Inclusion in the Digital Age

[Commentary] In their groundbreaking book, The Second Machine Age, Professor Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee described digital technology’s revolutionary impact on business, the economy, and society. As director and co-director, respectively, of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) (and, in the interest of full disclosure, my colleagues), their argument was that, with productivity, wealth, and profits at historic highs, digital innovation has created unprecedented bounty for a great number of people. And yet, while the pace of economic change is exceptional, and wealth has been generated for society and for innovators, the authors also say that progress and societal benefits are not equally distributed. We at MIT’s IDE propose there are four ways we can enable more people to meaningfully engage in work and to fully experience the prosperity of the Second Machine Age:

1. Skills: We re-skill members of our workforce to prepare them for the future.
2. Matching: We connect qualified individuals with open opportunities for work.
3. Humans + Machines: We augment human labor with technology.
4. New Models: We create new operational practices and business models to revolutionize the existing labor market.

[Devin Cook is the Executive Producer of the MIT IDE Inclusive Innovation Competition]