Where is the Digital Revolution Taking Us?

How is the digital revolution creating and re-creating the economy? How long will it last? How does this revolution compare with earlier ones? What can history tell us about where we are heading now?

At our June 7 PARC Forum, W. Brian Arthur will explore these questions. Arthur will explore how digitization is creating an external intelligence—one that is no longer housed internally in the brains of human workers but is moving outward into the conversation among intelligent algorithms. In the next few decades, companies that enable industries to harness this external intelligence will thrive.

Digitization is also bringing us into a new economic era that is not so much about production anymore—how much is produced—but about distribution—how people get a share in what is produced. Politics will change, free-market beliefs will change, social structures will change. We are still at the start of this shift, but it will be deep and will unfold indefinitely into the future.

Presenter(s)

W. Brian Arthur is a Visiting Researcher in the System Sciences Lab at PARC. He has held the Morrison Chair in Economics and Population Studies at Stanford, and is a founding member and Citibank Professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He is author of The Nature of Technology: What it Is and How it Evolves.