here’s the good news: There are more options than ever.

It’s useful to divide the information technology policy world into 3 big buckets (Note: This is a taxonomy that Jerry Brito, Eli Dourado, and I use to think about our priorities of the Mercatus Center’s Technology Policy Program each year):

  • Conduit / Infrastructure
  • Content / Speech
  • Other

Let’s break down each one of these to reveal just how specialized this field has become:

(A) Conduit: Generally refers to anything involving the physical infrastructure side of information technology policy, including:

  • Broadband policy (including traditional communications / common carrier regs)
  • Spectrum / Wireless
  • Universal service (and other tech subsidies)
  • Media marketplace regs (broadcasting, cable)
  • Antitrust & mergers

(B) Content: Generally refers to any (mostly intangible) information control or speech control issue

  • Public Morals / Free Speech (porn, gambling, spam, cyberbullying, political speech, etc)
  • Privacy (including reputation & defamation concerns)
  • Cybersecurity (online security, national security concerns, state secrets, encryption controls)
  • IP (copyright & patents)
(C) Other: The hodge-podge of issues that don’t quite fit into the other two buckets
  • Internet Governance (ICANN, domain names, international affairs & treaties)
  • Taxation of online goods or services
  • Trade policy involving tech

Here’s the key takeaway from this taxonomy: You can develop a specialized career around countless information policy issues today. Do you want to be a privacy guru? Great, there are countless policy opportunities in that area alone. Do you love freedom of speech? Excellent, you can find plenty of cool gigs there, too. Cybersecurity strike your fancy? No problem. That field is growing like wildfire. And there are entire academic programs and activist institutions that long ago developed around digital copyright.

If you prefer to stick with the “conduit” bucket, have no fear, there exists many opportunities in those sub-areas. I know many professionals who describe themselves as a “cable lawyer” or a “media economist” or an “antitrust consultant.” Those fields are heavily saturated today, however, especially because they tended to pay quite well in the past. That could change as the “content” issues become more visible and important in coming years. Privacy policy is probably the biggest growth market in this regard. Huge opportunities await you there if you are so inclined.

I could go on, but you get the idea: You need to think about specialization because just randomly contacting someone and telling them you want to be an Internet policy analyst today is not enough. You need to be able to tell them, “I am interested in information technology policy and I possess a particular interest/expertise in X.” What “X” is is up to you, but you better have something to fill in that blank.

#3) What Specific Academic Experience Will Help?

Many people who contact me about how to advance their careers in the information technology policy arena are already far along in advanced degree programs or even finished those degrees long ago. But, for what it’s worth, here’s some general advice about which degrees will help you out the most in this arena. They are listed in order of importance:

  • Law: A law degree from a program with a specialized cyberlaw program will probably help you out most in this arena. It will open more doors for you than the other degrees mentioned below. I suppose that is true for most public policy fields and jobs, of course. Legal experience is also easier to “re-purpose” than other degrees; it offers excellent training for many different professions. The downside: The field of information technology policy is increasingly being flooded with lawyers. While a law degree still offers important advantages over other degrees, that may change if the legal market grows over-saturated. The way to counter that, of course, is to hyper-specialize! Start thinking about how to develop a very targeted legal expertise in privacy law, free speech policy, copyright law, cybersecurity, media/spectrum policy, antitrust law, etc.
  • Economics: An economics degree offers you the opportunity to analyze public policy using a very different toolbox than the lawyer will use. Economists are in increasing demand in the field of information technology policy because (a) there are just too many damn lawyers in the field already and (b) economists can actually offer some hard data to support their claims or make their case. PhD economists with a focused expertise in a particular tech area can also command a very impressive premium for their skills. (Note: MBAs are less in demand than economists and are generally a rare bird in the information technology policy arena. I am one of them, and I regret to say that it really hasn’t done much to help my career.)
  • Computer Science / Engineering: Increasingly, employers in this arena are interested in finding skilled CS grads and engineering experts (ex: spectrum engineers) who can tackle special jobs and projects. If you have such expertise, you will be able to cover certain technical policy issues in a far more authoritative fashion. That’s increasingly valuable to institutions as they look to broaden their stable of talent. For example, many policy institutions and even government agencies now hire a “Chief Technologist” to offer the rest of the staff their specialized advice on highly technical matters. In the future, I expect policy institutions will employ several technologists to fit the specialized needs they have.
  • Poly Sci / Public Policy / History: Degrees in political science, public policy, and even history probably won’t help you out as much as degrees from one of the three previous areas, but it depends on what you are looking to do. Again, the information technology policy arena is specialized enough today that certain jobs will require this skill set. For example, I have personally done a lot of work on cronyism and regulatory capture in this arena and my undergrad degree in poly sci has actually come in quite handy as I try to explain the political economy of high-tech rent-seeking. Similarly, many advanced degrees in public policy today offer very specialized areas of focus that could help. For example, the School of Public Policy here at George Mason University offers a couple of excellent M.A. and PhD. programs related to information technology policy. I’ve found many other Public Policy M.A. and PhD. programs that offer similar degree opportunities.

Needless to say, if you can combine two of these degrees, you’ll be golden. I’m finding a lot more analysts in this field have economics undergrad degrees and then a law degree to boot. Even better, however, would be combining a technical degree in CS or engineering with one of these other degrees. Then you are talking about truly valuable academic experience. And it had damn well better be valuable because you are going to be dead broke after you get done with all that education!

One other point: I don’t want to suggest that you can’t break into the info-tech policy world with other degrees under your belt. There’s a growing group of philosophers and sociologists, for example, who are doing important Internet policy work. Likewise, there have always been major media studies and journalism programs that offered a path toward being a tech policy wonk. (My other undergrad degree was in journalism). For now, however, that policy work is being doing almost exclusively within universities. If you are looking to come to Washington (or a state or international capital) and do public policy work, you would probably be better served having one of the degrees listed above.

#4) What Other Experience Will Help?

Regardless of what academic degree you are pursing or already possess, additional “real-world” experience will help you advance you career in the the information technology policy arena, much like every other policy field. Here’s what I think will be most useful to you:

  • Hill / govt work: If you can stomach spending a semester or even an entire year working on Capitol Hill or in a regulatory agency, it will do wonders to advance your career in the information technology policy world. It’s not just about the experience you gain from working inside the system; people care about the connections you make, too. When you work for the right sort of Hill office or committee (like Energy & Commerce), or for the right sort of agency (FCC, FTC, NTIA), you gain important connections in those institutions that can benefit you (or your future employer) for many years to come.
  • Legal associate / clerkship: For you lawyers out there, experience in a firm, or clerking for a judge, puts a big star on any resume and is increasingly important in this field. Again, if you can land a gig in the right firm or with the right judge (one that has a very specialized expertise), that’s even better.
  • Corporate internship / fellowship: Working for a major corporation or trade association offers very specialized experience that can help advance your career, but it comes with one potential downside: It could label you as being too close to that interest. For example, tech firms like Google and Microsoft offer some wonderful internships and research fellowships, but once you accept such positions it could be held against you by others who, for whatever reason, might have issues with those firms.
  • University programs/ projects: If you are still at university finishing up a higher degree, are their programs internally that can help advance your career in the information technology policy field? There are obvious things like serving on the law review, but how about more specialized programs that might allow you to work with other tech policy scholars on special reports and projects? Can you help a scholar in that program with research for a big paper? Can you help them build a website to highlight an important new project? Can you join together with other students in your program to develop new sites or tools that highlight a particular public policy issue that you care deeply about?  Stuff like this can help boost your visibility in an increasingly crowded field.
  • Think tank internship / fellowship: There are a lot of great opportunities available to you in the think tank world, so long as you don’t mind slave wages! Think tanks of all stripes offer aspiring tech policy analysts a wonderful opportunity to get their feet wet and experience the tech policy world first-hand.  Some think tanks will even let interns or junior analysts write for their blogs or at least work on major projects as a research assistant. Again, the pay absolutely blows and you will struggle to make ends meet, but the experience will be quite valuable. If you are already older and looking to shift from you current dead-end profession into the world of Internet policy, think tanks can offer you an excellent platform — perhaps the very best platform of all. Again, the downside is the pay. You won’t be able to command a premium for your talent in the think tank world. They just don’t have the budget to pay you handsomely and there will probably also be plenty of other competition for your position. But you’ll have the opportunity to write and speak and preach like no other job can provide.

Again, if you can combine a few of these things, it’ll be a hell of a resume-builder.

#5) Write (and then write some more!)

Whether you are a student looking to break into this field or an established professional looking to shift jobs, there is one piece of advice I have for all of you: If you really want to get involved in the information technology policy world, you need to start writing about the information technology policy world.

I suppose this general word of advice could apply to all public policy fields and professions, but the reason it is particularly important in this field is because, quite obviously, we are in the information business! We are using the same technologies we are writing about. And people in our arena generally use these technologies far more aggressively than people in other professions. So, it is generally expected that you should be using them, too.

There are two specific reasons why writing is vitally important. First, it shows others you have a deep interest (and potential expertise) in information technology policy. Second, it serves as a writing sample when others want to gauge your capabilities and grasp of the issues.

Here are a few ways you can start writing more and building your brand:

  • Start a blog or start blogging with others: If you’re already doing so, that’s great. But kick it up a notch. Just find anything that interests you — an academic paper, a news report, another blog post — and write about it. Even if you just summarize that other piece and add a line or two of commentary, that’s something. It’ll help get your name out there and help you develop your own brand. Better yet, when you write about others and their work or advocacy, they see it. Most academics and policy wonks have a big enough ego that they probably have a Google Alert set up for their own name. I certainly do because I want to know what others are saying about me and my work. So, if I see you writing about me, I’m going to be far more likely to add your blog to my RSS feed or even follow you on Twitter.
  • Try to publish something “professionally”: If you can, find a way to get some of your work published in a academic journal, a professional publication, or a leading media outlet in the field. I realize that this isn’t easy. Sometimes it will be impossible, especially at a young age when you are first breaking into the field. But the good news is that there are more outlets than ever and, if you work hard enough, you’ll eventually find one of them that will republish your work. Having a few independent publications under your belt and on your resume can really help jumpstart your career in the policy world. It goes without saying that getting published matters even more if you’re hoping to secure a position with a university-based research center. If your work is more academic in character, get it on SSRN immediately.
  • Use Twitter and other social media services (but be careful): Twitter can do wonders to help you build a following in the information technology policy arena by (1) letting you share your insights about tech policy with the world and, more importantly, (2) getting you connected with well-established figures in the field. Not every tech guru will follow you back once you start following them, but many will. And, with enough work (and a little brown-nosing), you will eventually get on their radar screen. For example, if you enjoy papers and essays by a particular cyberlaw guru or digital policy economist, retweet their work and add a thoughtful comment. Keep doing that for them and others. And do the same for journalists who post interesting tech policy stories. Put all these people on a curated Twitter list of your own and label it something flattering like “Tech Policy Gurus” or “Best Net Policy Wonks.” I can say from personal experience that when I find myself on such lists, I am more likely to follow the people who created them. One word of caution about Twitter and social media, however: Being provocative can get you noticed, but it can also piss people off and cost you followers / respect. Worse yet, it could come back to haunt you when you pursue future job opportunities. If you are at the stage in your career where you are fairly well-established and don’t necessary care as much about what the rest of the world thinks about you (hey, that’s me!), then it’s easier to get away with being provocative and even a bit snarky online. But when you are young and just getting started, be careful not to burn bridges before you’ve even built any. Be friendly, at least at first. There will be plenty of time in the future for you to tell me that you think I am full of sh*t!

#6) Network

Sure, you can get plenty of networking done using online tools and strategies, some of which I discussed above. But meeting people in person still matters. A little face time and a few handshakes can open up opportunities that you would otherwise not even known existed. Toward that end, if you are near a major university center or city that hosts occasional tech policy events, get to them. Or, if you can, plan occasional visits to major university events or other tech policy galas. When you visit these places, see if you can schedule a few minutes of private face time with leading analysts that you respect. Tell them how much you value their time but ask for just a few minutes with them to get some advice on how to be the next great tech policy analyst, just like them! (Again, flattery gets you everywhere in this world).

Finally, if you are lucky enough to live near Washington, DC, then you’ll have no problem finding an endless array of technology policy events to attend on a near-daily basis.  Get to as many as you can and introduce yourself to as many people as possible. Tell them all you are interested in pursuing a career in the information technology field and stress the particular area of policy that most interests you. I have probably found more jobs for people during cocktail hours than anything else. One person will come up to me and explain their interests and background and then I will point them to the 2 or 3 other people in the room who can help them advance their particular career objective.

#7) Read

Geez… do I really need to say this? Well, I do only because I wanted to offer a list of a few things I read regularly to keep my finger on the pulse of the info-tech policy world. Perhaps the easiest way to do so is to just list some of what’s in my daily RSS and/or Twitter feed. Here’s a sample:

This just scratches the surface.  Again, the more specialized your focus, the more likely it is you’ll follow very targeted blogs and media outlets. For example, there are dozens of targeted blogs on copyright and privacy policy. I follow many of them casually on Twitter but don’t keep them in my daily RSS feed.

More generally, you should be keeping up with major Internet policy books so that you are conversant in intellectual circles about the hottest publications du jour. That can be challenging — both because reading books takes time and the field is increasingly crowded with new titles. At the end of each year, I try to put together a list of important info-tech policy books. (Here are the lists for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012). You should try to be familiar with some of the big titles on those lists. Also, here’s my compendium of all the major titles from the 2000s and here’s the running list of all my tech policy book reviews.

Conclusion

Well, that’s all I got for ya. I promise to try to offer my thoughts to you in person or via email if you call or write, but please understand that I’m just sometimes too busy to respond to everyone at length. But I hope what I’ve written here helps some of you out in your effort to break into the tech policy world.  Best of luck, and if you make it big, buy me a beer someday!

 

Additional Reading / Resources:

 

 

*** Addendum, July 2014 ***

If I was penning this essay today, I think I would have instead entitled it, “So You Want to Be a Technology Policy Analyst?” Since I penned this back in Dec 2012, a lot has changed in the world of Internet policy, starting with the fact that, as Marc Andreessen has noted, “software is eating the world.” As Jerry Brito, Eli Dourado, and I noted in our May 2014 essay, “Technology Policy: A Look Ahead”:

many of the underlying drivers of the digital revolution—massive increases in processing power, exploding storage capacity, steady miniaturization of computing, ubiquitous communications and networking capabilities, the digitization of all data, and increasing decentralization and disintermediation—are beginning to have a profound impact beyond the confines of cyberspace.

As a result of this convergence of the old “meatspace” economy (the world of atoms) and the digital economy (the world of bits), what it means to be an “Internet policy analyst” is changing and expanding once again. A wide variety of new innovations are now emerging and raising fresh policy concerns. For example, a short list of the technologies and sectors I am now covering includes: the “Internet of Things” and “wearable technologies;” smart car technology and autonomous vehicles; commercial drones; robotics; mobile medicine; biohacking and genetic engineering; and much more.

Just a few years ago, none of these issues were on my list of policy priorities. Today, they constitute 90% of what I write and speak about on a daily basis.

What this means for aspiring technology policy analysts is that the opportunities here are virtually boundless. The sky is the limit!

Of course, I will reiterate my first piece of advice above by once again stressing that specialization matters. While it would be wonderful to be able to be a jack-of-all-trades who could cover all these issues effectively, that’s just impossible. You need to focus, and that is even truer today as the universe of tech policy issues expands rapidly. I had to abandon issues that I once cared deeply about, such as Internet governance, intellectual property, infrastructure regulation, and mass media policy. I wrote 4 books on those topics in the past decade, and now I’ve had to give up on them entirely to make room for all the hot new tech policy issues out there.

But while it may seem a bit overwhelming at times, again, the upside of all this is that you have countless opportunities at your disposal to make your mark in these new policy arenas. There has never been a more exciting time to be a technology policy analyst. Good luck, and I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do, because I am having a blast! Every day brings an exciting new challenge.

(Seriously, why would anyone want to cover any other issue?!)

 

 

*** Addendum, Sept. 2015 ***

On the whiteboard in my office I have a giant matrix of technology policy issues and the policy “threat vectors” that might end up driving regulation of particular technologies or sectors. Along with my colleagues at the Mercatus Center, we constantly revise this list of policy priorities and simultaneously make a (very unscientific) attempt to weight the potential policy severity in each area. I use 5 policy groupings: Privacy, safety, security, economic disruption, and IP. We then use this matrix to help us determine what we should be paying more attention to and then decide what sort of scholarly outputs are needed on each front. [See this post for more elaboration about the categories and issues.]

Several people who have seen that matrix in my office tell me I should do something more with it, but I’m not really sure what that something would be. But I thought it might make  sense to plop it into this old post to give readers a feel for the current generation of tech policy issues that might be worth focusing on. Again, there are lots and lots of opportunities here! I’ll try to upload new versions of the matrix as that giant whiteboard in my office morphs over time.

Tech Policy Issue Matrix 2015

]]> https://techliberation.com/2012/12/03/so-you-want-to-be-an-internet-policy-analyst/feed/ 24 42996 ACM Seeks Policy Analyst https://techliberation.com/2011/10/06/acm-seeks-policy-analyst/ https://techliberation.com/2011/10/06/acm-seeks-policy-analyst/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:45:22 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=38602

Public Policy Analyst/Computing and IT Policy

A leading organization of computing professionals is seeking a Public Policy Analyst in its Washington DC Office of Public Policy. The position will assist in carrying out the society’s policy agenda by working with the federal government, the organization’s volunteer leadership and other organizations. The position’s duties include:

• Following, researching, analyzing and reporting on policy issues being discussed in the Congress, the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch and the media • Providing advice and direction on policy issues and strategies for engagement • Keeping members informed of relevant policy developments • Developing and/or reviewing policy position statements (letters, white papers, etc.) • Planning meetings and/or conference calls • Developing and managing projects to implement policy agenda • Maintaining and updating website • Identifying and recommending opportunities to further the overall policy agenda • Producing and distributing newsletters, blog posts and various other communications

The qualifications for this position are:

• Minimum of a Bachelor’s Degree • Command of the legislative, regulatory and legal process, including the ability to conduct legal research and analyze policy developments • Minimum of three years of experience in the policy, legislative or regulatory environment • Superior communication (writing and oral) and organizational skills • Demonstrated interest in and/or prior experience in the technology policy • Ability to work both in teams and independently • Self-starter and ability to manage multiple projects and meet tight deadlines • Strong IT skills

Applicants should submit a resume and cover letter describing interests and qualifications by e-mail policy.analyst.job@gmail.com

]]> https://techliberation.com/2011/10/06/acm-seeks-policy-analyst/feed/ 1 38602 Russ Roberts on ‘Why Technology Doesn’t Destroy Jobs’ https://techliberation.com/2011/06/22/russ-roberts-on-why-technology-doesnt-destroy-jobs/ https://techliberation.com/2011/06/22/russ-roberts-on-why-technology-doesnt-destroy-jobs/#comments Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:52:32 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=37433

You wouldn’t think that policymakers need to be reminded that technological progress raises living standards and creates new (and better) employment opportunities. Alas, some comments President Obama made in a speech last week seemed to link technology to job losses. “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers,” he said. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

In an essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, one of my Mercatus Center colleagues Russ Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, brilliantly deconstructs this logic and points out why technology doesn’t destroy jobs:

Somehow, new jobs get created to replace the old ones. Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines. Why do new jobs get created? When it gets cheaper to make food and clothing, there are more resources and people available to create new products that didn’t exist before. Fifty years ago, the computer industry was tiny. It was able to expand because we no longer had to have so many workers connecting telephone calls. So many job descriptions exist today that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. That’s only possible when technology makes workers more productive.

Read the whole thing. Great stuff.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2011/06/22/russ-roberts-on-why-technology-doesnt-destroy-jobs/feed/ 3 37433 Another Sky-is-Falling Zittrain Editorial https://techliberation.com/2010/02/05/another-sky-is-falling-zittrain-editorial/ https://techliberation.com/2010/02/05/another-sky-is-falling-zittrain-editorial/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:19:57 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=25742

Harvard Berkman Center professor Jonathan Zittrain has published another pessimistic, Steve-Jobs-is-Taking-Us-Straight-To-Cyber-Hell editorial building on the gloomy thesis he set forth in his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. His latest piece appears in the Financial Times and it’s entitled, “A Fight over Freedom at Apple’s Core. Concerning the recent Apple iPad announcement, Zittrain warns: “Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out.”

I’m not going to go into yet another lengthy dissertation about what it so misguided about his thesis that cyberspace is becoming more “regulable” and that digital “generativity” is dying because of the rise of devices like the iPhone & iPad, or sites like Facebook.  Instead, I will just point you to the many things I’ve written before explaining just how far off the mark Prof. Zittrain is on this point. [See the complete list down below + video of our debate.]

But let me just say this… Ignoring that fact that he is an iPhone user himself — which makes no sense considering that he thinks of Apple as the font of all cyber-evil — he can’t muster any substantive empirical evidence proving that the Net and digital devices are being more “closed, sterile, and tethered,” as he repeatedly claims in his book and editorials.  And that’s not surprising because the reality is that the digital world is more open and generative than ever, and even if there are some “closed” devices and systems out there, they are actually quite innovative and not perfectly closed as Zittrain suggests. The spectrum of “open vs. closed” systems and devices is incredible diverse and nothing is perfectly “open” or “closed.”  We can have the best of both worlds: many open systems with some partial “walled gardens” here and there (or hybrid systems combining both). Regardless, we are witnessing greater digital “generativity” and innovation with each passing year. Until Zittrain can prove the opposite, his thesis must be considered a failure.

Finally, I want to associate myself with this excellent critique of the Zittrain thesis by Prof. Ed Felten, who points out that Zittrain’s argument doesn’t even work for the iPad, which I would agree is a fairly “closed appliance” in the Zittrainian scheme of the things:

For the iPad to become a Zittrain-type appliance, two things must happen. First, Apple must remain picky about which apps are available in the App Store. Second, Apple must limit the device’s browser so that it lacks the features that make today’s browsers viable application platforms. Will Apple be able to limit their product in this way, despite competition from other, more general-purpose tablets? I doubt it. But even this — even an appliance-style iPad — would not be enough to prove Zittrain’s thesis. Zittrain argued not just that appliances would exist, but that they would replace general purpose computers. Amazon’s kindle is an appliance, but it doesn’t prove Zittrain’s thesis because nobody is ditching their laptop in favor of a Kindle. Instead, the Kindle is an extra device which is used for its purpose, while the general-purpose device is used for everything else. If the iPad ends up like the Kindle — a complement to the laptop or netbook, rather than a replacement for it — this will not prove Zittrain’s thesis. It seems unlikely, then, that the iPad, even if it succeeds, will provide strong support for Zittrain’s thesis. General-purpose computers are so useful that we’re not likely to abandon them.

Exactly right. And here’s a few more things you might want to read to see why Zittrain’s thesis doesn’t add up (the first and the last one probably provide the best overview):

http://www.youtube.com/v/KDgxGN6cqTA&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]]> https://techliberation.com/2010/02/05/another-sky-is-falling-zittrain-editorial/feed/ 7 25742 There's no accounting for job creation https://techliberation.com/2010/01/13/theres-no-accounting-for-job-creation/ https://techliberation.com/2010/01/13/theres-no-accounting-for-job-creation/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:20:39 +0000 http://surprisinglyfree.com/?p=854

An Associated Press story posted at 9:31 pm last night by Brett J. Blackledge notes that the Obama adminsitration “has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama‘s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.” Recipients of federal money were originally supposed to report how many jobs they had “saved or created.” Now, they’re just supposed to report how many people got paid with the money. 

The “saved or created” approach was an attempt to estimate how the Recovery Act spending affected employment. Unfortunately, it was impossible for this approach to deliver what it promised, as I pointed out in testimony to Congress last May. To know how many jobs the Recovery Act spending saved or created, we need to control for other factors that affect employment. We also need to control for the employment effects of the borrowing (and future taxing) that pays for the spending.

This is what good “macroeconomic” analysis does. It is not what employers do when they put people on the payroll.  Asking employers who received federal money to tell us how many jobs were created or saved is asking them to give us information that they do not have and cannot acquire.

Under the new approach, employers will report quarterly how many people they are paying with the federal money. Since the reports will be quarterly, some jobs may be counted more than once — I guess as much as four times a year. According to the AP story, some Republicans are complaining that the new approach will lead to even larger and more misleading job numbers.

The numbers will likely be higher. But they will not necessarily be misleading, as long as recovery.gov makes clear that these are simply reports on the number of people paid with the federal money, not an attempt to measure the number of jobs created.

Estimating jobs created is work for serious macroeconomists who try to control for other factors affecting the results. There’s of course plenty of room for disagreement over how to do this, as this commentary by my Mercatus Center colleagues Garrett Jones and Veronique de Rugy demonstrates.

The administration’s decision demonstrates once again the old adage that data is not knowledge.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2010/01/13/theres-no-accounting-for-job-creation/feed/ 3 854 Media Deconsolidation (Part 24): I Read the News Today, Oh Boy https://techliberation.com/2008/12/11/media-deconsolidation-part-24-i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy/ https://techliberation.com/2008/12/11/media-deconsolidation-part-24-i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy/#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:43:42 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=14795

It almost seems pointless for me to continue my ongoing media DE-consolidation series, which has been an ongoing effort to debunk myths about the media marketplace (specifically, the notion that rampant consolidation is taking place and that operators are only growing larger and devouring more and more companies.) After all, even the kookiest of the media reformistas can’t deny the truth anymore: Traditional media operators are struggling to keep their heads above water, and markets are growing more atomistic by the day, not more concentrated.

The New York Times website seems to run a story per day about traditional media giants falling apart as consumers and advertisers disappear. For those of you with short attention spans, you can even follow the death of old media on Twitter now via “The Media is Dying.” If 140 characters per entry is still too much for you to read, here’s the cribbed version: Lots of downsizing, bankruptcies, and closing of doors. The Tribune’s bankruptcy has been the biggest news this week, but few noticed the amazing statement by CBS Corp. Chief Executive Les Moonves that within 10 years he thinks CBS may dump all its affiliated TV stations and just sell programming direct to cable and satellite operators (and the Net, too). Once other networks take that path, that’s pretty much the end of traditional broadcast local affiliates. (I wonder who the FCC will impose those “localism” regulations on then!)

For those working in the business, the news couldn’t be any worse. As Ad Week reported a few days ago:

The media industries have shed more than 30,000 jobs in 2008, according to an Ad Age analysis of Department of Labor employment statistics and news reports. That’s about 3.5% of the total media work force of 858,000. Since the bubble-inflated high-water mark in 2000, media has lost more than 200,000 jobs.

It’s difficult to have journalism without journalists. Yes, yes… I know all about the blogging revolution, the rise of “mass amateurization,” the wonders of peer-produced “We-dia” (we-media), and so on, but the fact is, professionals matter.  I’m not about to go off on some Lee Siegel / Andrew Keen sort of rant here about the evils of the Internet and digital technology — in fact, I have repeatedly blasted those guys here for their Luddite-ish approach to saving media — but there are some serious questions about how investigatory journalism and local media are going to get funded going forward.

Most media operators are scrambling to adjust but most of them don’t really have any idea what to do. It’s easy for armchair critics to say “get online” and “reinvent your business model,” but most media operators have been trying to do exactly that for some time now, and failing (at least failing to make it very profitable). Even the venerable New York Times, with its wonderful online offerings, is struggling to make digital media work in the increasingly crowded online marketplace.

Regardless, none of this will likely subdue the media reformistas and their ongoing effort to regulate traditional media operators into oblivion. We’re going to spend the next few years bickering over the same old media regulations and new regulatory proposals that dominated the last few years. Meanwhile, as the FCC fiddles, old media burns. I don’t understand why we don’t just tear all the old walls down and give them a chance to save themselves.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2008/12/11/media-deconsolidation-part-24-i-read-the-news-today-oh-boy/feed/ 20 14795 Google Policy Fellow Program https://techliberation.com/2008/10/25/google-policy-fellow-program/ https://techliberation.com/2008/10/25/google-policy-fellow-program/#comments Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:32:55 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=13455

Google has just announced that it is now accepting applications from undergraduate, graduate and professional students for its summer 2009 Google Policy Fellowship.  Three think tanks employing TLFers are among the host organizations participating in the program: The Progress & Freedom Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

Applications are due by December 12, 2008.  The program will run for ten weeks during the summer of 2009 (June-August). Apply today!

]]> https://techliberation.com/2008/10/25/google-policy-fellow-program/feed/ 12 13455