Second Half Of The Chessboard

I just finished listening to the audio version of the book 'The Second Machine Age' by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson.  They co-direct the MIT Center for Digital Business.  It is a terrific book.

The first third of the book was fairly obvious.  It set-up how the world of technology is changing.  Examples such as autonomous vehicles, WAYZ, AirBNB, Uber abound.

The last third of the book is prosaic in its policy prescriptions.  Ideas like guaranteed minimum income that have been debated for decades now both by the left and the right are suggested as remedies to what ails us today.

The middle third of the book, which is about the implications of this new technology is absolutely topnotch.  It provides a compelling description of the challenges and opportunities we face.  Especially compelling is the concept of the second half of the chessboard.

The authors use the analogy of the second half of the chessboard to explain the exponential growth in technology and processing power.  This term was first coined by Ray Kurzweil to explain the implications of technology strategy on business enterprises.  Indeed Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis established Singularity University at the NASA park in Palo Alto based on this concept.  I had a chance to visit and spend a day there a couple of years ago.

The second half of the chessboard concept goes back to the invention of chess (or its preceding version) in India.  The authors called the king, who sanctioned the creation of the game, one of the 'Guptas,'  who of course were a leading dynasty.  But I could not corroborate this in my searches.

The story goes like this:

A king in ancient India commissioned a mathematician to come up with a new game. The mathematician came up with the game of Chaturanga. The game had two armies each lead by a King who commanded the army to defeat the other by capturing the enemy King. It was played on a 8x8 square board.

The king wanted to reward the mathematician and asked him to make a request.

"I would like one grain of rice for the first square of the board, two grains for the second, four grains for the third and so on doubled for each of the 64 squares of the game board," said the mathematician.

The king was pleased to grant this request.

The number of grains of rice on the first half of the chessboard is 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + ... + 2,147,483,648, for a total of 4,294,967,295 (232 − 1) grains of rice.

The number of grains of rice on the second half of the chessboard is 232 + 233 + 234 + ... + 263, for a total of 264 − 232 grains of rice (the square of the number of grains on the first half of the board plus itself).

Indeed, as each square contains one grain more than the total of all the squares before it, the first square of the second half alone contains more grains than the entire first half.

While the number of grains on the first half of the chessboard is large, the amount on the second half is vastly (232 > 4 billion times) larger.

On the 64th square of the chessboard alone there would be 263 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice, or more than two billion times as much as on the first half of the chessboard.

On the entire chessboard there would be 264 − 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice, weighing 461,168,602,000 metric tons, which would be a heap of rice larger than Mount Everest.   That would be around 1,000 times the global production of rice in the 21st century.

The king of course was not so pleased with the outcome as soon as he realized what was actually happening.  I can't imagine the mathematician's fate was a good one at some point as they moved across the chessboard.

The implication of this story for us is that technology is progressing so rapidly; doubling in processing power every 18 months (according to Moore's Law) that when we move into the second half of the chessboard, the impacts on jobs, companies, society and humanity will literally be unimaginable.

While the first third and the final third of the book, The Second Machine Age, were middling, the middle third of the book was really worth it.

The middle third of the book is nicely captured in this 15 min TED Talk that one of the co-authors, Andrew gave in 2013.  It is quite scary that a few years have passed since the talk was given and technology has exponentially progressed that much more.

In the video, the difference he paints between white-collar Ted and blue collar Bill from 1960 through to today is a devastating portrait!  The importance of work to social cohesion and self-esteem becomes very apparent through this description.  Voltaire is quoted as saying, "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need."

At minute 12, he brings up Social Impact Investing, which I am currently working on.  Indeed work and life with purpose appears to be infusing capital markets as well.  Daniel Pink is quoted as saying, "Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose are what really motivate us."

What I like about this talk is that Andrew is candid in his diagnosis, prescriptive in his recommendations, bold in his prediction and humble in demeanor ...

Here is the video:  What will the future of jobs look like?

While the content of the middle third of this book were fascinating, the implications of our society moving into the second half of the chessboard are breathtaking!