Where to find the best quotes from this book?
>> On the book Twitter page:
>> On the book official website:
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Thesis
Why recent history marks only the first stages of the computer revolution?
How digital technologies change society and how to respond to these changes?
In The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee provide a great explanation of the new age we are quickly heading into and demonstrate why we should be optimistic about it. They also discuss the challenges that technological changes bring.
Contrary to R. Gordon, E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee think that technology is about to take off.
According to them, we should be optimistic about the future because technological progress, « the only free lunch », is accelerating quickly.
However, The Second Machine Age reminds that we should also be mindful of our values and our choices, as technological progress may leave a lot of people and organizations behind.
Other interesting resources
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From the same authors
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Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future, 2017
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Leading Digital – Turning Technology into Business Transformation, 2014
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Race against the Machine, 2011
Main recommendations
As Voltaire said: « Work saves a man from the three great evils: boredom, vice, and need ».
It is thus necessary to keep people working.
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> Policy recommendations
The authors recommend to increase efforts on:
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Education
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Startups: boost entrepreneurship will lead to more innovation and productivity
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Science
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Matching employees and employers
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Adapting taxation accordingly: Rather than putting higher tax on salaries, they suggest to tax people on their detrimental actions (e.g: pollution).
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> Recommendations for individuals
Learning to race against the Machine
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Even though computers are much faster in computing certain tasks, they have not reached the complexity and speed of human brains yet. One thing that computers can’t do is being creative. To remain valuable knowledge workers in the future, people should improve their skills on ideation and complex communication.
> Computing Bounty vs Spread
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Bounty = The use of IT has increased the overall living standards. Positive correlations can be identified between business productivity and the use of IT.
Spread =In the new era, innovation and technology are very spread: they are available for a wide range of people. The example of smartphones shows that technology is available for everyone, from low-income to high-level income groups. Moreover, new software rarely need more than a few programmers and designers, and their results can be replicated easily.
Both bounty and spread will grow in the future. Everyone will benefit from it, but the benefits are not equal. Technology increases productivity and productivity increases employment. However, adaptions are needed to avoid unemployment (see Recommandations).
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> Moravec’s paradox
Artificial intelligence developers and robotics engineers have discovered that contrary to popular belief, high-level reasoning require very little computational power, whereas sensory motor skills require a lot of computational power. This means that machines are not going to take jobs like cooks, gardeners, hairdressers in the next coming years.
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> Moore’s law
Computational power doubles every 18 months. « The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. »
Interesting concepts
Erik Brynjolfsson
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An American economist born in 1967
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Co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management
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Known for his research on the influence of information technology on businesses and econmy and society as a whole.
Andrew McAfee
The authors
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An American academic born in 1962
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Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business.
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Graduated from Harvard (1984) and received a PhD in managerial economics from the MIT (1991)
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Research focused on the economic impacts of information technology on productivity and employment
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Where to find adverse opinions?
Strengths and weaknesses of this book
+ This book weaves macro and microeconomics with insights from a wide range of other disciplines into an accessible and convincing story.
- The recommendations provided are perfectly reasonable, but they are a bit too consensual.
Interested enough to read their book ?
>> The first chapter is available
The Second Machine Age,
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Andrew McAfee: What will future jobs look like?
Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs?
More and more people are concerned by the effect that new technologies have on employment. In his two TED talks Andrew McAfee raises the question about whether robots are going to take over our jobs or create new ones and discusses general impact of technology on the economy.
None of the history’s significant landmarks (religions, philosophies, empires, pandemias, inventions) have influenced social development as much as technology did by overcoming our limitations. Consequently, for the last couple of centuries people have been fearing to lose their jobs to new technologies. However, so far no innovation has led to major unemployment.
Is it going to be different now, and if so, why?
In the past few years our machines started demonstrating mental skills and the ability to learn, which they’ve never had before. It means that soon they will be able to do a lot of the work that we are doing right now. In the near future many jobs will be automated, especially those requiring narrow variety of skills like simple manual labor, administrative and service work. However, AI is already beating even the general knowledge workers (e.g. Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings lost to supercomputer Watson), so the range of jobs that will be automated in the future in unpredictable.
“In the world that we are creating very quickly, we’re going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs.”
What's good about it ?
“Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.” - Freeman Dyson
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ABUNDANCE: Due to the technological progress our economic wellbeing keeps rising while the prices keep getting lower.
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NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR CREATION: If the robots do our jobs, we don’t have to do them anymore. With inexpensive technology and less routine work and drudgery we can clear the way for creators, engineers and inventors to bring their ideas to life without any constraints.
What are the possible dangers ?
“Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need” - Voltaire
MORE EMPLOYEES THAN JOBS: Businesses are prospering, but they’re not hiring. Corporate profits are getting higher (all-time high), but total wages are lowering (all-time low). The threat for middle-wage workers (blue and white collars) is the biggest, because their jobs are the first to be automated. The gap between the number of potential employees vs the number of jobs in the country gets bigger every year.
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INEQUALITY: job polarisation leads to social polarisation and inequality as well. It is clearly shown by recent social trends among lower middle-class representatives: as their chances of the employment drastically declined so did the percentage of happy and stable marriages and tendency to vote in the presidential elections, while the percentage of people serving prison time has risen.
What do we do about these challenges ?
We are transitioning into an economy that is very productive, but doesn’t need a lot of workers.
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The most promising solution lies in the education system. If we can educate kids in the way that they are prepared to deal with the digital world and use it for their own good, then we can solve the problem for the future generations.
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Education doesn’t solve the problem of millions adults who are already unemployed. It is possible that some more radical changes in policy, like a guaranteed minimum income.
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We should encourage awareness of the upcoming change. “The work of innovation is becoming more open, more inclusive, more transparent and more merit-based”, and we should reinforce this trend, because it will allow us to start the good course into the challenging and abundant future economy.