Reid Hoffman is one of many leaders helping to share the Next:Economy

Schedule for the Next:Economy Summit

I’m super excited about the Next:Economy Summit that I’m holding next week at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, on November 12–13. We have put together a star-studded, but more importantly, idea-rich program that explores how technologies such as AI, on-demand networks, augmented reality, 21st century education, better business practices, new approaches to labor, and applying technology to solve hard problems will shape the economy of the 21st century.

Here’s a view of next week’s program and the themes we’ll be exploring.

Thursday November 12, 2015

9 am — Welcome and overview of the program. Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, and Steven Levy and Lauren Smiley, Medium.

No ordinary disruption. James Manyika, director of the McKinsey Global Institute and co-author of the book No Ordinary Disruption, sets the stage with a global perspective on the future shape of the economy and technology’s role in disrupting that economy. He’ll give us some perspective on the speed and scale of the current disruption compared to the industrial revolution, as well as some hard data on what’s happening to productivity, growth, and labor market fluidity and participation rates.

9:20-10:45am — Session 1: Minds and Machines

The first industrial revolution transformed agriculture, manufacturing and other forms of manual labor, destroying millions of familiar jobs and creating decades of unrest and inequality, but also leading to a vast expansion of human prosperity. Now, in what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee call “the Second Machine Age,” AI is replacing many familiar white collar jobs and threatening to wipe out even more forms of manual labor. The media is full of fear mongering about Artificial Intelligence and jobs. In this session, we’ll look at the current state of AI and its impact on the Next Economy.

• From self-driving cars to retraining humans. Sebastian Thrun’s self-driving car project at Google is perhaps the most eye-opening application of AI. When widely deployed, it will up-end millions of jobs, demolish entire industries, and even reshape our cities. Yet Sebastian has moved on to found Udacity, an online learning company that is engaged in retraining millions of workers for the jobs of the future. What does he know that we don’t?
• Assistant to the Machine. When Jeff Bezos quipped that Mechanical Turk is “artificial artificial intelligence,” he wasn’t kidding. It turns out that a large proportion of jobs for Mechanical Turk are working as “the last mile” to refine the work of algorithms that produce results that aren’t quite good enough, and thereby helping to train those algorithms. Rochelle LaPlante, a moderator of the Reddit subreddit for Turkers, /r/mturk, and an administrator for MTurkGrind.com, an open online forum for Turkers and requesters, will take us on a tour of the human-powered world that creates the illusion of machine intelligence.
• The future of personal assistants. Adam Cheyer, original creator of Siri, Apple’s revolutionary personal assistant, is working on a new agent-based startup. Meanwhile, Alex Lebrun, whose work on Wit.AI became the basis of Facebook’s new M personal agent, is building a personal assistant based both on technology and human intervention. We learn about these products and where they will go. If the vision of the movie “Her” is to come to life, quite possibly one of the inventors is on our stage.
• Will Robots Augment Us or Rule Us? John Markoff, the author of Machines of Loving Grace; and Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply join the conversation. Markoff and Kaplan disagree about the extent of autonomy that robots will have and between them we have the tension in the larger debate about how automation will either make us more productive or make us irrelevant.
• “Knowledge Work” — No longer safe from automation. Kristian Hammond of Narrative Science demonstrates how AI can write news stories indistinguishable from those that were formerly cranked out by humans. Sporting events, earnings reports, and other kinds of routine news are now being brought to you by robots. Will this free up reporters at cash-strapped news organizations to focus on investigative journalism and deeper reporting, or is it just a race to the bottom?

11:15am-12:45pm — Session 2: The First Machine Age Isn’t Over Yet

At the same time as we are seeing great leaps forward in applied AI, we are also seeing technology continue to reinvent manufacturing. We are entering a world of smart stuff, and dumb stuff built with smart tools. And this modern manufacturing revolution is converging with networks of hardware entrepreneurs, new sources of funding, and widely available next generation manufacturing tools.

• The small scale factory of the future. What happens when you put together a brilliant engineer, modern design and manufacturing tools, and a powerful internet media platform? You get Adafruit Industries, a $35 million/year, 80-person startup in New York City, funded by no VCs, a little bit of credit card debt to get off the ground, and a lot of customers! Limor Fried will take us on a live video factory tour of her design lab, her micro-factory, her warehouse, and her media studio. If Jeff Immelt represents the future of big manufacturing, Limor may well represent the future of small manufacturing in America.
• One, two, three, Boom! Limor is not alone. Mark Hatch of Techshopexplains what happens when you give creative people access to the tools of modern manufacturing. One after another, in quick succession, we’ll hear about some of the many Techshop projects that have sparked successful businesses.
• The Kickstarter economy. One of the fascinating things about the Next Economy is how much innovation is being funded by ordinary people. Kickstarter has provided over half a billion dollars in funding to hardware startups like those Mark Hatch talks about. We’ll talk with Yancey Strickler, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, about crowdfunding and what it teaches us about ways that the future of the economy doesn’t look like the past.
• Real R&D is Hard. Saul Griffith of Otherlab will show us some of the amazing projects spilling out of his lab, where research funded by DARPA, the Department of Energy, and industrial partners tackles hard problems, which when cracked, are spun out into new companies. This is a 21st century model of the public-private partnership: small scale, innovative, and fast moving. Wind power from drones, inflatable robots and exoskeletons, low cost methods for industrial solar arrays to follow the sun, and natural gas storage tanks of any arbitrary shape are only a few of the innovations Saul and his team have developed at Otherlab and related companies.
• Why services aren’t enough. Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, one of the world’s largest industrial corporations, has long argued against the idea that the US can outsource manufacturing — whether to Asia or to robots — and get by solely as a services economy. We’ll talk with Jeff about GE’s investments in big data, brilliant factories, and the industrial internet, and what role he sees for humans in the industrial economy of the 21st century. We’ll also talk about GE’s new focus on data and the energy grid, and how the lessons of networks and on-demand have the potential to transform the energy sector.

1:30–3:00pm — Session 3: Workers in a World of Continuous Partial Employment

There are those who say that Uber, TaskRabbit, DoorDash, and other “on demand” companies are leading to a world of continuous partial employment. This may be true, but it is also true that the rise of automated workplace monitoring and scheduling algorithms has done that for virtually all low wage jobs. If the algorithm is the new shift boss, what kind of algorithm do we want running things? We’ll delve deep into algorithmic workplace management.

• Never mind the algorithm, the drone Is the shift boss! One of the most remarkable things we’ve seen recently is a drone used to monitor and supervise construction workers, making sure they don’t slack off and do the job right. Is this a new tool for workplace productivity ora taste of a dystopian future?
• Workplace monitoring, algorithmic scheduling, and the quest for a fair workweek. Investigative journalist Esther Kaplan and labor activist Carrie Gleason team up to bring us a deep dive into the world of low-wage work in America, a world dominated by pervasive employee monitoring, automated scheduling systems programmed to keep everyone part time, on-call, and at minimum cost to the company. We’ll look at the havoc the misuse of algorithmic scheduling brings into workers’ lives, and explore what is being done to change that.
• Good Jobs in the On Demand Economy. There’s a prevailing meme that on-demand jobs are bad jobs. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The smartest companies in the on-demand space recognize that their workers, not just their technology, are essential to their success. They focus on building a platform that enables workers, not just customers, with the goal of creating great experiences not just for consumers but for the people delivering those experiences. Lauren Smiley will talk with Leah Busque, co-founder and CEO of TaskRabbit, and Dan Teran, founder and CEO of Managed by Q, about their different approaches to making better jobs for on-demand workers.
• What’s it like to drive for Uber or Lyft? “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet,” William Gibson famously said. If working on-demand for a platform like Uber or Lyft is one possible future for all of us, what’s that like? We’ll hear from workers who are already living in this future. What did they do before, and why did they choose this job? What do they like about it? What do they hate? What would make it better? We’re tired of hearing opinions from dueling pundits. Let’s hear from the drivers themselves.

3:30–5:15pm — Session 4: Networks and the Nature of the Firm

Economist Ronald Coase argued that the modern corporation replaced the Renaissance economy of small businesses and tradesmen because the management overhead of a large firm was lower than the transaction costs between small firms. This logic may be changing in fundamental ways. As Esko Kilpi, one of our speakers, put it, “If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically as is happening today, the form and logic of economic and organizational entities necessarily need to change! The core firm should now be small and agile, with a large network.”

• The changing nature of work. Esko Kilpi of Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund in Helsinki, and the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation in New Delhi, is one of the most intriguing theorists about how the shape of the corporation, and work itself, is changing in the age of smart devices, networks and what he calls “technological intelligence.” Here, he will set the stage by imagining the underpinnings of 21st century work.
• What’s the investment opportunity? James Cham of Bloomberg Beta, Simon Rothman of Greylock, and Gary Swart, former CEO of Odesk and now at Polaris Ventures, are all focused on the future of work and the transformative applications of platforms and networks to business. What are they investing in, and why?
• Supporting the on-demand economy. Providing services to consumers isn’t the only play. Nick Grossman of Union Square Ventures explores his investment model for the ecosystem of companies that will provide support and infrastructure services to the deconstructed corporation.
• Tax and Accounting Tools for the Franchise of One. Intuit has built one of Silicon Valley’s iconic companies providing accounting and tax software for individuals and small businesses. They’ve already built tools integrated with the Uber app. We’ll hear from Brad Smith, Intuit’s CEO, about the finance and accounting tools that are needed to help individuals successfully navigate the challenges of being the CEO of a “franchise of one.”
• Creating Better Teams. Slack is one of the fastest growing business applications in history. It’s a key enabler of distributed teams and cross-company collaboration. We’ll talk with co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield about his vision for Slack and why it is the perfect tool for the way business works now. He will show us how every company can be a network company.
• Flexibility Needed: Not Just for On-Demand Workers. On-demand jobs are chosen by many workers because of the life flexibility they afford. Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of New America, has been talking and writing urgently about the need for more flexibility in traditional employment. She believes that the lack of that flexibility, especially as applied to child care, elder care, and other family needs, is at the root of many of the gender disparities in the management of even progressive, well-intentioned firms. She advocates family friendly policies that not only improve the quality of life for employees but improve company performance by opening them up to new talent and making the most of the people they have.

6:30pm — Cocktails and Gala Dinner
Networking is the heart of an event like this one. During the long breaks and the gala dinner, you will have a chance to socialize with speakers and fellow attendees.

Friday, November 13, 2015

9–9:20am — Humans need not apply? Not so fast!

Nick Hanauer, investor and entrepreneur, explains why customers, not just entrepreneurs and investors, drive our economy. Even in a world dominated by AI and robots, people will still need to get paid one way or another, or there will be no one to buy products and services. The people will rise up before the robots do!

9:20–10:45am — Session 5: The Entrepreneurial Learner and the New Career Arc

The old compact between employer and employee that led to lifetime employment and a career ladder at a single company is a thing of the past. Not only that, the idea that you can master the skills of your job and then settle in to doing the same thing for a lifetime seem curiously out of step with the reality of a fast changing world. Individuals must develop a culture of continuous learning, and must, as Reid Hoffman has said, become “the CEOs of their own career.”

• Connecting Talent to Opportunity. Reid Hoffman has done more than anyone else to focus on the changing nature of work. As co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn, he has changed how professionals find and evaluate new job opportunities, and how companies find new employees. He’s built mechanisms for individuals to take charge of their own career, and to build a personal network that supports them in that career. He’ll be joined by Zoe Baird, CEO of the Markle Foundation (and co-chair, with Howard Schultz of Starbucks, of the Markle Rework America initiative) to discuss innovations in work and the 21st century skills-based labor market that LinkedIn and Markle are building along with Arizona State University and EdX, Rework America’s Connected.
• Exponential Teaching. There are a lot of things to learn from Black Girls Code, the amazing non-profit founded and run by Kimberly Bryant. But one that I’m asking her to focus on is what she calls “exponential teaching.” In her words, “Exponential teaching is how we will reach 1 million girls by 2040…If you teach one girl, she will naturally turn around and teach five, six or 10 more.” We may start a fire with teaching, but at some point, it must become a natural engagement, intrinsically social, where the acquired skills are passed on because they are useful and exciting.
• Matching Workers with Opportunities at High Velocity. People expect traditional job searches to take months. They struggle to network, send out inquiries, and scan listings. The traditional process is painful and prohibitive at a time when jobs are more fast-changing than ever. Careers are becoming extremely flexible and so is the process of finding work. Online work marketplaces, such as Upwork, are innovating job matching algorithms to take friction out of the job search process — reducing the time it takes to find work from months to minutes. What will the high-paced, increasingly entrepreneurial job market of the future look like and how will finding work be redefined? Will companies need to change their approaches to find the talent they need? And what will this changed pace mean to education? Upwork may seem at first far removed from the way people find full time jobs rather than short term gigs, but it has a huge amount to teach us. Glimpse the future of work through the eyes of Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel, a technologist who helped pioneer the Upwork’s data-driven matching efforts.
• Work Rules: Lessons from Google’s Success. Why do multimillionaires continue to work 60–80 hour weeks? What do Google and Wegmans Supermarkets have in common as America’s best places to work? How do you get employees to balance creativity and independence with rigorous, measurable goals? Laszlo Bock, the Senior Vice President of People Operations talks with us about how companies can better find and nurture superstar talent, and put them to work on audacious challenges.

11am–12:30pm — Session 6: Augmented Workers

Luddites have long claimed that technology is a job destroyer. The evidence of rising standards of living around the world says otherwise. Tools that improve worker productivity have historically made us all better off, and there are those who are betting that trend will continue.

• Intelligent agents, augmented reality, and the future of productivity. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says Microsoft is, at bottom, a productivity company. He sees enormous upside in AI, augmented reality, and other 21st century technology in making human workers more effective. We’ll have a frank discussion with Satya about his vision for Microsoft and how that vision is playing out
• Augmented Reality in the factory. Brian Mullins, founder and CEO of Daqri, will give us a look at how augmented reality is transforming factory work
• How augmented workers grow the market. It’s easy to forget that an Uber or Lyft driver is a technology-augmented worker, whose job is only possible because of technology that matches up driver and passenger in real time, and allows a part time worker to navigate to any destination as effectively as a driver with years of experience. We’ll have a conversation with Uber’s David Plouffe about the network model that has allowed Uber to vastly increase both the market size for on-demand transportation and the supply of workers to meet that demand. We’ll talk through some of the thorny labor issues that are raised, but explore why the various pieces of the Uber model go together, and why it’s difficult to remove one leg of the ladder, and still have it stand.

1:30–3pm — Session 7: What If the Robots Do Take All Our Jobs?

The notion that robots and AI may lead to the end of employment as we know it seems far-fetched to many. But scenario planning teaches us to develop strategies that are robust in the face of multiple possible futures, not just the ones that we think are most likely. In this session, we’ll explore how to build a human safety net for a world in which amoral, inhuman machines (and institutions) set the agenda, or for a world in which networks, not single organizations amenable to collective bargaining, become a major force in our economy.

• Policy Recommendations for the 21st Century Economy. It’s easy for people in Silicon Valley to miss the enormous role that government policy and scalable actions at a national level play in enabling innovation, preserving a level playing field, and setting the conditions under which the market flourishes. Zoe Baird of the Markle Foundation and Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress are two of the most influential voices exploring strategies to address the economic challenges of 21st century America. CAP’s “Middle Out Economics” and Markle’s Rework America initiative both provide frameworks for us to think about how government, businesses, and entrepreneurs can take action at all levels — based on the needs of this century, not the previous one — to make the economy work for all. We’ll explore their latest thinking and concrete policy recommendations.
• Rewiring the US Labor Market. Tens of thousands of high quality jobs go begging because qualified employees can’t find them. Opportunity@Work’s Techhire initiative is one example of how enabling better matching of skills and demand can create a more efficient job market. Byron Auguste, former White House deputy assistant to the President for economic policy and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, will tell us how TechHire works, and why more companies should get involved.
• Reinventing the Labor Union. The labor union as we knew it in the 20th century is fading away, yet the challenges of giving workers a voice in decision making, ensuring that unscrupulous employers don’t take advantage of them, and training them for the jobs of the future remains. We’ll talk with forward thinking labor advocates about their strategies. Liz Shuler, the Chief Financial Officer of the AFL/CIO, the largest and most powerful of the traditional labor unions, will tell us how they are working to reinvent themselves. Palak Shah of the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance will help us understand how you organize and support workers when you’re dealing not with large, centralized employers but a diffuse web of individual employers hiring workers who are explicitly excluded by law from many of the labor protections other workers enjoy. And Jess Kutch and Michelle Miller of Coworker.org will show how social media can be used to give workers voice and influence without traditional organizing.
• Portable Benefits and the “Shared Security Account.” In a world where people have multiple simultaneous jobs and multiple sources of income, our traditional model for employee benefits and the social safety net are increasingly out of touch with reality. Laura Tyson, former Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, will talk with investor Nick Hanauer and David Rolf of the SEIU, architects of the $15 minimum wage initiative in Seattle, about their ambitious proposal to decouple benefits from the job, and instead center them on the individual, with portable benefits that are funded pro-rata by every employer.

3:30–5pm — Session 8: Work, Not Jobs, and The Future We Want

There’s been a lot of hand wringing about the loss of good middle class jobs in America. But at the same time, it’s obvious that there are so many great challenges facing us. As Nick Hanauer says, “we won’t run out of jobs till we run out of problems.” We need to talk about work, not jobs. What needs doing? How can technology help us do it better? As Alan Kay once said, “It is easier to invent the future than it is to predict it.” So what kind of future do we want? What problems should we be focusing on and how can we harness technology to make a better world?

• Reinventing Public Transportation. Logan Green, co-founder and CEO of Lyft, began his entrepreneurial career thinking about how to reinvent public transportation, making it affordable and comprehensive, and that’s still his dream. Can an on-demand network model replace costly, inefficient bus systems that are used by a fraction of the population in most cities? Can we bring the costs down so that services like Lyft Line are truly a cost-equivalent replacement for public transportation, available to all?
• Small is beautiful. It’s easy to imagine that the future of the consumer economy looks much like the past: low cost goods produced by outsourced low cost labor, and eventually by machines, in a race to the bottom that leaves people out of the picture. Chad Dickerson, CEO of Etsy, has a different vision, in which high quality goods are produced by individuals or small businesses and valued for their uniqueness, their durability, and their human touch.
• The Good Jobs Strategy. MIT’s Zeynep Ton has studied what makes a “good job” and it goes far beyond narrow economic measures like benefits. She has studied how people find meaning in their work, and how companies can create jobs at every level that people find fulfilling and rewarding for employees. And she’s found a direct connection between that job satisfaction and the business results of the companies that enable it. She will share with us her research into how the smartest companies invest in employees to lower costs and boost profits.
• The Caring and Sharing Economy. One of the great challenges of the 21st century in developed countries is going to be the “demographic inversion,” where there are more old people than young people. This will strain social systems, and calls on us to rethink some of our fundamental assumptions about what we value.
• Enable people, and they will amaze you. Evan Williams is one of the most remarkable serial entrepreneurs of our age. First with Blogger, then Twitter, and now Medium, he has focused persistently on increasing the ability of humans to communicate and share. Now, as an investor, he has committed Obvious Ventures to invest in people who dream about a better future. We will talk with Ev about the sharing of ideas and what that may teach us about the future shape of business and the economy.

Join us at the Next:Economy Summit for an amazing conversation that will explore the opportunities and challenges for business, entrepreneurs, and investors over the next few decades.