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Personal computing decentralized the decisions from institutions to individuals at the firm. This is
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revolutionary. In the past, if you want to make some kind of analysis, you sign up with a
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mainframe computer and hopefully get a slot. With personal compute, all that is gone. You simply pull the data, you
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model it yourself, and it's done. There's no permission. There's no allocation of resources assigned by some
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manager. You just do it yourself. That's the power of personal compute in the sense that decentralized computing power
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into the individuals. Three forces occurred that made personal computing possible. First, we just have
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incredible advances in chips, in microprocessors, semiconductor industry in the 70s. Second, our society, our
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economy has becoming growingly to be a knowledgebased economy. And third, more importantly all in the 70s and 80s, our
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culture have shifted into experimentation. So, lots of people are tinkering with this computer on the
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edges to see where we can push this machine, this new forms of technology. When you can decentralize power into
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individuals, they can make their own decisions. It changes how firms is organized. It flattens organizational
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hierarchy. So in my research, we found that any recent technology adoption productivity increased. We actually
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hired more people. But the hiring is uneven. It tend to eliminate many of the middle management layer. Computing is
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decentralized and productivity has improved but it fundamentally reorganized how information is being
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processed in the firms. So, INIA computing is a great example because at first it was a government
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contract is specifically for government with military use and we never envisioned that the specific purpose of
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INIA could be democratized the extent we have today like 20 years 30 years later
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look at what we've been using with personal compute and it's example of a specific technology going to a general
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purpose technology We kind of take it for granted these days that we can just pull information
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from the cloud or anywhere and make analysis in real time. We can collaborate with people globally in real
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time and thinking about what it means for the future extending to the age of AI. This is a forbrer from personalized
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compute to personalized intelligent augmentation. So now we're not just going to be able to process data to make
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decision based on these data. Now we can analyze, model and reason with these technologies. So everyone's cognitive
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capabilities will be augmented to some extent.