Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of the authors of The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson,  Andrew McAfee, and Jeremy Howard who examine the impact that “thinking” machines may have on top-management roles for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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Technology is getting smarter, faster. Are you?

The exact moment when computers got better than people at human tasks arrived in 2011, according to data scientist Jeremy Howard, at an otherwise inconsequential machine-learning competition in Germany. Contest participants were asked to design an algorithm that could recognize street signs, many of which were a bit blurry or dark. Humans correctly identified them 98.5 percent of the time. At 99.4 percent, the winning algorithm did even better.

Or maybe the moment came earlier that year, when IBM’s Watson computer defeated the two leading human Jeopardy! players on the planet. Whenever or wherever it was, it’s increasingly clear that the comparative advantage of humans over software has been steadily eroding. Machines and their learning-based algorithms have leapt forward in pattern-matching ability and in the nuances of interpreting and communicating complex information. The long-standing debate about computers as complements or substitutes for human labor has been renewed.

The matter is more than academic. Many of the jobs that had once seemed the sole province of humans—including those of pathologists, petroleum geologists, and law clerks—are now being performed by computers.

And so it must be asked: can software substitute for the responsibilities of senior managers in their roles at the top of today’s biggest corporations? In some activities, particularly when it comes to finding answers to problems, software already surpasses even the best managers. Knowing whether to assert your own expertise or to step out of the way is fast becoming a critical executive skill.

Managing in the era of brilliant machines: An interview

In this interview by McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee discuss the organizational challenge posed by the Second Machine Age.

Yet senior managers are far from obsolete. As machine learning progresses at a rapid pace, top executives will be called on to create the innovative new organizational forms needed to crowdsource the far-flung human talent that’s coming online around the globe. Those executives will have to emphasize their creative abilities, their leadership skills, and their strategic thinking.

To sort out the exponential advance of deep-learning algorithms and what it means for managerial science, McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland conducted a series of interviews in January at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. Among those interviewed were two leading business academics—Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, coauthors of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton, January 2014)—and two leading entrepreneurs: Anthony Goldbloom, the founder and CEO of Kaggle (the San Francisco start-up that’s crowdsourcing predictive-analysis contests to help companies and researchers gain insights from big data); and data scientist Jeremy Howard. This edited transcript captures and combines highlights from those conversations.

The Second Machine Age

What is it and why does it matter?

McAfee: The Industrial Revolution was when humans overcame the limitations of our muscle power. We’re now in the early stages of doing the same thing to our mental capacity—infinitely multiplying it by virtue of digital technologies. There are two discontinuous changes that will stick in historians’ minds. The first is the development of artificial intelligence, and the kinds of things we’ve seen so far are the warm-up act for what’s to come. The second big deal is the global interconnection of the world’s population, billions of people who are not only becoming consumers but also joining the global pool of innovative talent.

Brynjolfsson: The First Machine Age was about power systems and the ability to move large amounts of mass. The Second Machine Age is much more about automating and augmenting mental power and cognitive work. Humans were largely complements for the machines of the First Machine Age. In the Second Machine Age, it’s not so clear whether humans will be complements or machines will largely substitute for humans; we see examples of both. That potentially has some very different effects on employment, on incomes, on wages, and on the types of companies that are going to be successful.

Howard: Today, machine-learning algorithms are actually as good as or better than humans at many things that we think of as being uniquely human capabilities. People whose job is to take boxes of legal documents and figure out which ones are discoverable— that job is rapidly disappearing because computers are much faster and better than people at it.

In 2012, a team of four expert pathologists looked through thousands of breast-cancer screening images, and identified the areas of what’s called mitosis, the areas which were the most active parts of a tumor. It takes four pathologists to do that because any two only agree with each other 50 percent of the time. It’s that hard to look at these images; there’s so much complexity. So they then took this kind of consensus of experts and fed those breast-cancer images with those tags to a machine-learning algorithm. The algorithm came back with something that agreed with the pathologists 60 percent of the time, so it is more accurate at identifying the very thing that these pathologists were trained for years to do. And this machine-learning algorithm was built by people with no background in life sciences at all. These are total domain newbies.

McAfee: We thought we knew, after a few decades of experience with computers and information technology, the comparative advantages of human and digital labor. But just in the past few years, we have seen astonishing progress. A digital brain can now drive a car down a street and not hit anything or hurt anyone—that’s a high-stakes exercise in pattern matching involving lots of different kinds of data and a constantly changing environment.

Why now?

Computers have been around for more than 50 years. Why is machine learning suddenly so important?

Brynjolfsson: It’s been said that the greatest failing of the human mind is the inability to understand the exponential function. Daniela Rus—the chair of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT—thinks that, if anything, our projections about how rapidly machine learning will become mainstream are too pessimistic. It’ll happen even faster. And that’s the way it works with exponential trends: they’re slower than we expect, then they catch us off guard and soar ahead.

McAfee: There’s a passage from a Hemingway novel about a man going broke in two ways: “gradually and then suddenly.” And that characterizes the progress of digital technologies. It was really slow and gradual and then, boom—suddenly, it’s right now.

Howard: The difference here is each thing builds on each other thing. The data and the computational capability are increasing exponentially, and the more data you give these deep-learning networks and the more computational capability you give them, the better the result becomes because the results of previous machine-learning exercises can be fed back into the algorithms. That means each layer becomes a foundation for the next layer of machine learning, and the whole thing scales in a multiplicative way every year. There’s no reason to believe that has a limit.

Brynjolfsson: With the foundational layers we now have in place, you can take a prior innovation and augment it to create something new. This is very different from the common idea that innovations get used up like low-hanging fruit. Now each innovation actually adds to our stock of building blocks and allows us to do new things.

One of my students, for example, built an app on Facebook. It took him about three weeks to build, and within a few months the app had reached 1.3 million users. He was able to do that with no particularly special skills and no company infrastructure, because he was building it on top of an existing platform, Facebook, which of course is built on the web, which is built on the Internet. Each of the prior innovations provided building blocks for new innovations. I think it’s no accident that so many of today’s innovators are younger than innovators were a generation ago; it’s so much easier to build on things that are preexisting.

Howard: I think people are massively underestimating the impact, on both their organizations and on society, of the combination of data plus modern analytical techniques. The reason for that is very clear: these techniques are growing exponentially in capability, and the human brain just can’t conceive of that.

There is no organization that shouldn’t be thinking about leveraging these approaches, because either you do—in which case you’ll probably surpass the competition—or somebody else will. And by the time the competition has learned to leverage data really effectively, it’s probably going to be too late for you to try to catch up. Your competitors will be on the exponential path, and you’ll still be on that linear path.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

This edited roundtable is adapted from interviews conducted by Rik Kirkland, senior managing editor of McKinsey Publishing, who is based in McKinsey’s New York office.