The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

W. W. Norton & Company, Jan 20, 2014 - Business & Economics - 306 pages

A New York Times Bestseller

A revolution is under way.

In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies—with hardware, software, and networks at their core—will 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 MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—two thinkers at the forefront of their field—reveal 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 kinds—from lawyers to truck drivers—will 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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - DLMorrese - LibraryThing

How has technology affected human culture and economics? How will the rapid progress of digital technology do so in the future? These are the questions this book attempts to answer, albeit not in any ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - nmarun - LibraryThing

The purpose of the book is to talk about how machines are and will change our lifestyle in the coming years. With Internet of Things being on the rise, I do see things change very drastically (in a ...

Contents

• Chapter: 1
• STARS AND SUPERSTARS: 147
• IMPLICATIONS OF THE BOUNTY AND THE SPREAD: 163
• RECOMMENDATIONS FOR INDIVIDUALS: 187
• POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS: 205
• LONGTERM RECOMMENDATIONS: 229
• TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE Which Is Very Different from Technology Is the Future: 249
• Acknowledgments: 259
• Notes: 263
• Illustration Sources: 293
• Index: 295

About the author

Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School. He is the author of several best-selling books with co-author Andrew McAfee, and one of the world's most cited scholars in information systems and economics.

Andrew McAfee is the co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of the best-selling The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future. He and co-author Erik Brynjolfsson are the only people named to both the Thinkers 50 list of the world's top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
• Authors: Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014
• ISBN: 0393239357, 9780393239355
• Length: 306 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Development / Business Development; Social Science / Future Studies; Technology & Engineering / Social Aspects