Erik Brynjolfsson - The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
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A New York Times Bestseller
A revolution is under way.
In recent years, Googles autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBMs Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologieswith hardware, software, and networks at their corewill in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human.
In The Second Machine Age MITs Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfeetwo thinkers at the forefront of their fieldreveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.
Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kindsfrom lawyers to truck driverswill be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.
Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape.
A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age will alter how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.
ReviewFascinating. (Thomas L. Friedman - New York Times)
A terrific book. Brynjolfsson and McAfee combine their knowledge of rapidly evolving digital technologies and relevant economics to give us a colorful and accessible picture of dynamic forces that are shaping our lives, our work, and our economies. For those who want to learn to Race with the Machines, their book is a great place to start. (Michael Spence, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences)
Erik and Andy have lived on the cutting edge, and now, with this book, they are taking us there with them. A brilliant look at the future that technology is bringing to our economic and social lives. Read The Second Machine Age if you want to prepare yourself and your children for the world of work ahead. (Zo Baird, president, Markle Foundation)
How we build, use, and live with our digital creations will define our success as a civilization in the twenty-first century. Will our new technologies lift us all up or leave more and more of us behind? The Second Machine Age is the essential guide to how and why that success will, or will not, be achieved. (Garry Kasparov, thirteenth World Chess Champion)
The Second Machine Age offers important insights into how digital technologies are transforming our economy, a process that has only just begun. Erik and Andrews thesis: As massive technological innovation radically reshapes our world, we need to develop new business models, new technologies, and new policies that amplify our human capabilities, so every person can stay economically viable in an age of increasing automation. I couldnt agree more. (Reid Hoffman, cofounder/chairman of LinkedIn and coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Start-up of You)
Although a few others have tried, The Second Machine Age truly helped me see the world of tomorrow through exponential rather than arithmetic lenses. Macro and microscopic frontiers now seem plausible, meaning that learners and teachers alike are in a perpetual mode of catching up with what is possible. It frames a future that is genuinely exciting! (Clayton M. Christensen, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovators Dilemma)
Brynjolfsson and McAfee are right: we are on the cusp of a dramatically different world brought on by technology. The Second Machine Age is the book for anyone who wants to thrive in it. Ill encourage all of our entrepreneurs to read it, and hope their competitors dont. (Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz)
What globalization was to the economic debates of the late 20th century, technological change is to the early 21st century. Long after the financial crisis and great recession have receded, the issues raised in this important book will be central to our lives and our politics. (Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University)
Technology is overturning the worlds economies, and The Second Machine Age is the best explanation of this revolution yet written. (Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired and author of What Technology Wants)
Brynjolfsson and McAfee take us on a whirlwind tour of innovators and innovations around the world. But this isnt just casual sightseeing. Along the way, they describe how these technological wonders came to be, why they are important, and where they are headed. (Hal Varian, chief economist at Google)
In this optimistic book Brynjolfsson and McAfee clearly explain the bounty that awaits us from intelligent machines. But they argue that creating the bounty depends on finding ways to race with the machine rather than racing against the machine. That means people like me need to build machines that are easy to master and use. Ultimately, those who embrace the new technologies will be the ones who benefit most. (Rodney Brooks, chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics, Inc)
New technologies may bring about our economic salvation or they may threaten our very livelihoodsor they may do both. Brynjolfsson and McAfee have written an important book on the technology-driven opportunities and challenges we all face in the next decade. Anyone who wants to understand how amazing new technologies are transforming our economy should start here. (Austan Goolsbee, professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers)
After reading this book, your world view will be flipped: youll see that collective intelligence will come not only from networked brains but also from massively connected and intelligent machines. In the near future, the best job to have will be the one you would do for free. (Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the MIT Media Lab, founder of One Laptop per Child, and author of Being Digital)
The Second Machine Age helps us all better understand the new age we are entering, an age in which by working with the machine we can unleash the full power of human ingenuity. This provocative book is both grounded and visionary, with highly approachable economic analyses that add depth to their vision. A must-read. (John Seely Brown, coauthor of The Power of Pull and A New Culture of Learning)
Brynjolfsson and McAfee do an amazing job of explaining the progression of technology, giving us a glimpse of the future, and explaining the economics of these advances. And they provide sound policy prescriptions. Their book could also have been titled Exponential Economics 101it is a must-read. (Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke Universitys Pratt School of Engineering and author of The Immigrant Exodus)
Fascinating. (Andrew Leonard - Salon)
Maddeningly reasonable and readable. (Thomas Claburn - InformationWeek)
Excellent. (Clive Cook - Bloomberg)
Optimistic and intriguing. (Steven Pearlstein - The Washington Post)
About the AuthorErik Brynjolfsson is the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and one of the most cited scholars in information systems and economics.
Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business and the author of Enterprise 2.0.
Subject : tech
Author : Brynjolfsson, Erik & McAfee, Andrew
ISBN : 9780393241259
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ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON ANDREW MCAFEE
To Martha Pavlakis, the love of my life.
To my parents, David McAfee and Nancy Haller, who prepared me for the second machine age by giving me every advantage a person could have.
Chapter 15 TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE
(Which Is Very Different from Technology Is the Future)
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of Gods gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Freeman Dyson
WHAT HAVE BEEN THE most important developments in human history?
As anyone investigating this question soon learns, its difficult to answer. For one thing, when does human history even begin? Anatomically and behaviorally modern Homo sapiens , equipped with language, fanned out from their African homeland some sixty thousand years ago.1 By 25,000 BCE2 they had wiped out the Neanderthals and other hominids, and thereafter faced no competition from other big-brained, upright-walking species.
We might consider 25,000 BCE a reasonable time to start tracking the big stories of humankind, were it not for the development-retarding ice age earth was experiencing at the time.3 In his book Why the West RulesFor Now , anthropologist Ian Morris starts tracking human societal progress in 14,000 BCE, when the world clearly started getting warmer.
Another reason its a hard question to answer is that its not clear what criteria we should use: what constitutes a truly important development? Most of us share a sense that it would be an event or advance that significantly changes the course of thingsone that bends the curve of human history. Many have argued that the domestication of animals did just this, and is one of our earliest important achievements.
The dog might well have been domesticated before 14,000 BCE, but the horse was not; eight thousand more years would pass before we started breeding them and keeping them in corrals. The ox, too, had been tamed by that time (ca. 6,000 BCE) and hitched to a plow. Domestication of work animals hastened the transition from foraging to farming, an important development already underway by 8,000 BCE.4
Agriculture ensures plentiful and reliable food sources, which in turn enable larger human settlements and, eventually, cities. Cities in turn make tempting targets for plunder and conquest. A list of important human developments should therefore include great wars and the empires they yielded. The Mongol, Roman, Arab, and Ottoman empiresto name just fourwere transformative; they affected kingdoms, commerce, and customs over immense areas.
Of course, some important developments have nothing to do with animals, plants, or fighting men; some are simply ideas. Philosopher Karl Jaspers notes that Buddha (563483 BCE), Confucius (551479 BCE), and Socrates (469399 BCE) all lived quite close to one another in time (but not in place). In his analysis these men are the central thinkers of an Axial Age spanning 800200 BCE. Jaspers calls this age a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness and holds that its philosophers brought transformative schools of thought to three major civilizations: Indian, Chinese, and European.5
The Buddha also founded one of the worlds major religions, and common sense demands that any list of major human developments include the establishment of other major faiths like Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each has influenced the lives and ideals of hundreds of millions of people.6
Many of these religions ideas and revelations were spread by the written word, itself a fundamental innovation in human history. Debate rages about precisely when, where, and how writing was invented, but a safe estimate puts it in Mesopotamia around 3,200 BCE. Written symbols to facilitate counting also existed then, but they did not include the concept of zero, as basic as that seems to us now. The modern numbering system, which we call Arabic, arrived around 830 CE.7
The list of important developments goes on and on. The Athenians began to practice democracy around 500 BCE. The Black Death reduced Europes population by at least 30 percent during the latter half of the 1300s. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, beginning interactions between the New World and the Old that would transform both.
The History of Humanity in One Graph
How can we ever get clarity about which of these developments is the most important? All of the candidates listed above have passionate advocatespeople who argue forcefully and persuasively for one developments sovereignty over all the others. And in Why the West RulesFor Now Morris confronts a more fundamental debate: whether any attempt to rank or compare human events and developments is meaningful or legitimate. Many anthropologists and other social scientists say it is not. Morris disagrees, and his book boldly attempts to quantify human development. As he writes, reducing the ocean of facts to simple numerical scores has drawbacks but it also has the one great merit of forcing everyone to confront the same evidencewith surprising results.8 In other words, if we want to know which developments bent the curve of human history, it makes sense to try to draw that curve.
Morris has done thoughtful and careful work to quantify what he terms social development (a groups ability to master its physical and intellectual environment to get things done) over time. As Morris suggests, the results are surprising. In fact, theyre astonishing. They show that none of the developments discussed so far has mattered very much, at least in comparison to something elsesomething that bent the curve of human history like nothing before or since. Heres the graph, with total worldwide human population graphed over time along with social development; as you can see, the two lines are nearly identical:
FIGURE 1.1 Numerically Speaking, Most of Human History Is Boring.
For many thousands of years, humanity was a very gradual upward trajectory. Progress was achingly slow, almost invisible. Animals and farms, wars and empires, philosophies and religions all failed to exert much influence. But just over two hundred years ago, something sudden and profound arrived and bent the curve of human historyof population and social developmentalmost ninety degrees.
Engines of Progress
By now youve probably guessed what it was. This is a book about the impact of technology, after all, so its a safe bet that were opening it this way in order to demonstrate how important technology has been. And the sudden change in the graph in the late eighteenth century corresponds to a development weve heard a lot about: the Industrial Revolution, which was the sum of several nearly simultaneous developments in mechanical engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, and other disciplines. So youve most likely figured out that these technological developments underlie the sudden, sharp, and sustained jump in human progress.
If so, your guess is exactly right. And we can be even more precise about which technology was most important. It was the steam engine or, to be more precise, one developed and improved by James Watt and his colleagues in the second half of the eighteenth century.
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