languages, answering phone calls, even writing sports stories for the newspaper. one of the world's leading experts in this phenomenon is dr. andrew mcafee. he is principal research scientist at m.i.d.'s center for digital business at the sloan school of management and leleah of tech crunch. last week we did an entire show with a different mcafee. any relation to virus hunter john mcafee? >> i used to say with regret there is no relationship. now i'm happier there are not family ties. i'm not sure i want that dna coursing through. >> understood. there is this concern, but this concern has been around forever that robots or machines are taking our jobs. you look back at john henry or there was even a quote i think you had about technological

unemployment by a fellow named john keens in 1930. >> we've always been both correct and wrong. the correct part of this idea of technological unemployment is automation and technology do destroy jobs. they automate jobs away. at the same time, technology creates new opportunities, entrepreneurs create new companies, new industries. >> created more jobs than destroyed. >> unbelievable amount of jobs. so we've had, even in this era of intense industrialization for the past couple of centuries, we had pretty close to full employment. it's this really great run. my deepest worry is that that run might be coming to an end and that things actually are different this time. >> why? >> because when i look at the bundle of stuff that any of us can offer to the work force or offer to an employer, all the previous ways of technology combined don't encroach on that

bundle very much. >> the steam engine took away or comparative advantage lifting heavy stuff, unless you're a circus strong man or athlete, no one hires to you do that any more. but the encroachment of technology into that bundle was mild. if you wanted anything written all of human history had to involve a human being in that. if you wanted someone to listen to someone talking and give an accurate and intelligent answer, you needed a person for that. if you wanted any kind of decent pattern matching done, you needed a person for that. that's just not the case any more. >> it seems like now technology has become so intelligent that they can replace humans, how much of machine learning is involved in what you're saying? >> it's a pretty big deal. i try to be careful about the terms i use. i don't like "intelligent" because people start to think about "the terminator" and "the matrix." computers are getting better at the stuff they've always been good at, but it feels like a

tipping point has been past. because of extremely powerful computers, really, really big data and smart people programming them in the background, we see them do stuff that looks like science fiction. >> the jeopardy playing supercomputer champion is a favorite example of that these days. >> terry gough talked about inserting robots where we saw chinese workers. american workers built things. that got shipped over to china. chinese workers said, hey, i kind of like this disposable income and jobs. is it possible we could ship that back to the united states and give it to robots and china would get lost and never take part in the industrial revolution? >> if your comparative advantage in the world economy is cheap manual labor, that is really precarious. a couple more ticks of moore's

law. >> they can do similar things. >> the robots are getting more capable over time and cheaper over time. >> that could be devastating for india and china. >> it can. >> and maybe for us. >> i would rather have our problems than anybody else's problems right now the phenomenon you described is already taking place. you pointed out earlier that we've been shedding manufacturing jobs since about 1980 in this country, while output has gone up. what people don't realize is that the year peak manufacturing employment in china was 1996. they employ a lot fewer people now than they did then to make stuff. their manufacturing output is 77% greater than it was. >> now that you totally depressed us about the future of humanity, is there anything we can still do better than machines and will be able to for the foreseeable future? >> one of the things i learned is never say never. let me tell you what i've never seen a computer do. i've never seen a computer i

would call creative. a computer i would call entrepreneurial. i've never seen what empathetic. >> rod brooks is working in that last category. that is a lot of what his research is focused on is establishing the machine human connection. >> what he's trying to do with his baxter robots, they are amazing, he's been so clever about putting a screen with a face on the robot that will actually turn when a human walks up to make it seem like he's part of the team on the factory floor. it's a really clever approach to the interaction questions that we're going to have. rod is also trying to improve robots' ability to sense the physical world and to do fine motor manipulation, which again, we do very, very easily. evolution programmed us to be good at it. historically robots have been terrible at it. they are getting better. >> we talk about creative types,

empathetic types may still have a job. there may be a future where robots and automation does a great deal and a lot of people don't have jobs. then the rest of us, and i would like to be in this group, please, who are still creative and create and do these things do have jobs, but that's a different america. >> it's a very different america. you don't have to look too, too far into the crystal ball. i don't think it's crazy science fiction to envision america is the tragedy ejectory we are on. the economic inequality is bigger. we love to think of rags to riches story. our social mobility is lower than it is in european countries right now. the trends about, not about our ability to generate wealth. we have an astonishingly productive economy. my prediction is that will continue. we'll move into a world of abundance. there are two huge questions that result from that. how do we share that abundance

in a way that doesn't leave people behind? and to your point, what does a life look like that's not really dominated by your job and by your career and by work? >> andrew mcafee from m.i.t., we appreciate you being with us this morning. >> thanks for having me on. a start-up which relies on employing the underemployed. can it survive a good economy? when "press: here" continues.

welcome back to "press: here." taskrabbit is an online service which matches people looking for work with people who need a simple chore done. in this case, a guy hired to grab some dog food. it's a cool new san francisco-based start-up with a cool young ceo leah busque, a former ibm engineer turned

founder, raised $40 million in funding. recently taskrabbit expanded into taskrabbit for business. you've been on the show before. thank you for coming back. >> thanks for having me back. >> when you were last here, we talked about the poor economy and how you were employing folks in san francisco who maybe were underemployed. things have gotten a lot better. has that caused you problems? you had the carrots, do you have the rabbits any more? >> it's a great question. we were waiting to see what was going to happen. it hasn't affected the rate of the taskrabbit applications at all. actually, i was just looking at the numbers. last week we had over 3,000 taskrabbit applications, our highest ever of all time across the country. >> has it affected the salaries? do you see any evidence of a better economy? >> you know, that is a really good question because it has affected the salaries a bit, i think. >> the requests people are making for how much money? >> how much they are willing to pay to get a job done. last time i was here i mentioned

some of our top taskrabbits are cashing out up to $5,000 a month. looking at the numbers yesterday, we had some taskrabbits cashing up to $10,000 a month. >> are you seeing people who are just using taskrabbit to make their income total? >> we are. we have some folks that had full-time jobs, full-time work that started doing taskrabbit because they were unemployed or underemployed going through this time of recession and decided to remain there and build up their own businesses what got me really excited watching that happen, it's like we are creating these micro entrepreneurs and give them these platforms to build out their own businesses. >> we heard recently about the effect of technology on the pace of the recovery in terms of employment. are you seeing people migrating from manufacturing from other areas more into the service sector here? >> you know what we are seeing are a lot of folks that were

maybe construction workers or handymen, and were working for other people and other firms and other contractors. and are now breaking out on their own. that's a big trend we are seeing on the platform right now. >> tell me a little about the buys aspect now as you're moving into the b-to-b market. >> for our friends who don't speak that language, business-to-business. business services. go on. >> that's right. in the past we had all these consumers requesting jobs, dry cleaning pick-up, grocery deliveries. when we started to see about six months ago is this organic trend of small businesses starting to use the taskrabbit network to get jobs done for their business. so particularly through the holiday season, we had a huge trend of people hiring taskrabbit's on-demand to do pack-and-ship. retailers who needed temporary workers to come in a few days a week going to the taskrabbit platform finding temporary workers there. >> is there a certain noncool

about that? taskrabbit you get a cute name, cute logo, et cetera. when you start supplying business workers, you've become man power. it's great business, but it lacks that san francisco start-up, give me venture capital money that taskrabbit sounds cool. techcrunch loves taskrabbit. it doesn't write about manpower. >> the thing is the temporary waiver industry is a mul multibillion dollar industry. >> it's a great industry. >> it hasn't been reinvented in decades. i bet techcrunch would write the story thinking about how to leverage technology to build a more efficient business. >> in a lot of ways, you're the marketplace to put the people who need services and the people who can provide them together. isn't there a possibility that at some point the technology evolves to the point where they

don't need you in the middle? where people can market more directly, market their services or market their needs to each other more directly? >> we have to create enough value on the platform to want to keep people there. if we are not doing that, we are not doing a good job. things like the vetting process we put our taskrabbits through, application process, a series of background checks, training program, we have this quality standard we hold high on the taskrabbit platform. there's also a whole payment flow that is protected and secure. that's one of the big ways that ebay secured people by having paypal underwrite and secure. >> that's value for the customer looking for the job and the person performing the job. i occasionally use fivvrr. le often times people will do that first job and say why don't you contact me off channel because then i'm not paying. >> there is not enough value to keep people there.

>> you are seeing more marketplaces, especially with bringing that labor online and matching people. you've got a bunch more competitors in the space. how are you guys going to stay competitive? >> four years ago when i started taskrabbit back in boston, collaborative consumption, share economy didn't exist yet. i think we've been very fortunate to have the amount of time and luxury of learning that we have under our belts. you're right. the competitive landscape heated up. it validated the market, which i've been excited to see. four years later if no one else was trying to do this, i would be a little concerned that maybe we weren't really tackling the problem in the right way. >> didn't i read there was task panda? >> oh, my goodness. >> it was really close. it was your name. >> they matched the brand, they matched everything. >> did it make you angry at first? >> no. you know what? it fueled my desire just to compete. that's just in my nature. it's an exciting time. it's exciting to see.

we're going to be differentiated and we're going to win because the value we put in the platform in the community, and the quality. and technology. we are just staying that much ahead of the curve on the technology side. >> lena you nominated leah for founder of the year last year at the crunch awards. i'm sorry to say you didn't actually win, but you lost to a heck of a guy. >> it's tough to compete with jack dorsey. when i look back at the crunchies, it was such a fun evening. that was one of my favorite moments because jack's speech was so amazing. he talked about founding moments in companies and how companies evolved. that resonated with me at the time and that's kept with me throughout the last year. >> i have a feeling that one day leah will be up there, too, winning that award at some

point. >> keep the acceptance speech handy. >> yeah. >> the next crunchies are this coming week. >> they are in two weeks, yeah. we are really excited about it. i think it's going to be a creative -- it's sort of compared to the oscar awards for the tech industry. >> with john oliver hosting. >> that's right from "the daily show." that will be just a really fun evening. we let ourselves take a rest from all the work and enjoy and celebrate entrepreneurship. >> it was a fun event this year taskrabbit has been nominated again for best collaborative consumption service. we are really excited to attend. >> leah busque, thank you for coming back. "press: here" will be back in a minute.

welcome back to "press: here." in the next few weeks you'll start seeing search show up in your facebook timeline. mark zuckerberg briefed us about this on wednesday. he calls it graph search. the basic idea is search that makes connections in the material that facebook already knows. that's different than the way that google works. it's more like the way that ask.com works. doug leeds, thank you for coming back. you recently bought about.com, which is -- about.com dates back to -- >> been around a long time, yeah. >> it's people going online and explaining their knowledge to the world. >> actually, it's fewer people than maybe you think. it's only a thousand people. they are all experts in their field. >> about san francisco, about baking bread. >> right, about southern

recipes, about cocktails, about car repair and about topics people are asking questions about, which is why we bought them. people are asking questions about these subjects. >> what stops google from doing that? >> google does it, too. what google is looking at is xwo google is trying to get you a link to their page and get you off their site as fast as possible. more and more they are trying to get you an answer and develop that content experience themselves. you have a lot of engagement on facebook. now they are adding search. you have very little engagement on google. ask is trying to be a place where you can get a question answered and stay there and get the whole picture. >> who should i believe, my friends or your experts? >> yes. it depends on the question. it depends -- look, you might ask your friend what's a good restaurant to go to. you may not just take their word for it and go. you may then go and see what an

expert thinks about it or a community of people you don't even know. it's all those signals we talk about in the search world that are really important. combine people you know from facebook or linkedin or other places. or real experts. >> what are you doing specifically to incorporate social signals in ask.com? >> we have our own community of users. it's big and vibrant and mobile where people are bringing this with them. we have over 3 million downloads from our mobile app. we are taking questions people ask on our service and sending it to people who are in our community that provide their own answers and using their connections to things they talked about and who they know at signals, also where they are located geographically, how fresh the information is. all these things feed into the answers we are using. also we found and bought ask.com was there was a big gap in expert knowledge. there was more of an opportunity

to find out things from general folks than there is from someone who really knows. >> how do you get that message out to the consumer? if the consumer knows, if i go on google, i will probably find the link to the answer i want. but doesn't realize that on your service you can offer more. how do you get that message out? >> interestingly enough, they do realize it, but they start on google and end on ask, start on google and end on about. one of the wonderful things that happened in our business and has been a source of our growth is we stopped saying google stay away from our page and said google, we have a lot of answers here. people go to google. the search wars are over. web search wars. people are going to go to google first. the question is where are they going next to get the answer they started on google. they are getting those answers from ask.com. >> one of the things from ask.com that distinguishes it is the ability to interpret and

parse natural language. does that put you in potential competition with siri, the apple service? >> it's possible. we haven't seen the effect of that yet. i think siri is supposed to be, the promise is it understands what you're asking and goes out and finds the answer. if we are doing our job right, we find that answer for you. siri will be the interface like google might be a keyword interface. the other side ask provides the answer. >> couldn't you work with apple to basically cut google out of the equation? >> yeah. i don't think google is in the equation with apple. it's less and less google in ate kwags with apple. we've done very well on the apple platform. there are lots of opportunity. we've talked already on the show about what humans can do, whether it's being a taskrabbit or being replaced by a machine. one of the things humans do better than anything else is answer questions, understand

what they are asking and answer it. where our technology comes into play, texting people with answers, whether they are experts or just people in the community to people with questions. >> that is an interesting point. one that was completely accidental is we talked about robots, we talked about people. you are using technology, artificial intelligence, to connect people with people. >> that's right. we are bridging that. we are creating a marketplace with answers. it's a marketplace that answers where the best answers, and it's our job to figure out where that is, based on signals like volume. those answers might be found on a content page on the web. might beound in about.com expert, on facebook or in a community of users. >> there is a point where people don't realize how well this is working. there is a "usa today" article recently that said you're taking ask.com back from the brink. which i guess is a compliment, but you're not on the brink. that's the surprising thing. ask.com.

you get a viable business. >> we've been around 16 years now. >> the old ask jeeves. >> yes. over 100 million, almost 200 million people worldwide. and growing crazy great, and people don't realize we are a small market share in the traditional search world, but the traditional search world isn't that relevant to the way we think about the value we add. if you measure in other aspects, we are huge. we are the number seven destination on the web in the u.s. people don't think of us that way, but they come to us like that. >> i'm interested in mobile, actually. i think there's certainly a different way people are asking questions and searching on mobile. google and others are trying to figure out, what are you guys doing? >> the quick answer people are using mobile differently. it is exploding.

we are finding that they do want to interact with voice, but still value, people who can understand their question and give them a quick answer. >> i value a quick answer, as well. doug, thank you for being with us. appreciate it.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests. if you joined us late, every interview is available on our website pressheretv.com. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

next winter, from the

world's largest country, the greatest athletes on snow and ice, the 2014 olympic winter games coming to the networks of nbc universal. sunday afternoon in buffalo. opening day for the sabres, and all 23 on the roster greeted early arriving fans. it's the 43rd year of the sabres. nearly all the tickets are gone for the season, and it hasn't even begun. captain jason pominville is in his 11th season since being drafted by the team. the slate's clean for his sabres to make a good first impression. claude giroux, the new philadelphia player's captain, scored his team's only goal yesterday that. wasn't enough, so more to shoot for in buffalo as it's the nhl on nbc, flyers and sabres up after this update. >> thanks, doc. 99 days to fit in 48 games. that's the sprint story of this enis