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

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. Professions of all kinds - from lawyers to truck drivers - will be forever upended. 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. 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 inge

A New Age of Smart Machines Bill Jarvis In "The Second Machine Age," Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that as technology advances exponentially and combinatorially it is taking us into an entirely new era. In the future we can expect more of everything, including both tangible goods and digital products and services, at lower and lower prices. They call this "Bounty." There is a dark side as well, however. Machines and computers are increasingly substituting for routine human labor, and technology is a major driver of increased inequality. The authors call this "Spread".In addition. What the steam engine and its like did for muscle power For about 8,000 years, humanity developed very gradually. The number of people on the planet was largely unchanged at less than half a billion. The tools people used to survive changed little. Life was, to quote Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”Towards the last quarter of the 17th century, there was profound change. The population of the world grew exponentially, making the graph of demographics look suddenly right angled, as it grew from a half to seven billion. The cause of this change began with th. A cogent discussion of where we are and where we're headed Steven Grimm This covers a lot of the same ground as books such as "The Lights in the Tunnel" but in a more pop-academic style: the prose is all very accessible but the information is extensively footnoted and attributed, and there are numerous references to the work of other academics, mostly but not exclusively economists. For anyone who wonders why we're seeing record-high income inequality and jobless recoveries from recessions, this book will clear up a lot of mysteries.As someone in the technology field myself, I found little to disagree with in