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.

For a long time, the humans are going to be better than the machines and so different parts of the job will be leveraged. In a way that's happened for centuries, and we've adapted. And it's made the people who had parts of their jobs automated more valuable and more productive to the extent that they are essential for the other components of their jobs.

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power - the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

Going a little further into the future, we'll start literally connecting to machines. Some of my colleagues at MIT here - some of them are working on a neural mesh that connects directly to your brain, and they've already done it with some disabled people and allowed them to move objects just by thinking.

G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers. Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.

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.