Reinvent Podcast

Lee Rainie, Director of Internet, Science and Technology Research at Pew Research Center, believes we are in the middle of the fourth major technology-based revolution of the 21st century. The first was Internet broadband, Rainie says, which has skyrocketed from zero percent of Americans using it to 73 percent. The second was the explosion of mobile phones—today 77 percent of Americans have smartphones and 51 percent have tablets. The third was social media, which 69 percent of Americans use. The fourth revolution, which we are currently in the middle of, is the rise of the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. When Pew first began tracking Internet usage, in March of 2000, fewer than half of American adults were on the Internet. “We’ve never seen a suite of consumer electronic technologies be adopted this fast with this much impact,” Rainie says. Rainie views the story of the sharing, or platform, economy as paralleling the growth of the Internet. From the earliest days of the Internet, people use