There has been plenty of justifiable trepidation over the potential for jobs — not to mention entire entire companies and industries — being wiped out by the digital wave sweeping through society and business. We’ve already seen administrative and production jobs go by the wayside as a result of automation. Through driverless cars and trucks, there’s potential for job losses among professional drivers. Financial services jobs are being disintermediated by self-service sites and trading algorithms. Doctors and journalists are not immune from the specter, either, with algorithms taking over many tasks. Even executives are finding parts of their jobs usurped by decision management systems.
However, a couple of MIT professors argue that, if anything, there is an abundance of new opportunities arising as a result of digital systems, clouds and big data. Along with that, there are many jobs and roles machines can never replicate — such as the ability to create new ideas and products, establish interpersonal connections, and effectively communicate the value of new innovations.
MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, spoke on the opportunities technology is providing to society in a recent interview. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, co-authors of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, argue that productivity in an increasingly digital economy won’t come from automation itself. Rather, it will come out of humans working with systems and machines. “We call racing with machines,” Brynjolfsson explains. “There’s been a lot of attention on how machines can replace humans, but the bigger opportunity is in how humans and machines can work together to do things that could never have been done before.”
Machines could never identify or act on opportunities as humans can, he continues. Rather, systems can augment innovation by humans, such as “when they’re making new discoveries in neuroscience, or new kinds of business models like Uber, and others where we are seeing value creation in ways that were just not possible previously,” he says.

Medical diagnosis is an example of how human decisions can be augmented — but not replaced — by machines, McAfee adds. For example, he says, “I may want Doctor Watson [IBM's artificial intelligence system] as my primary care physician, but I do think the real opportunities are going to be to combine digital diagnosis, digital pattern recognition with the unique skills and abilities of a human doctor. Let’s bring those two skill sets together.” An automated physician can immediately retain the latest knowledge, versus the 160 hours a week a human physician would require to keep up to date with the latest techniques, McAfee adds. “Humans and machines have complementary skills,” he adds. “Machines are strong in some categories, humans in others. That’s why any team with humans and computers is a killer combo.”
The greatest technology-driven innovations are based on building-block approaches with ready-made components. Innovation “isn’t coming up with some brand new eureka, but is putting together existing building blocks in a new and powerful way,” says McAfee. “You should get really optimistic because the number building blocks out there in the world is only going up, with iPhones and sensors and bandwidth and all these different tools. And in the ability to tap into more brains around the world to allow more people to do recombination as well. I’m massively optimistic about innovation.”
The advantage of technology innovation is that it doesn’t stop — one set of innovations only breeds more building blocks for new innovation.  “Historically most the breakthroughs have been achieved by combining previously existing innovations,” says says Brynjolfsson. “That makes the us more optimistic that we’ll have more those building blocks going forward.”
Some of the most notable web-based companies are based on assembling pre-existing technologies or services, they note, citing the growth of Waze, an online traffic management service and app. “None of what Waze created was original — they just put those elements together in a really powerful way,” says McAfee. Add to this the fact that the service is available for free, Brynjolfsson said. “It’s available for free on my phone. A GPS would have cost hundreds of dollars a few years ago, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as good as Waze.  And a decade before that it would have been infinitely expensive – you couldn’t get it at any price.”

In the process, however, it’s difficult to measure — let alone see — the impact of these new digital services to economic growth, Brynjolfsson says. Digital services such as Waze are not being tracked as part of the formal economy, so the value is not fully understood, he continues.”So much of what we get is now available at zero cost. In our [Gross Domestic Product], all the goods and services that are bought and sold, if they have zero prices, they show up as a zero in GDP.  That doesn’t mean it has zero value, it’s still quite valuable to us. and more and more out metrics are not capturing the value of the digital economy.”
In addition, with technology as a tool, many disruptive innovations can be formulated by very small teams, using virtually free resources such as cloud and open-source software. This results in a network effect that ripples across the economy, McAfee says, adding that many of the constraints to innovation and new business are disappearing. “Access to technology is vanishing as a constraint, access to capital is vanishing as a constraint,” he says. “A small team or a lone innovator can demonstrate the power their idea and then ramp up.”