These phenomena are pushing the trend toward more obscure products. And that will feed back to what products get created in the first place.

The big payoff for the future will be in helping knowledge workers to be more inventive and creative, and to get those innovations into the marketplace. That's where a wealthy nation like the United States is ultimately going to have to seek its competitive advantage.

The kind of job where you have to hustle and hustle and where you're not sure whether you will have enough clients next month, where you have less job security, is becoming much more common.

Some people think it's a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits. There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It's possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don't share in that gain.

Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment.

There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks, and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them. They could be software robots; they could be physical robots.