Mike Olson

Mike Olson Founder, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudera San Francisco Bay Area Connect Connect with Mike Olson Cloudera University of California, Berkeley See contact info 500+ connections Engineer with an interest in business, contracts and ways to monetize open source software. Articles 49,877 followers The Second Machine Age Mike’s profile photo Mike Olson Published on LinkedIn Here's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Over more than a century of the Industrial Age, we figured out how to automate repetitive manual labor. We discovered how to use machines -- better tools, assembly lines and eventually robots -- to replace people in many jobs. I believe that transition was seriously good for society. It let us consign dull and dangerous work to motors and metal. It freed people for more interesting work. Of course it was disruptive. A high school diploma was, once upon a time, a ticket to a decent paycheck and upward mobility. With the advent of machinery in manufacturing, those jobs became scarcer and the skills required in the workplace became more advanced. The transition wasn't -- in fact, with income inequality on the rise worldwide, still isn't -- easy or free of real social and economic pain. On balance, though, industrialization has made society richer, safer and more productive. Today, we see a new class of tools that sound like science fiction breaking out of research laboratories and into ordinary life. I began my career in the late 1970s, when the internet was not yet a whiff of what it would become; today, much of the knowledge of the whole human race is just on the other side of a Google search box. Powerful algorithms like machine learning, techniques like predictive modeling and deep statistical analysis let computers evaluate data and draw conclusions over much more data than people have ever been able to handle. I'm involved in the industry that is making that happen. I am hugely in favor of these new techniques. I believe that they will help us feed more people, produce cleaner energy, cure deadly disease and improve the quality of life for everyone. But they come with some downside risk, too. We may be watching the second act of the Industrial Age disruption of work. Fifty years ago, manual labor was threatened by physical machinery, but what we came to call "knowledge work" -- legal advice, accounting, journalism and other white-collar professions -- were safe. They were also lucrative. If you could get the training and education they required, you were likely to have a very comfortable middle-class life. But algorithms and computers are encroaching quickly on knowledge work territory. Already we have computer programs that write news stories, software that drafts wills and does your taxes. More recently we have seen robot cars, game-show champions and object recognition break into the mainstream. Jobs that used to require human eyeballs and human insight are now done, competently and quickly, by computers. We have not, so far, found the limits of our ability to build more systems like these, or to make them better and faster. So what if computers and algorithms do to the current middle class what belts and gears did to the last? What if we are building machines that will displace the people and eliminate the jobs on which the developed world's economy depends? The Dismal Science I'm not the first, nor the only, person to spot these trends, or to fret about them. Economists have been thinking and writing about them for some time. Robert Gordon, for example, is an accomplished economist with a storied career who still does research, at age 72, at Northwestern University. Gordon has lately increased his fame by giving a sort of anti-TED talk, bleak and clear: he hypothesizes that the Industrial Age was a once-in-history accident that created a short, anomalous period of steady economic growth. He claims that it's over, and that it won't happen again. Tyler Cowen at George Mason University is a little less bleak, but only a little. He's published two very good books (The Great Stagnation and Average Is Over) in which he argues that for a small number of professionals, there will be careers in creating and tending alorithms, and in working alongside computers in advanced disciplines. For most, though, the future holds only a series of service jobs, tending the elderly and taking care of errands for the wealthy. Neither of these analyses satisfies me; my bias is firmly in favor of progress and improvement. That bias, though, is informed by the fifty-one years I've walked the planet, and Gordon and Cowen would point out that those fifty-one years are a tiny sample of human history. The thing to do, they would say, is to look at the data. The View from MIT Two MIT researchers in the Sloan School's Center for Digital Business -- Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson -- have just published their view of this economic and social transformation, and it is somewhat brighter. Their book, The Second Machine Age, argues that technical innovation has produced a huge collection of new tools and systems, and that there is much more power and value in front of us by combining them in new ways and adding new technologies to them. The two aren't unreservedly optimistic. They see some of the same challenges and disruption that Gordon describes, and they see a shift toward services in the same way that Cowen does. Their central theme, though, is one of economic mobility driven, not threatened, by technology. I've read broadly on this topic. I think it's an important social and economic issue, too little recognized by the public at large and not discussed nearly enough in the media. Among all the books and articles I've read, I like The Second Machine Age best. Yes, in part because it reflects my own hopeful optimism, but more fundamentally because it's prescriptive. The book ends with three chapters that are not just interesting, but also useful. There are recommendations for individuals (central here is a retooling of the educational system, and an embrace of lifelong learning and new skills). There are policy recommendations, including some suggestions for governments in easing the transition and in shoring up the middle class for the long term. And, finally, there are recommendations for society at large -- ways to organize and to deal with one another that will preserve opportunity and increase cultural richness as we drive economic wealth broadly across society. Andrew, Erik: Best book of the year. I say that with confidence though it is only January. Thank you, and nicely done! Photo: elevate.boston / Flickr 32 Comments Like Comment Share See all Experience Cloudera Company NameCloudera Total Duration10 yrs 11 mos TitleChief Strategy Officer (CSO) Dates EmployedJan 2019 – Present Employment Duration4 mos LocationPalo Alto, California TitleBoard Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer Dates EmployedJun 2013 – Jan 2019 Employment Duration5 yrs 8 mos TitleCEO and Founder Dates EmployedJun 2008 – Jun 2013 Employment Duration5 yrs 1 mo DataKind Chairman of the Board Company NameDataKind Dates EmployedMar 2014 – Jul 2017 Employment Duration3 yrs 5 mos LocationGreater New York City Area Oracle Corporation Vice President, Embedded Technologies Company NameOracle Corporation Dates EmployedFeb 2006 – Jan 2008 Employment Duration2 yrs Worked with Oracle's new Embedded Global Business Unit in the wake of the acquisition of Sleepycat. Sleepycat Software CEO Company NameSleepycat Software Dates EmployedJan 1998 – Feb 2006 Employment Duration8 yrs 2 mos First full-time employee; VP Sales and Marketing from 1998 to 2000, CEO thereafter. Negotiated sale of company to Oracle Corporation in February 2006. Molecular Applications Group Vice President, Engineering Company NameMolecular Applications Group Dates EmployedFeb 1996 – May 1997 Employment Duration1 yr 4 mos Ran the development team for a biotechnology company focused on informatics to help drug companies understand disease pathways and develop drugs. Informix Software Director, Datablades Business Unit Company NameInformix Software Dates EmployedJan 1996 – Feb 1997 Employment Duration1 yr 2 mos Oversaw the development and marketing of third-party extensions to the Informix database product line ("datablades") after Informix's acquisition of Illustra Information Technologies. Illustra Information Technologies Architect Company NameIllustra Information Technologies Dates Employed1993 – 1997 Employment Duration4 yrs Illustra Architect Company NameIllustra Dates EmployedJun 1993 – Dec 1995 Employment Duration2 yrs 7 mos Software developer and architect for the first company to commercialize the Postgres database engine. Transitioned to marketing and sales support during my tenure. BrittonLee/Sharebase Software Engineer Company NameBrittonLee/Sharebase Dates Employed1986 – 1988 Employment Duration2 yrs Show fewer experiences Education University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley Degree NameMS Field Of StudyElectrical Engineering and Computer Science Dates attended or expected graduation 1991 – 1993 Earned a Master's Degree in 1992 and continued for a year of work on my PhD, never completed. Advisor was Michael Stonebraker. My area of research was database management systems. I was a key developer on the Postgres project during my undergraduate and graduate years. Left the PhD program to join Illustra Information Technologies, the first commercialization of Postgres, in May of 1993. University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley Degree NameBA Field Of StudyComputer Science Dates attended or expected graduation 1979 – 1991 Minor in Dutch Studies.