But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.

Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.

What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to try to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine.

The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.

But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.

Technology has made it easier for different firms to coordinate their activities with one another, and they don't have to be part of one company. They can get the benefits of scale without the inertia of scale.