Welcome to the After-On Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Reed.

And this is a series of conversations with thinkers, founders, and scientists.

Take a little time and stretch out because these talks are unhurried and meant to bring

you to a top percentile understanding of something important.

So whether you're ready to start up or ideas, a techie or a lip major, take your time,

engage your mind, and you'll be glad you did it.

Especially this week when we'll be talking to Andy McAfee of MIT.

In February of 2013, I saw Andy give a talk at the TED conference about the future of jobs

and unemployment in the face of a coming tsunami of automation in both manual and cognitive

work.

The talk did hit some optimistic notes, but what really stuck with me were his points

about Everchieber, evermore agile, evermore productive automation, and paroling employment

on a mass scale.

Now when I hear something I don't like, it helps if the person saying it is, you know,

a bit of a knucklehead, but Andy was depressingly smart.

Not that I find smart people depressing, quite the contrary, but in his case, this intelligence

did make his grammar points entirely believable.

About a year later, Andy and his co-author and partner in research, Eric Rignielson,

released a book called The Second Machine Age, which covers all the ideas in that TED talk

and extraordinary depth, and this fuller exploration of their thinking actually leaves me rather

optimistic about the future, although with many caveats and asterisks as you will soon

see.

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