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 alters how we
think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.
