And Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

An outstanding and deep analysis of how computer and robotics technology (especially artificial intelligence) is shaping the world we live in but more importantly, are heading toward in the not-so-distant future. Of special note is the explanation of the widening income and wealth gap and how it is driven by advancing technology, a gap that is growing wider and is slowly making its way to center stage in US politics. The book is penetrating in its analysis and enormous in its scope. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the past, present, and future of our global economy. The book will get you thinking about the profound impacts in our evolving global society.

The book merited a major discussion of its key points in the Financial Times (2/4/14) and sparked a recent column by David Brooks. It could come to be viewed as one of the most important books of the decade (and perhaps, beyond).

If you find the book as enlightening as we have, we recommend that you also read The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford (2009) which is another extraordinary book on this subject.

The book is somewhat simplistic and over influenced by the sense that technology is ''great''.
I could have used greater effort to suggest more imaginative solutions. Greater use of taxes designed to deal with negative externalities and rewards for increasing positive ones.

The scholarly analysis references tons of papers, books, etc. The book presents a huge amount of information that shows how very difficult it is going to be to ever reach full employment again in the US because of the advances in technology. The latter part of the book contains suggestions and policy recommendations for remedying high unemployment. This section seems a bit overenthusiastic and optimistic about their own ideas but still worth pondering.

Everyone should read this book and contemplate the effects that are coming with the continuing exponential advances in the digital age. This is an excellent summary of the technology headed our way. The authors are insightful is highlighting the changes that this technology will mean. It will mean unemployment for many who will be replaced by a machine. We should be thinking about how to handle this now.

There are two ways of looking at this. Unemployment disaster is headed our way or we should be able to become even more productive with the new digital tools we will have at our disposal. I think the latter is what we should focus on. But we need to realize that we need to prepare people with new STEM and Job Creating skills and not continue with the overwhelming Liberal Arts education that most are receiving now (I'm not saying eliminate Liberal Arts but I am saying de-emphasize it).

The book presents the case that the 2nd Machine Age will continue to create tremendous innovation for many years to come. It will lead to intelligent bots that can replace intelligent but repetitive human labor and lead to powerful human-machine symbiosis. They argue that this will yield great benefit to the World's population. Five stars so far. But their arguments about how the world's economies will create meaningful work for unskilled labor and how massive permanent unemployment can be avoided are unconvincing.

Among the many signs of our chaos-bound times, one peculiar phenomenon is worth dwelling on for a minute. Thoughtful people publish books about how and why digital science and technology portend a brilliant future; then go on to enumerate the problems the new age entails without recognizing that our economic organization cannot handle them.

"The Second Machine Age" is the apotheosis of a scholarly "pas de deux" to this theme. The starry-eyed logorrhea begins by quoting an extraordinary royal "wirrkopf:" “Technology is a gift of God,” the famed savant said. (This dreadful silliness ranks with his eloquent disparagement of environmental concerns.) Side by side with a helpful enumeration of the blessings that “The Second Machine Age” will bring to the world, Brynjolfsson and McAffe more or less put their digits on the main threat: Digital technology is suspected of being a serial job killer. What to do with the potential masses of incomeless people and the (consequently) unsold bounty of commodities those ever-more-intelligent forerunners of androids drone-deliver to department stores and supermarkets -- short, of course, of producing also some consumer robots? Why, read introductory economics (pp. 206-208); absorb the defunct wisdom of non-ecological economic thought that does not recognize a scale limit to the eternal acceleration of global output; and everything will be alright.

The authors’ cognitive dissonance is underscored by their recognition of the worsening income distribution, which may be both a subsidiary consequence and an emerging disabler of digitally-mastered productivity growth. The chatty tome even offers some career counseling on the order of “Plastics” -- the laugh-inducing word of advice uttered in the 1967 movie, “The Graduate.”

“The Second Machine Age” was a roaring success. There is no reason why it should not have been. It contains useful information, it is entertaining; and who would not like to hear serious scholars confirm the cherished belief that technology, like a miraculous interloper, will solve all our problems -- resource, environmental, organizational. This is providentially ordained, isn’t it? (The same thrice holy “Invisible Hand” that created equilibrium in Adam Smith’s village markets just keeps on giving.) The flaws mentioned here glisten only in the fissures of modernity’s intrinsic walls. Good salesmanship can easily divert attention from them.

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The book covers a broad range of topics within the many implications of advancements in AI and ML. Important things to keep in mind as we progress in the 2nd Machine Age; truly one of the most transformative times in human history.

Mr. Brynjolfsson and McAfee did a superb job with exploring the history and possibilities of technology. They ask and answer important societal questions and most importantly, they do not leave the reader hanging. They spend a good deal with sharing possible solutions that, and they admit themselves, are not answers but the start of an important societal discussion.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee follow up their Race against the Machine with this much more thorough book. Going through both numerous stories and examples of rampant digitization, and analysis of what makes the shift to digital so different from other technological shifts, it is both an easy read and a lasting think-piece.

Excellent book. Very eye opening and a book young folks should read to plan their future. Amazing stuff when it is laid out like this. Little slow just by the nature of the topic but very interesting book.

This isn't a five star book. There are probably 20 pages of insight here - good stuff. The rest of it boils down to the typical airport business literature. Very current and buzzworthy, but little you didn't know if you were already paying attention to tech. Even a little. Turns into a grab bag of policy recommendations towards the end. Some are irrelevant, others really beside the point. Overall a disappointment.

This book explains what to me had been inexplicable about the different behavior of the U.S. and global economies since the Clinton era, Now it suddenly makes sense why the top 1% are the only ones to be prospering, and how the top 0.01% are doing so much better even than they. Everything from the accelerating decline of the middle class to our floundering educational systems vis-à-vis other advanced countries and even as compared to U.S. standards decades ago becomes comprehensible. Everyone who needs to understand should read this book. Only then might the fortunes of the bottom 99% improve.

Didn't Steve Jobs say all this already in his "the computer is the bicycle of the mind" antidote:

I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” ~ Steve Jobs

The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee is a very good book about the Tech of the future and has a lot to say about the driverless cars, but nothing on the developing tech of fusion energy, floating semiconductors or beam transporting. The work is very factual and lacks any of the mystical or imaginative interpretations of what tomorrow might bring.
This is a great book that might have been a greater book if the authors had spent a little more time on the effect of humans on the direction of the coming second machine age. I suspect they are too young to remember the Edsel which was a great car with a slightly futuristic look that people refused to buy. It was one of the greatest failures of automobile machine history.
The authors did a great job on the economic projections, but again miss the human equation. Machines are leaving too many people jobless and they will not just sit and watch TV, they will find things to do and whatever those things are, they will affect the economies and tech of the future. Machine can’t live our lives for us but they can make our lives easier and more exciting. Mechanization is changing what prosperity actually means and a few words on this could have made this book epic.
This is a good book, but it could have been a great book with just a little more speculation on what kind of tomorrow the second machine age might bring.

An interesting and thought provoking book. However also a somewhat frustrating one. First off, when voicing concerns regarding diminishing employment opportunities in the digital age the authors don't make any mention of the growth in government (probably the single largest employer in our day and age) nor the expansion of the non-profit sector or academia. Also when they talk about the value of work, both to society and the individual, it largely discounts non-wage earning employment, i.e. raising children, volunteering, raising vegetables in your back yard, etc. Consequently, I think the book portrays a very incomplete picture of how peoples lives have changed, and will continue to change, going forward. That's not to say I'm necessarily thrilled with big government or many of the ongoing efforts to subsidize non-wage earning work, i.e., arts grants, paying people to look after ill family members, student loans, and so on. But they're part of the modern world and will almost certainly become an increasing factor in the distribution of resources.

Also, one of the main themes of the book is the balance between the "bounty" of the digital age on one hand, and the "spread" in incomes on the other. However, the bounty, i.e. quieter, more reliable cars, big screen TVs, being able to skype with your grandkids, etc. isn't really quantifiable. So to compare it to income seems fundamentally unfair. For instance, if you were to compare someone with an income of 10,000,000 dollars and someone with an income of 100,000 dollars, no reasonable person would claim that the higher earning of the two was a hundred times happier or had a one hundred times better quality of life. So focusing on income disparity as the dark side of the digital age really makes the socio-economic differences of the modern world seem much worse than they actually are.

Lastly, the authors (perhaps predictably, being academics) promote education as improving an individuals employability. However elsewhere in the book they mention how most software engineers aren't very well paid. They also mention research indicating that college for most "students" is more about partying than getting an education. So, to me, they're faith in higher education seems misplaced.

A great book on comparing the progress from the first industrial revolution. The book explains very well the impact the second revolution has on many aspects of life that most individuals for granted. This is a great book to understand what is going to happen as we move forward in life.

A good review of what's happened in this country since the 60s. Not much new to anybody who's up on modern technology. There is a plethora of references for those who may want to research the subject further.

The Second Machine Age is a thoughtful analysis of what's different about the technological change that's going on now. They have front row seats to the change, and present the information is a balanced, thought-provoking way. I've seen some other reviews knock them for not providing enough on the "solution" front. I don't think that's fair -- this is a very complex problem and if they succeed (and I think they do) in framing the problem in a way that is constructive, that is a big step in itself.

This book clearly conveys complex research in way that helps the reader to understand the world around us, and provides a platform for thinking about, and talking about, what we can or should do in response to the forces shaping society.

Bought the paperback and its very hard to read. Print is so light that it strains the eyes. Content is stale. Reads like a panel discussion at a tech conference with a few historical and future prediction notes. Most of this stuff is well known to anyone who has been developing products in the digital age. If you are new to tech may be its worth a read, otherwise save your money.

A wide scope of literature, both historical and recent, is used to describe the ideas related to the progression of technology. The redirection of energy to replicating brain powder tether than muscle power means that physical limits no longer apply. However, conceptual developments are progressing in ways that do change people's real lives, especially the nature of work rewarded in a society. This book is a sobering presentation of choices to be made. The solutions, while simple in some instances to state, such as better education and encouragement of innovation, are not so easily realized.

This book discusses an important matter, how our society and our economy will be affected by the changes in technology that are already beginning to be quite visible in our daily lives.
A worth-while read.

This is better than their other book, as it focuses more on the technological development than on purely a policy perspective, so that you get a glimpse into some of the exciting possibilities for the future.

This is an amazing read that looks at the products of technology and how they're going to affect our future as a species.
This is an excellent book for any person who is in a technologically driven field (pretty much everyone). So much amazing insight.

One big question remains open - how long does it take for the legacy systems processes and leadership to be sunset...the example of antediluvian yet persisting ERP instances shows that the move can take longer than expected.

superficially interesting, but nothing we haven't heard from Kurzweil and other futurists. If you haven't read a book on the digital age or the future of technology, then this is a good place to start.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee continue to do a magnificent job in describing the potential of our new age. Like Race Against the Machines this book is both deep in subject matter and easy to understand. I recommend reading The Second Machine Age along with Tyler Cowen's Average is Over to get a full view of the challenges faced by society in the coming years.

A stimulating and a fun read. The examples provided to support the authors premises are thought provoking. In the area of suggestions the authors fall short. Few bold ideas are offered. In fact I sensed a conflict, the data clearly supports one direction yet the authors long held beliefs were in conflict with their own findings. That was a disappointment. An opportunity lost.

This is sort of an airport book. For a short trip.
I think it is OK, if you like "Oh my gosh, how fantastic!" type of books. Important issues are treated rather superficially, such as the growing income inequality in rich societies and the phenomenon of overpaid "superstars", but at least get a mention. Unfortunately, the authors don't really say anything original about these issues.
For a book on the future of technology, it seems quite strange that there is no mention whatsoever of the fact that we and our technologies exist within a analog natural environment, which will change irreversibly thanks to the "first machine age" thirst for energy.
The impact of climate change on the human societies that produce these wondrous digital technologies is not even referenced (further reading...). To what extent can our digital technologies protect us from our analog technologies? OK, this discussion will lead us into further speculative terrain, but not less so than the rest of the book. Is this book merely the sad result of the pressure to publish in modern academia with the consequent loss of depth in intelectual enquiries? Or does it reflect a more serious loss of working neurons in the great American centers of learning? Hard to tell. And, yes, I do have a computer, a tablet, a celular phone, and a high speed internet connection. I am not a Luddite. Maybe just a little bit too demanding on MIT professors.

One big question remains open - how long does it take for the legacy systems processes and leadership to be sunset...the example of antediluvian yet persisting ERP instances shows that the move can take longer than expected.

p. 6 ...[the] most important technological development [underlying] the sudden, sharp, and sustained jump in human progress ... was the steam engine ...

Comment: how might an analyst falsify this claim? If it's not falsifiable, it's fluff.

p. 7 the second machine age: computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power ... what the steam engine ... did for muscle power.

p. 72 [Krugman:] "A country's ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker."

Comment: standard Econ 101 blind economic growth worship. What if already realized past economic (and population) growth threatens to make Earth habitable for only the least evolved lifeforms (e.g., politicians and televangelists)?

p. 93 It is a remarkable and unmistakeable fact that, with the exception of climate change, virtually all environmental, social, and individual indicators of health have improved over time, even as human population has increased. This improvement is not a lucky coincidence; it is cause and effect. Things have gotten better because there are more people, who in total have more good ideas that improve our overall lot.

Comment: ditto

p. 106 ... the fundamentals are in place for bounty that vastly exceeds anything we've ever seen before.

Comment: do the authors live on the same planet as I do? Where are the raw materials for this bounty going to come from?

p. 133 ...the main driver [of income and asset inequality] is exponential, digital, and combinatorial change in the technology that undergirds our economic system.

Comment: economic conservatives just love this. Isn't it delightful that changes in tax policy and executive compensation norms over the last 30 years are only minor drivers of income and asset inequality?

p. 207 For now the best way to tackle our labor force challenges is to grow the economy.

Comment: more economic growth worship - hooray! Damn the torpedoes - full speed ahead!

p. 235 It seems that all around the world, people want to escape the evils of boredom, vice, and need and instead find mastery, autonomy, and purpose by working.

Comment: too bad the authors forgot to ask workers at Walmart how much mastery, autonomy, and purpose they obtain through their work.

p. 257 But in the long run, the real questions will go beyond economic growth. As more and more work is done by machines, people can spend more time on other activities. Not just leisure and amusments, but also the deeper satisfactions that come from invention and exploration, from creativity and building, and from love, friendship, and community.

Comment: what happened to the blessings of work? The authors do not seem to have completed their thinking on this topic.

p. 257 Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.

Comment: the authors do not seem to understand the risk posed by releasing a superhuman intelligence into the environment. What should we do if such an intelligence decides that Earth would be much better off with only 1% of its current human population, and implements a humane human population reduction program? We will have lost control of our destiny, possibly permanently.

Not well written or argued. The author seems to say we are in the midst of a third industrial revolution but he wants call it the second. (?) The rest is mostly rehash of earlier and better books on the rapid changes in the modern economy.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee describe the arc of technological progress from industrial to cyber with corresponding economic impacts. Their projections of future developments are detailed and convincing. Their discussion of societal externalities could be more fully developed. Their policy advice appears appears deliberately crafted more to spark discussion than prescribe specific laws and regulations.

Overall, The Second Machine Age provides a Nobel worthy contribution to the intersection of academic economics and real world public policy formulation.

This is a great book if you want to understand recent thinking on bathe impact of technological change on economic growth and labour markets peppered with entrepreneurial examples to delight a managerial audience.

This is the authors’ second book on the subject. Their first book “Race Against the Machine” was published in 2011. This was a very short book on the subject, more like a long essay, that the author self-published. It’s content and success attracted the attention of an established agent who encouraged the authors to continue their research and turn their short book into an expanded conventional length nonfiction book. As a result, “The Second Machine” was published in 2014.

The authors are at the forefront of contemporary concerns regarding technological unemployment. The latter entails that as software becomes increasingly intelligent, it is replacing an ever increasing share of ever more sophisticated cognitive functions that were deemed un-automatable. The first machine (mechanization) replaced our muscle power and the horse. The concern is that the second machine (software) may replace our brains. If computers can beat us routinely at chess, Go, Jeopardy, X-ray diagnostics, and much of everything else where can humans add incremental cognitive value? How can an economy sustain itself with massive technological unemployment?

Even though the technological unemployment concern is one of the main themes of this book, the authors are unexpectedly upbeat on numerous counts and can be considered as genuine technology advocates. The first half of the book goes over the history of technological progress and how humankind so richly benefitted from it. Technological progress has been associated with rising living standards, longer life expectancies, increasingly interesting employment opportunities and an abundance of extraordinary free goods (Internet search, Mobile apps, Wikipedia, Open source software, etc.).

Any time series graph of worldwide economic growth, GDP per capita, population growth will typically show the exact same pattern. The curve will look nearly flat for a millennium and abruptly rise upward at an inflection point close to 1800. The authors indicate that this first inflection point in history was caused by the advent of James Watt steam engine introduced in 1775 at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It led to innovative and technological improvements including mass production, railways, and mass transportation. The authors call this first inflection point associated with the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath of progress the First Machine Age.

The authors believe we are now at the second inflection point in history (The Second Machine Age) due to three driving forces:
1) exponential improvements in computing;
2) extraordinarily large amounts of digitized information; and
3) recombinant innovation (creating new concepts by combining old ones).

These three forces have created two of the most important one-time events in our history:
1) the emergence of useful artificial intelligence; and
2) the connection of most of the people on the planet via a common digital network.

The authors consider those two events as more important than anything since the Industrial Revolution. They argue that we haven’t seen anything yet. There comes a point in development where you fairly abruptly move to a totally different level based on what appeared like rather slow-paced preceding steps of incremental progress. The authors call it the “second half of the chess board.” Others may call it “emergence.” The authors refer to all the positive contribution of technology (past, present, and future) as the “bounty.”

On a less positive note, the authors are concerned not only about technological unemployment but also income inequality. They observed throughout the Great Recession recovery a decoupling between average GDP per capita and median wages. They refer to this concern as the “spread.”

How can GDP per capita be decoupled from median wages? The answer is simple. It is the difference between the Median and the Average. The Average is skewed upward by very large figures. Meanwhile, the Median is not. Thus, technological progress has contributed to a rapid rise in income for the technologically savvy, entrepreneurs in high-tech fields, stars able to resell their talent digitally worldwide. Thus, a technology-benefitting elite has seen its income and wealth grow very rapidly. Their income/revenue growth contributes to GDP growth and it distorts upward average GDP per capita. Meanwhile, the majority that did not reap the benefits from technology has experienced stagnant wages. This decoupling effect goes further back than the Great Recession. It can be observed since the mid 1970s (near the onset of mass computerization).

The authors further explain the inequality in income distribution as it is increasingly following a Power Law distribution (the top capturing a rising portion of income) instead of a Normal distribution (the Middle Class capturing the majority of income). The differentiation between Power Law and Normal distribution is just a more complex explanation of inequality than the differentiation between the Average and the Median.

So, going back to the race between brains and technology, is there any hope for humans?

The authors indicate the issue on an individual level is very interesting.

They take the example of chess. IBM Deep Blue handily beat Kasparov in chess in 1997. Nowadays, even mid-tier software computer programs on cheap laptop computers can beat the best human chess player. So, what can human beings contribute to this most demanding cognitive challenge (playing chess)? Surprisingly, a whole lot!

With the advent of freestyle chess, humans have regained a leading role in this discipline. Freestyle chess entails a tournament between completely different set of team players. A team can consist of a supercomputer (successor of IBM Deep Blue), or a supercomputer plus a human, or various combination of computers and human players cooperating on the same team. And, the outcome of such tournaments is counterintuitive. The winners are not the teams made up of grandmaster chess players and supercomputers. They are instead teams made of amateur chess players and mathematicians with expertise at analyzing freestyle chess games and guiding several laptop computers with Machine Learning and other algorithms.

In freestyle chess, the grandmasters are at a marked disadvantage. This is because they are overconfident in their expertise just like any expert typically is (as captured within Phillip Tetlock’s work on the subject) and they typically do not trust the machines and have little ability in using them.

Supercomputers on a stand-alone basis have little chance in such tournaments. They can’t match the creativity of human-computer teams. In the near future of freestyle chess, we can anticipate that grandmaster chess players and stand-alone supercomputers will quit this league. Humans who understand machines and machines make for the winning combination. And, this may be the case regardless of the field. As with chess, it is anticipated that IBM Watson specializing in healthcare will be much more effective when combined with the judgment of doctors than without (or probably the judgment of specialists able to better interpret IBM Watson diagnostics rather than expert doctors who are overconfident in their expertise).

However, what is true for an elite few freestyle chess quants may have little relevance for the masses. Today’s information technologies do contribute to inequality and technological unemployment because:
1) They favor more skilled and educated workers over lesser skilled and educated ones;
2) They increase the return to capital owners over labor;
3) They increase the advantages of stars over everybody else.

The above trends are especially true if the demand for a product or service is inelastic. In such cases, automation replaces labor. If the demand is elastic, the increase in demand due to increase in efficiency (and lower costs and price) can result in automation complementing labor.

In the last few chapters of the book, the authors make recommendation for how we humans can survive the race against the machine. These recommendations are earmarked at various levels:
1) individuals;
2) national policy; and
3) long-term policies.

They concentrate on what remaining advantages humans have. And, software is apparently still not good at innovating, creating new ideas, asking the important questions. The authors call this human cognitive capability “ideation.”

At the individual level, the authors recommend Montessori School type education to promote ideation. Apparently, many of today’s leading technologists such as founders of Google (Larry Page, Sergey Brin), the store (Jeff Bezos), and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) and a disproportionate share of the creative innovative elite went to Montessori schools. The authors are also big on online education provided from the Khan Academy and all the free online courses provided by universities. The ability to interpret and use data is a foundational skill to support higher-level ideation. This underlies a focus on coding that is becoming an inherent component of contemporary literacy.

It remains to be seen what percent of the population would:
1) benefit from the unstructured Montessori education;
2) have the motivation to complete online university courses; and
3) teach themselves coding.

The recommendations are interesting, but are they applicable to the masses? The authors are aware of their recommendation limits as they state (on pg. 214): “The lesson here is that unless we make real efforts to broaden its impact, the digitization of education won’t automatically reduce the spread.” Additionally, wouldn’t a nationwide mass of coders make themselves nearly as superfluous as a mass of truck drivers in an emerging driverless transportation world?

At the national education level, the authors recommend a much stronger K-12 education system with:
1) more preschool education;
2) longer hours, longer school year;
3) more frequent standardized testing for all ages;
4) and better teachers (relatively better paid and more accountable).

Those elements are at the foundation of the success of East-Asian countries who dominate the primary education worldwide rankings.

Besides education, the authors recommend we improve the environment for start-ups in two ways:

1) by shoring up immigration policies to attract the type of world class human capital (we had attracted in the past) that is likely to create start-ups. Nowadays, immigration laws are far too complex and restrictive discouraging successful immigrants to come to the U.S. They increasingly go to Australia, Canada, and the U.K. that have far more effective immigration policies to attract and retain human capital; and

2) by reducing relevant regulations that negatively affect start-ups. Start-ups are major contributors to job creation, innovation, and technology. Whatever we can do to help them “start” will increase opportunities for all.

They also recommend we support sciences by:
1) Increasing Government funding of primary basic science research;
2) Reforming U.S. intellectual property laws. The authors consider that at times such laws are associated with excessive time duration. And, they stifle innovation instead of promoting it;
3) Run more frequent contest by offering large prizes to the winners who can resolve meaningful challenging problems. This is done by both the public and private sector and is a very effective way of stimulating innovation.

Other national policy recommendations include shoring up our infrastructure (bridges, airports, electricity grids, etc.).

In order to resolve potential massive technological unemployment, the authors address the concept of a Basic or Guaranteed Income for all. And, they end up being strongly against it. They believe the associated idleness would be devastating for individuals and society at large. Instead, they favor a reasonable expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit that is equivalent to what others describe as a Negative Tax. They feel this concept better preserves initiative, motivation to work and remain productive in society.

In summary, this book is very informative, and thought provoking. The authors have done extensive research and are genuine experts in this field. I understand their work is frequently referred to within the specialized literature. Their treaty is very convincing when addressing the positives of technology (bounty) and the counter balancing concern of technological unemployment and inequality (spread). However, even though the authors recommendations to resolve the issues make good sense, one wonders if they will be enough to tackle these formidable challenges.

This was a very enjoyable book for me, as I am very interested in both advancing technologies and economics, and obviously their intersection. The book does a great job putting advancing technology in a historical perspective. It captures the optimism of the new machine age while being thoughtful about its risk and potential impacts to society.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in technology or economics.

superficially interesting, but nothing we haven't heard from Kurzweil and other futurists. If you haven't read a book on the digital age or the future of technology, then this is a good place to start.

So the previous book, "race against the machine" was perfect: condensed, insightful, and with a unique perspective. This follow-up is awful. It is a rehash of a series of topics related to AI and tech in general. I absolutely would not recommend this book.

An insightful book with an optimistic cum cautious take on technology driven future. Authors dive deep into what is happening today with technology - autonomous cars, 3D printers, peer economy, crowdsourcing etc - and assess its benefits as well as potential risks to society and to our way of living.

Deep dives into the nature and consequences of a bell curve, that is quickly turning into a Poreto power curve, with increasing means and declining medians, can seem scary depending on which side of the curve one finds oneself. While the bounty is increasing, the spread is not even, and median incomes have even declined in the US. This difference could also account in part for the current divisive political climate in which we find ourselves.

The book offers good suggestions into what would remain meaningful to human jobs (for now) - ideation, complex communication and large scale pattern matching (connecting the dots). Authors argues that the way to stay competitive in this new age is to study hard, leveraging the available online tools, in areas that benefit from up-skilling. Importance of good schooling, including good teachers, is also emphasized. Authors argue for longer school hours, additional school days, and a no-excuse philosophy that tests the students and implicitly their teachers.

The latter half of the book tries to suggest public policy changes that would be needed to absorb these changes. While some ideas make sense, others seem to need more thinking of unintended consequences. For instance, authors propose implementing an Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system in US, similar to that in Singapore, which attempts to curb road congestion by taxing drivers in correlation with prevailing traffic conditions. While this sounds great in theory, and has worked well for Singapore, it is not a suitable solution for US economy, which lacks proper public transportation in majority, if not all, of its cities, without which such an implementation would only burden the masses without a good economical alternative.

The book's primary premise of increasing digitization, exponential growth and combinatorial solutions is here to stay. By 2010, our world would look very different from anything we can imagine today. Just as the world has revolutionized since early 21st century, when we had just come up with an iPod to today when a smartphone is a mere means to a plethora of ends ranging form security to finance to entertainment to relationships.

The book is not fatalistic by any means nor is it mired in gloom and doom, as many books about the future of human-technology relationship seem to be these days. The book offers a data backed, cogently argued account of what is possible, how it may be shaped, and offers a potential happy middle path for mutually beneficial human-machine coexistence.

I'm not going to review the entire book, since others have done so already, and quite well. I did find it well worth reading and I have recommended it to several others in person already. I would give the description that occupies most of the book four stars but the policy recommendations at the end a more mixed, two-star rating. In particular, there is one key contradiction I would like to point out, which bothered me as I read it, and has only bothered me more since then. This has to do with education and how we prepare the future work force, which is obviously central to the book's import. I was intrigued to learn from the authors that humans will continue to have an advantage over machines in the following areas: "ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and the most complex forms of communication." And as they rightly point out, "these skills are not emphasized in most educational environments today" (p. 194). However, we then learn later on of their great enthusiasm for MOOCs and other forms of automated education. Do they not see the glaring contradiction here? It seems to me they have approached the problem of "education" from the wrong (backwards) end. If one looks not at inputs to education, but rather to "outputs" (i.e. the educated students) then it seems quite evident that the very things that automated education such as MOOCs do best are the exact opposite of the things that humans can still do better than machines for the foreseeable future. To put it another way: almost by definition, the things that can be mostly easily standardized and taught with the aid of machines are the very things that we won't need humans to do any more!

Take writing, for example. Can you produce writing that would receive a high rating from a grading machine? Well then why not just have that writing produced by the machines themselves. For the more complex forms of writing, lauded in the book as not subject to machine-ification, it seems that an actual live human being with some expertise in such writing is going to be key to teaching and evaluating students. Or, take "ideation" (which has to do with generating original ideas and combinations of ideas). How to recognize this? It seems to me that to nearly the exact same extent that we can design a machine to recognize or teach ideation, then the machine itself could do the ideation. If this is not possible, then it is hard to see how a machine could teach it, or recognize it.

My take-away from the book is thus quite different from the authors themselves. I found it to be a clear clarion call to reverse nearly all the current trends in "education reform" such as a heavy reliance on standardized tests and MOOCs. If we are going to end up with students who can do the tasks that human will still be needed to do, then we will need to have them taught by humans, and the key learning goals will be precisely the ones that most resist "education reform" as it is now hyped.

CONTENT
The book's idea is that the the computer/network/digital has now reached a maturity so we will see big changes in the future. They compare with the steam engine (but they should really have compared with electricity if they knew their history). There is a delay until we get big productivity improvement so we can soon expect higher productivity growth due to the Internet. I do not have any quarrels with this basic idea. I agree with the authors that the future is quite bright. Still, I wonder why anyone would agree with the authors mainly by providing a bunch of tech-friendly examples. It is a pretty poor way to forecast the future.

The book goes from being average to bad when it comes to assessing the consequences. The digital future will have many consequences for the world in terms of economy, politics and culture. These authors are not suited to provide that perspective, even though they try. The authors have a lot to say about the US and nothing to say about the world. We get to learn things that American school need to get better and that America needs to welcome talent. I am left wondering if there could me MIT professors without a passport.

If you are familiar with the recent trends, like Apple's Siri, Google's driverless car, then you will not even learn from the examples. I found one example about crowd-sourced innovation very interesting. Whether you find the examples useful or not depends on whether you read about technology. If you do I don't think you will find this book valuable at all.

The material in the book would have been great for a long article in The Atlantic, but it certainly is not sufficient for a book length treatment.

STYLE
The book is very easy to read and contains nothing complicated like diagrams or figures. However, you can expect the book to be full of buzzwords.

The authors like to name drop all through the book. I am paraphrasing: "Our colleague, the world famous, Graznij Huj, has said that.." Personally, I don't like argumentation by scaffolding.

Finally, I can't stop repeating what the most famous management guru (also from Boston) has written on the back of the book: "[It] 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." I would be ashamed of writing such baloney. It is just the Boston crowd writing book blurbs to help each other endlessly recycle the same ideas. Ideas that once were novel but not in their n-th reincarnation.

This book is a solid two stars.

UPDATE
This has been a much talked about book in some circles, so you should probably read it if you've heard about it. Still, not really a good book, but a good topic

This is the second of a three book series (so far) by MIT researchers Brynjolfsson and McAffee about the future in light of rapid progress in automation and artificial intelligence. The first came out in the early part of the decade and presented a set of ideas in embryonic form on how we need to learn to race with machines rather than against them and left it at that. This book takes that idea forward and makes a compelling case of why the age we are entering could be as transformative as the industrial revolution. But with a field that is advancing at an accelerated rate and with difficult to predict consequences, a reader interested in these topics taking this book written in 2013 five years later will likely already have encountered most of these ideas elsewhere and will be left wondering what we should be doing about them today, which this book will not address. Instead, they should go straight to Machine, Platform, Crowd, published in 2017 and by far the most practical and useful of the three. This last book will likely remain relevant for a much longer period.

There are some great parts of this book and some that are a little strange which you might expect from a book fundamentally about the future. The best parts review what has happened in exponential doublings created by technologies. But there is too much reliance on Moore'sLaw Law which is not a law like gravity but a consequence of simple math. Each time the law hits a snag, it seems we change the parameters and give it a new lease on life. As a metaphor you can't beat it though because it adequately explains the reality we are living through. We are in a paradigm shift as fundamental as the industrial revolution which incidentally also caused a lot of human misery as people tried to figure out how to race with machines as they say. The solution to the problems of the IR took generations to evolve and only surfaced in the second half of the 20th century with the advent of pervasive higher education that liberated people from performing labor with machines. Today's problem is that machines are nipping at humanity's heels again but this time the machines are on the brink of taking over knowledge work to a great degree. Meanwhile there are huge new demands that only humans can satisfy in areas like clean energy provision, cleaning up the environment, rebuilding infrastructure, preserving soil and water resources and limiting population. These are not hard problems but they are things people would rather not address because they require hard thinking. But any book that attempts to deal with the future and technology has to also deal with a future of people. This book basically kicks the can down the road.

This book delivers on its promise to describe the second machine age and just what proves we are in it. It's based on facts, figures, and real world examples, but rarely is it anecdotal, which could have managed the pacing a little better. You can't go wrong if you are looking to learn more on the subject, but it is quite a bit to absorb.

According to the authors, we live in a miraculous but precarious time. Innovation is at an all time high, often benefiting the economy but not the individual. It's a series of highs and lows that they present, the amazing technologies that are exponentially expanding our world, the devastating effect on the middle and lower class, the promise that comes from finding new ways to leverage our very humaness, how that can easily fall to the wayside due to corporate greed, the importance of education, the futility of it... and so on. Like a good tennis match the counter always meets the serve. Some of the political solutions I didn't care for, but it's obvious a lot of research went into this.

The future ain’t what it used to be said the forever quotable Yogi Berra. This fairly sums up the forecast of the future that is “The Second Machine Age.” This forecast differs from a prediction in that Brynjolfsson and McAfee aren’t concerned with being modern day sages who will receive credit for their foresight; instead they analyze historical and current trends in technology in order to provide insights and perspective on what we can expect both economically and socially in the coming years and decades. More importantly, they offer recommendations on how we can better prepare for an unknowable interconnected global society in which we must quickly and constantly adapt or risk being left behind.

As I read their forecast, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. With their compelling argument that we have just begun a technological transformation that will literally blow our minds within the next 10-25 years I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed. I can’t keep up now with how quickly the world changes and am at a loss as to the very real sci-fi future that is just a few years away – a future with driverless cars, Artificial Intelligence, and algorithms that will write our daily news articles … actually these already exist, they will just be improved upon. This exponential growth in technology is having a very real impact on economic and social polarization and it will only get worse unless we change course.

As I write this review in May of 2016, I have observed that there is a persistent fear and anger felt around the globe. I see it in our 2016 election process. I experienced it when traveling to Europe a few months ago. Overall, I believe a vast majority of my fellow human beings, myself included are struggling with the fear of becoming irrelevant. Whether its machines taking our jobs or not having the needed skills to be an active citizen, the world we know is disappearing. In the process it’s taking the middle class with it. Unfortunately, our economic, political and social structures aren’t properly equipped to deal with the changes we are already experiencing.

And this is why if you want to understand what is truly going on, “The Second Machine Age” is a must read. Brynjolfsson and McAfee leave the soundbites and tweets behind. They don’t lay blame on a particular person or political party. What they offer is a well-researched assessment that results in uncomfortable and, to borrow from Al Gore, inconvenient truths into some of the most pressing questions of today; Why is income disparity surpassing the largess of the 1920’s? How are advances in digital technology that were thought to be decades off now just a few years away? How can we work with our new machines rather than against them? The answers to these questions aren’t the standard answers that have been regurgitated to us for years.

While it would be easy for the authors to take us on a doom and gloom journey, the final third of “The Second Machine Age” is devoted to recommendations on how to affect economic, political and social change. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that we have much to be optimistic about but we must have the courage to reassess how we have always done business. We need to recognize that creativity is the currency of the future. Accordingly we must begin by investing in a 21st century education system which includes emphasizing both science and the arts. It is not an either or proposition.

After completing “The Second Machine Age” I am still overwhelmed as to what is to come. However, I feel more confident that we will meet the challenges and seize the opportunities that are heading our way. We now live in a time when our choices will determine whether we continue on a path of unprecedented prosperity and discovery for generations to come or whether we will give into our basest fears and risk losing everything we hold dear. The results of these choices will happen much sooner than we think.

To once again paraphrase Yogi Berra, we have come to a fork in the road, let’s take it.

The authors of this book had a runaway success with its predecessor, the 76 page "Race Against the Machine." What they've done here is "put some flesh on the bones," really.

The summary is simple. The digital revolution is every bit as important as the previous industrial revolution, the one that was all to do with the steam engine and electricity. Those who deny this must consider the evidence. Technology is at the moment truly racing ahead and has started to do things that a short ten years ago genuine friends of the digital revolution considered impossible. The three buzzwords are "exponential," "digital" and "combinatorial."

I did not totally buy this line of argumentation when I read the "Race Against the Machine," but here it's argued a lot better and I must say I was convinced.

"Exponential" is all about how computer power doubles every 18 months. For the last 30 years it has seemed like Moore's Law only has ten years left in it based on what we know about physics, materials etc. and yet human ingenuity has found a way to carry on. Presented with evidence of the above, I've had to concede that the authors have a point and it's silly to bet against exponential growth of computer power. Just when it looks like we've hit some hard limit in the laws of Physics or the science of materials we've always found a way to carry on calculating faster. Which of course means it's a matter of time before computers will be able to do absolutely everything to do with seeing, recognizing etc. that they can't already do. I'm sold.

"Digital" is a big deal too. The idea here is the digitally encoded information (i) ain't going anywhere and (ii) does not get used up. If I use a gallon of oil, that's a gallon of oil that's not available to you. Not so with a song that's saved in 0s and 1s or a book or a beautiful picture. We can share, and we can share it forever.

"Combinatorial" comes to the rescue of those who fear their limited physical existence cannot keep up with the exponential growth of computer power. It's alright if a computer can perform tasks better than you and keeps getting even better because there's one thing that can be faster than exponential growth and that's combinatorial growth. So people who can combine things and can command computer power can combine it all to keep up with the machine. So for example a bunch of OK chess players who have very strong computers at their disposal will beat the world's best computer or the world's best chessmaster. More to the point, there are tons of technologies out there, the value these days is in using more than one at once. The example of a traffic app is given that not only uses good maps and the GPS infrastructure, but leverages the power of the network established by its users' mobile phones (another technology), "network" being the key word here.

So it's fascinating and convincing stuff.

From there the book moves on to the bit that I found to be the true contribution of "Race Against the Machine." New fancy words have been unleashed upon us here: "Bounty" and "Spread"

"Bounty" is the massive benefit of machines allowing us to do more with less, like for example sharing billions of pictures almost for free, or keeping in touch with all of our friends for absolutely free, or taking an MIT class from the comfort of your bedroom in Cameroon without paying MIT tuition, or keeping track of where your daughter's hanging out at three in the morning for a fiver a month--not sure at all about this one! "Spread" refers to the fact that if you were employed in a routine job you're either unemployed or you won't be employed for long, because your job will be taken over by a machine.

And the usual roster of winners and losers is rolled out. So if you play for Manchester United it's fantastic if people can follow you (and pay to watch you) in East Asia, but it's less fun if you are a good but not ManU-level player out in East Asia because nobody's going to come watch. Bounty and Spread in one example here, what with everybody being able to enjoy watching ManU all while Rooney is eating all other football players' lunch. He deserves it, many will argue, but what about them?

So I got myself a comfy chair to read the chapter where the authors explain that, rather than the laundry list of explanations (like for example the overleveraging of the lower middle class or the greed of Goldman Sachs or the "global glut of savings" and so on) the current recession / depression / whatever you want to call it is caused by the machines that have replaced everybody who used to do repetitive mental work. That was surely going to be the most fascinating bit of the book.

But, in the words of Quentin Tarantino, I could not find it because it wasn't there. They took that bit out.

Pity, because it was my favourite bit of the first book. They just mention that it wasn't globalization whodunit because (i) China is losing manufacturing employment as fast as we are and (ii) the most precarious jobs on earth are probably the ones we exported (for example) to India, as the back office / documentation / call center work we sent over there is sooner rather than later going to be done by machines.

But beyond crossing out globalization as a culprit, the authors have neglected the Great Depression MKII part that I was most looking forward to. I really wanted to hear something along the lines of "well, you might be a damn fool, Athan, but your kids, if they are like other kids on the planet, are totally on top of this exponential, digital and combinatorial revolution. Here's a bunch of stuff other kids are doing with their time, you just hang in there bud, do what you can to pass on the baton and watch them little ones and everybody else thrive and kiss this depression goodbye."

But no, I looked hard and that's nowhere to be found in the book.

Instead, there's a very tired list of "long term recommendations" that you could have torn out of Blinder's book. Heck, you could have torn them out of Jeff Sachs's book. Like, for example "Teach our Children Well" and "Restart Startups" and the good-old "Rebuild Infrastructure." Tax proposals galore too, some of them genuinely outlandish. WHAT ON EARTH? Infrastructure! Everybody and his mom knows the stat about how many of our bridges are in bad shape. And please somebody tell me what the connection is between tax and technology. None of those tech companies have ever paid any tax, their IP lives in an Irish / Bermudan / Martian tax enclave, last I checked.

I think they handed over the book to a grad student halfway through. Perhaps they left it to a computer. Now, there's a thought.

But the first 100 pages were damn good, so I'll be very generous and give "The Second Machine Age" four stars...

The Second Machine Age really blew my mind. This thoughtful and readable book convinced me that the machine age is real and it’s right around the corner. Because of Moore’s Law the progress in machine learning is exponential. Computers taking over our life will be similar to how Hemingway described going broke, “Gradually and then suddenly.” Even though this book was published in 2014 is still totally relevant in 2017. I read another book on AI and it lacked the 30,000 foot view of the machine age that is on point in this book. I highly rec reading this book if you want to know if you are going to have a job in 10 years.

From UUJEC.com. This book hypes the developing robotics revolution in technology, yet balances this extravaganza with warnings on growing inequality and job losses. It reminds me of Alvin Toffler’s blockbluster books of decades past, forecasting the stresses of technological and societal change, but this time from the narrower point of view of an economist. The authors see our “winner take all” society as a consequence primarily of technology, ignoring power relationships. Also, “growth” is the ultimate solution to escalating inequality, ignoring limits-to-growth.

They welcome ideas to reduce inequality like a guaranteed minimum income, but are hesitant about full employment policies and about shifting heavy payroll taxes to more progressive income, capital gains, and wealth taxes. They boost education and immigration as great inequality solvers but seem unfamiliar with conflicting research. Piketty is not cited, even though he shows that increasing inequality is inevitable when the rate of return exceeds the rate of growth.

Brynjlofsson and McAfee say, correctly, that artificial intelligence has come of age due to exponential growth in computer power (Moore’s Law). Yet they do not consider the lessons that might be learned from how the extreme inequality of the late 19th century industrial revolution was finally resolved after decades of turmoil, upheaval that now appears to be commencing in earnest for the “second machine age” after the election of Trump.

After reading great futurist books like The Singularity is Near,Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think and The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen - and What to Do I was expecting another eye-opening book on the technologies that will transform society in the coming decades. Instead, the book is merely a summary of a few selected technologies already mentioned in Abundance (like IBM's Watson supercomputer) or that anybody following tech news regularly would have read about countless times, like self-driving cars.

I was hoping for a book that explains more precisely how artificial intelligence, automations and robots will replace people in most jobs, and an in-depth analysis of what jobs will disappear soon and which ones will remain safe for the foreseeable future. I was looking forward to read about how the peer economy, 3-D printers and personal domestic robots will completely change the way we produce and consume. Unfortunately the book does not address any of these. The authors just explain, repetitively and in plain language, that machines will make consumer products cheaper while taking away people's jobs. But who doesn't already know that when it's been discussed countless times in the news?

Chapters 13 and 14 (one fifth of the book) are policy recommendations on how to make the USA more like northern Europe, by raising the standards of education, decreasing socio-economic inequalities, improving the infrastructure, taxing pollution, taxing more the rich and less the poor, or using a value added tax (VAT) system. I don't know if Erik Brynjolfsson was feeling nostalgic about his ancestral Scandinavia when he wrote that, but that is hardly relevant to the Second Machine Age. Even though the USA could benefit from that, Scandinavians will not be immune to the rise of automations regardless of how advanced they are in these regards.

As a side note, on page 241, it says that the United States is the only one of 34 OECD countries not to have a VAT. That is not true. Japan used to have VAT, but it scrapped it for a consumption tax in 1989. A Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management ought to know that. Besides, the state of Michigan does use VAT (known as "Single Business Tax" or SBT).

This book is a continuation on an earlier work titled "Race against the machine". It's an easy read of about 300 pages divided into 15 chapters. Basically I read it as 5 chapters devoted to the miracles of technological advancement, 5 chapters devoted to it's repercussions, and 5 chapters devoted to recommendations and predictions.

The first 5 chapters deal with how technology is advancing at a much faster pace than anticipated and how things are going to change very fast, a lot sooner than we expect them to. The writers tend to focus mainly on all the good and positive outcomes of technological advances and leave the dark possibilities for the very last chapters and devote very little time to it, almost skimming the subject.

The book really starts to get interesting from chapters 6 onward, where they cover their ideas and concepts behind what "the bounty" and "the spread" (i.e. whats at stake and who will gain and who will lose) of all these technological advances. They do a pretty good job in trying to cover what all these technological advances and robotics in the not so distant future "might" have in store for the "average Joe" who might not have kept up to date with whats going on.

The last 3 chapters cover high level ideas and recommendations on what could be done to make the technological future a better place for everyone.

A thing I was hoping they might cover is what happens when the 2.5 billion people in Asia who are constantly getting a little better off and richer and more and more of them enter the "middle class" consumer class -- will all the "innovations" in the future (the future Apples, and Macbooks, iPads) be originating in Asia purely based on the numbers (will innovating companies in Asia outnumber 10 to 1 in US and EU and will US and EU start to play catch up?)

This was a more balanced and optimistic book in contrast to The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr.
It is certain that no one, short of taking us back to the stone age, is going to stop the forward march of technology. The degree of automation, AI, and robotics that we have today is because we had the means to get here.

The authors toggle between infoming us about the rapid technological progress and the repercussions upon humanity. Their explanation of why GDP is going up while income is declining and unemployment is increasing is good.

While the authors restrain themselves from providing an overly optimistic picture of the future, their recommendations reveal the fear of societal turmoil as jobs disappear and wealth is narrowed to a few.

However things unfold in America, I hope our leaders have enough concern for the wellbeing of all the people of our nation not to make the same royal blunder they did in their approach to globalization which has brought a whirlwind of unnecessary suffering for the masses. People are not algorithms that can be changed overnight with the push of a button. Slow things down so that the effects of innovative ideas that show any penchant for societal destruction are time tested rather than thrusted upon the masses.

A strong and well-structured discussion on digitisation. Talks about current developments in tech, including digitisation and zero-marginal costs, exponential developments already brought us at the 'second half of the chessboard', and combinatorial possibilities of highly complex technological building blocks. The consequences are vast: enormous productivity gains (GDP and non-economic), and increased income/productivity/skill inequality due to winner-takes-all network effects on a global scale. The authors also dedicate some chapters with heuristics on how to navigate the 21th century, both on individual - focus on ideation - and policy level - focus on education system, explore income sources other than labour, like basic income.

The compartmentalization of academics and policy wonks often means people focus only on the salient aspects of their fields. Joseph Stiglitz has done a tremendous job of dissecting how free-trade policies and treaties that favor open borders ultimately favor the wealthy few at the expense of the working and middle classes. But he often leaves technology out of the discussion.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee fill in the gap. They document how the incredible pace of technology change is impacting economics. Their key data point is the disassociation of productivity and employment. Until the 1990s, employment and productivity grew together. Then the internet came along, processing power doubled a few more times, and we were launched into an era of automation -- where everything that can be automated, will be. This will kill jobs and concentrate wealth and power into the hands of those who own the largest servers (to borrow Lanier's catchphrase). For those who say it is more about moving jobs to China, the authors point out that the number of manufacturing jobs in China has actually declined in the past twenty years as well.

Where this book comes up short is at the end. After spending 250 pages telling us how bad things are and how they are only going to get worse, the authors attempt to offer some optimistic solutions. Make no mistake, the data and examples and arguments are impeccable up until the ideas for change, which are general, not nearly as well thought out, and do not fully speak to other aspects of the economy. (Though the idea of a guaranteed minimum income won me over.)

This is where Piketty comes in. He essentially arrives at the same conclusion as these two but from a completely different angle. While he does include AI and technology in his analysis, his focus is on capitalism per se, and his historical reach, examples, and painstaking assemblage of data allow him to offer better reasoned solutions. When applied to or filtered through technology, Piketty's remedies would also address the wealth concentration issue from a technology angle. In this respect, Brynjolfsson and McAfee further elaborate a key data point supporting Piketty's larger argument. (Though their book was published first.) For anyone interested in technology's impact on society generally and its role in wealth concentration in particular, this is essential reading. Highly recommended.

The Second Machine age is a well-written book on common technology topics that covers a lot in a balanced way without bringing up anything new.

The best thing about the book is the way it is written: fluid, fully understandable and with great anecdotes. Even while it is covering the most obvious topics - like the way technology has changed our lives - it is immensely engaging due to the chatty way in which it makes its arguments.

The book is also well-balanced. For a while, one fears the author to become too absorbed by his favorite topic. However, the book truly brings about many of the pitfalls, particularly as they affect income and the livelihood of workers and the inequality that has been a result. The author does not try to push aside the issues wishing everything will be ok based on some historic experiences but still tries to retain the overall constructive tone.

Yet, the biggest negative of the book is the sheer lack of novelty across the entire range of topics it covers. Most arguments - in their raw forms - would appear like they have been exhaustively discussed in newspapers' Op-Ed pages or good blogs over the last ten years. The author claims to have conducted intensive research to write the book and this is not exactly visible in the core arguments and conclusions.

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 positive way) for us very soon. I was impressed by the 'second half of the chessboard' analogy. I could relate to it being in the technology field myself.

The authors hint at improving productivity - throughput per worker - in the early chapters as a means of achieving this. Higher levels of computation, digitization, and recombinant innovation are the tools that are making these breakthroughs happen.

They do place an emphasis on better learning techniques, both in school and after. A mention of MOOCs and the way students can make the most of it was definitely a revival for me as I've read it earlier in other books.

Few of things mentioned in the book that the authors think as 'wonders of the future' are actually happening right now, but that could be my timing of reading the book.

The first parts of "The second machine age" are a celebration of all the cool and spiffy
things that computers and digital devices can do. There is emphasis on how that progress
has accelerated in just the last several years and on how tasks that we thought, just 2 or
3 years ago, computers would never be able to do, they are now doing or are in the early
and promising stages of becoming able to do.

That's followed by descriptions of how wonderful all these blessings will be, what
Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the "bounty" of this technological progress. But, some of
the later sections of the book become less sanguine, as Brynjolfsson and McAfee consider
both (1) how the benefits (and costs) of the adoption of this digital technology is going
to be distributed unevenly and (2) the likely effects and consequences of the elimination
of so much work through robotics and automation.

And, then an awareness of reality appears as Brynjolfsson and McAfee describe some of the
negative consequences of all that technology and automation, notably the loss of
employment opportunities and the increasingly skewed distribution of wealth and income
with a larger are larger share of profits going to a smaller and smaller proportion of the
population.

With respect to the technology itself, it's not just that the devices (desktop computers,
laptop computers, smart phones, embedded devices, etc.) are becoming more powerful and
capable; it's also that those devices have more (machine readable) data to work with *and*
that so many of those devices are connected. This suggests that much of the data that is
being created is either accessible to or being created and updated by these connected
devices. It also suggests that these devices are interacting with each other, for example
that these devices send information and requests to each other. Eventually, our devices
(and there are likely to be more and more of them) will do increasing amounts of their
processing in cooperation with the devices around us (or, more appropriately, around
*them*, since you and I will likely become less important assistants for their work) or
in cooperation with computers and devices accessible across the Internet. In the future,
although we may have an identifiable device in our hands or a computer on the desk in
front of us, that "computer" will effectively be composed of it and the devices it is
connected to (and the devices they are connected to recursively). We are not likely to be
aware of many of these devices (just as we are not aware of many of the embedded computers
and controllers in our automobiles), nor are we likely to be aware of the data they are
collecting. We may have a dim awareness that they (the computing devices) are doing tasks
that they did not formerly seem to be able to do and that they make intelligent choices
that they did not formerly make (e.g., suggest restaurants that we prefer and purchases
that entice us).

If innovation and technological advances lead to increased productivity and increased
productivity leads to improved standard of living, then it is highly unlikely that we as a
society or our political institutions are going to chose to slow it down. But, that means
that we are in the midst of a perma-growth economic system. If that is so, you have to
ask what we could possibly hope to do to slow down global warming and the consumption of
resources. Aren't our needs to deal with resource consumption and deletion in direct
conflict with the changes that Brynjolfsson and McAfee describe are so important to
improving our lives. We can imagine 50 to 100 years from now any society that manages to
survive will look back at us and ask: What were they thinking? Could they (we) have
possibly *not* been aware of the consequences of their actions and policies?

It is a bit depressing that books like this one constrain the set of "good" or beneficial
policy choices to the set described by perma-growth economics, to policies that promote
more economic growth and more production and more consumption. Are there really no other
alternatives? Possibly so, however, it does not seem to me that we are always going to
have the option of attempting to solve our problems with "more": more economic growth,
more production/productivity, more consumption, etc. At some time in the not to distant
future, we may have to start making do with less. We may have to stop growing the total
size of the pie so that everyone (or most of us) can have a slightly larger slice. We may
need to learn how to divide a smaller (total) pie, but share it more equitably.

Believe it or not, Brynjolfsson and McAfee are worried about the slowing down of
innovation and increased productivity, and not just about the possible negative
consequences. They worry that, with respect to innovation, we have already picked most of
the low hanging fruit and that the most productive innovations are behind us. Honestly?
Do we need new ways to burn fossil fuels and produce more plastic? Do we really need to
figure our how to do so more quickly? Shouldn't we be more concerned with understanding
why the benefits of innovation have not spread more evenly across the world?

Brynjolfsson and McAfee dismiss their own worry about innovation slowing down based on
these reasons: (1) many or most productive innovations come about through recombination
and adaptation of existing ideas and innovations; (2) information and communication
technology spreads those ideas and makes them more readily available; (3) many more people
have access to the technology that enables them to learn about and learn from existing
ideas, which will spread innovation possibilities more broadly across, say, more minds
capable of having more ideas and inspirations, which will cause an increase in innovation
activity. As someone who has been a computer programmer for many years, I can willingly
agree with that. In comparison with my experiences 20 years ago, I have quicker access to
more of the information I need about the computer programming technologies I use
(programming languages, libraries of support code and functions, and programming tools
such as text editors and debuggers), answers to questions about programming problems I run
into, etc. If you need evidence about that, look up almost any programming language or
technology at Wikipedia and follow the links near the bottom of the page. And, go to
StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/) and look at the incredible wealth of questions
and answers there. None of this readily available information existed 20 years ago. When
it comes to computer programming, we truly are living in information rich times.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee also attempt to explain why increases in productivity do not
immediately become visible when technological innovations are adopted. They say this is
due to a time lag as businesses adapt and improve the application of new technologies to
their needs. And that leads to Brynjolfsson and McAfee's claims that, during the last 10
to 15 years, worker productivity has increased dramatically.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee do devote a good amount of space toward the end of this book to
the problems associated with the loss of jobs and the problems that will result from an
increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and income that we are seeing, especially
currently in the U.S. But, that discussion gives suggestions such as the following: get
more education, train for a job that requires non-routine work, and so on. These are
suggestions and policies that might help some individuals, but will not fix a society or
an economy. A few of the points they make: (1) They explain how we (in the U.S.) may be
entering a time of "winner take all" era of economic compensation where a disproportionate
amount of earnings goes to a small number of individuals and where income distribution is
best described by a power law, i.e., a "fat tail" distribution curve. (2) Advancing
technology and innovation is a likely cause of both a bounty in the way of improved
medical care, better communications, safer air travel, and much more, as well as negative
consequences such as the extremely skewed and inequitable distribution of incomes and the
loss of so many employment opportunities. (3) It's actually possible to argue that we are
all better off because of our access to improved technology and its benefits, and
Brynjolfsson and McAfee do a reasonably balanced job of analyzing both the good and bad
consequences of advancing technology. (4) The economic inequality in the U.S. is likely
producing increasing political inequality, which will, in turn, enable a set of economic
and political elites to protect their favorable and unfair position and to deny all others
access to economic opportunities and the political process. That will, Brynjolfsson and
McAfee think, lead both to even more inequality and to a slowing of the innovation needed
for the increased productivity that, they think, will improve our lives.

Further reading -- (1) If you'd also like to read a book that takes a similar view that
innovations and advanced technology are the prescription for improving our lives and
raising our standard of living, but written from a political point of view, you might want
to look at "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty", by Daron
Acemoglu and James Robinson, which by the way, is referred to by Brynjolfsson and McAfee.
I'd also recommend that you take a look at: (2) "The rise of the robots", by Martin Ford;
and (3) "The glass cage", by Nicholas Carr.

Pretty good explanation of recent and near future events. Only problem is the authors are letting their left wing bias show with erroneous paragraphs about "Global Warming", etc. Other than that, not a bad read.

If you're interested in financial markets, you might be interested in Barry Ritholz's interview show on Bloomberg radio. He always asks his guests what they're reading, and one of them reccomended this book. So off I went to the library to pick it up.

The authors, who are professors at MIT, set out to examine the impact of the digital revolution, in the broadest terms, on the development of human society. Me? I use computers every day, just like you do, but I haven't devoted much energy into staying on top of the startling advances of technology. I am interested in such macro trends, especially in politics and economics, both for fun and to think more about how to position my family for sucess into a confusing and rapidly changing future. Trends in IT was a big gap in my knowledge. This book was a good first step in flling in some gaps.

Having said that, the writers are generally breathless cheerleaders for technological progress. That makes for poorly reasoned analysis. First, the authors rely on anecdotal evidence- they must refer to self-driving cars and Jeopardy at least ten random times each throughout the book. From this kind of evidence, it's hard to generalize to make detailed and persuasive statements about macro trends. Another flaw in the book is the unthinking extrapolation from past events into the future. It seems unlikely that computing power can continue to double every eighteen months indefinitely. Maybe it can, I don't know, but either way this is a key premise of the book. Unfortunately, the writers simply assert the extrapolation without any argumentation at all. Also, the writers dismiss rival explanations for outcomes they'd like to attribute to digitization- for example, cheap foreign competition as a cause for the reduction in wages among US factory workers is dismissed in a paragraph or two- again on mostly on anecdotal evidence. Replacement by technology is the favored explanation.
There are many other such flaws in this work and yet, after having read it, I am a good deal more knowledgeable than before. At least I understand some of the key questions and that's a good start. If you don't have the time or energy to find a better book, and you don't know much about trends in IT read this book.

In all, a very good and informative read, although the key ideas are not new to readers of Jeremy Rifkin's 1994 book "The End of Work", which, unfortunately, is not mentioned.

I especially liked the argument that "growth" is increasingly inadequately captured by GDP growth, and the point that the present fiscal system is too much labor-oriented. In general, the diagnosis was excellent. The solutions outlined by the authors, however, were much too short-term in my eyes. Especially since the authors stress that we are at an "inflection point" of history, focusing on quick fixes of the status quo (better education etc) is a little myopic. We need to be prepared for a largely laborless society within our lifetimes, which will require huge changes in the distribution of income, as the authors themselves acknowledge. This big transition will take a lot of time, so it must be started now. The authors were too light on outlining the long-term solutions. For example, how are governments going to finance negative income taxes for the legions on un(der)employed, and the necessary investments in science and infrastructure? I would have liked more detailed visions on the solutions for the "android experiment".

Lastly, for a book about technology, the ebook version is funny in that the final 15% consist of a (completely useless because the keywords are unlinked) index; it's also highly misleading as the main text already ends at 67% of the ebook. In general, the book makes the impression that it could have used another round of editing

Of late, in economic, social and political circles, the argument has been raging about the prospects for the future of Capitalist economies. The long stagnation in Japan and the persistent slowdown in the EU have given rise to pessimism about the future because of the added markers of an aging population and challenges from Globalization. We see economic growth in the US. The Corporations are making massive profits but incomes for the majority still remain static and jobs are difficult to come by. Eminent economists have made fundamental observations that when the growth rate is lower than the rate of return (minus taxes and consumption), one cannot prevent Capital from seizing a greater share of the national income. Consequently, in the economically stagnant societies of today, inherited wealth or wealth accumulated in the past will play a major role. The authors of this book project a more positive and hopeful future based on technological innovation and progress even as they do not dismiss the problems which have been raised by others. It is up to us to determine for ourselves whether the optimism is justified and whether all the worship of the digital future is based on a sound footing. After all, we have been disappointed in the recent past by excessive hype of the techno-future.

As the title says, the book propounds the view that we are in a Second Machine Age now, with the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century being the start of the First one. Just as the steam engine gave rise to more and more powerful machines to enhance the output of the manual labor of humans, the Second Machine Age does the same to the human intellectual capabilities through the delivery of more and more computing power, storage capacity and other electronic sensory devices. Not only that, we are at a tipping point on this road at the moment because of 'exponentiation'. I found this argument quite persuasive and convincing. The authors explain 'exponentiation' through a well-known Indian parable. In the 6th century CE, a Gupta empire king offered whatever reward he desired to the inventor of the Chess game. The inventor asked the King to give him one grain of rice on the first square of the Chessboard and in all the subsequent ones twice the number of the previous square. As we know, by the time the king reaches the 64th, all the rice ever produced in the world wouldn't be enough to fill it. The authors say that at square 32, the king would find 4 billion grains of rice, which is still comprehensible as it is about a field's size. From then on, the exponentiation makes it forbidding at each square. In the same way, the authors say that we are now at the 32nd square in digital technology. With the impact of doubling as per Moore's Law every 18 months, we have started seeing the explosions like driverless cars, computer programs winning Jeopardy and beating chess champions and a Cray-like supercomputer in every smartphone. When you apply advances in AI, Big Data Analysis, low-cost sensors on to this and use recombinant innovation and solve problems using crowdsourcing like NASA's Innocentive, the authors say that there is enough reason for optimism for an exciting future. At the same time, they do deal with the consequences of such a future and suggest correctives and regulatory acts to channel this revolution in a constructive manner.

Though I agree with the authors about exponentiation and recombinant innovation, I would go slow before jumping on the Big Data and AI trains. If we look at the history of AI, there is reason to be wary of hype. History says that in the 1950s, there was hype about a mechanical brain called the Perceptron which was supposed to be capable of sensing, recognizing, remembering and responding like humans. It fizzled out by the end of the 1960s and then there was the hype on neural networks in the 1980s which also fizzled out ten years later. Now, we face the hype about 'deep learning'. Google, Microsoft and other companies bet on it now but we can see that it is still at fairly primitive levels of problem solving compared to even monkies. It is true that this is the way science progresses and we must continue on this path certainly. At the same time, the average person should not be sold a hype whereby she is alarmed about computers developing consciousness and taking over the world.

The authors lament the low position of US children in Math skills in tests among students from OECD countries. Recent research has rebutted this saying that US kids have always been placed low on Math tests ever since these tests came into existence in the 1960s. But in the last fifty years, US has been quite at the forefront of innovation in technology and science. Even Sweden and Israel, which do equally badly in Math tests, have done pretty well in innovation too. So, this 'problem' may not be a real problem at all. On the other hand, this book's pointer that the Montessori school system may be crucial to inculcate the innovative spirit in children is an important observation. Innovators like Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia are all products of this system.

The book helps us to comprehend the new world of 'digital explosion' that is at our doorstep. It is a well-balanced work and deals with the economic and social consequences of this coming era in addition to its technological promise. Certainly, a book that must be read.

I find myself conflicted about "The Second Machine Age." It is a somewhat interesting, if high level, summary of things we already know if we're at all familiar with the evolution of technology. I found nothing new here, perhaps because I am fairly well read with respect to technology issues, and have thought a bit about them. At the same time, I suspect that most people who would be interested in reading a book of this nature are equally well-versed in its subject matter, and therefore, won't react much differently than I have.

The flip side is that the authors take a long time to state things which are already known, and while they integrate and synthesize the material well, they are clearly not breaking any new ground. What makes the book worse in some respects is the authors' tendency to pepper their tome with a seemingly endless litany of references to this or that academic study, this or that author, or this or that scholarly article. In some cases, they refer to others on numerous occasions, which can become quite tedious. As an Audible.com listener to "The Second Machine Age," this came across as a concerted effort by the authors to legitimize their own book by referencing others whose research and publications could, theoretically, lend credence and validity to "The Second Machine Age."

Bottom line: nothing much new here, albeit well stated, and well narrated.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee challenge us to acknowledge that we have reached a point of advancing technology surpassing that of the first machine age (itself a true inflection point) with innovations doubling at an almost incredible rate. Despite the fact this makes precise predictions of where we are heading nearly impossible, they present realistic views of what could happen and how we might best respond. Although the focus is the economy, they present their thoughts in a way that is accessible to most anybody and do not get bogged down in theory or esoteric calculations. With a generally optimistic slant, they offer some actual common-sense solutions to the major difficulty presented by replacement of many human functions with modern machine (computer) technology - the increasing spread between the haves and have-nots from the perspective of income and wealth. Further, they provide a link for readers to comment on the proposals in the book and to offer new ones, thus utilizing one of the most productive advances in modern communication and innovation, crowd-sourcing. This is the kind of book you want to read right away because, having been published just this year, it is very timely. It should be required reading for ALL our elected officials and other governmental policymakers TODAY. You'll see why when you read it.

An eye-opener which portrays the current trends in digital technologies and draws some interesting comparison with the age when the steam engine was invented. It covers the technology aspects as well as the socio-economic aspects well. The first machine age, referring to the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, replaced physical labor by the power of steam. The second machine age which we are experiencing currently, is the replacement of mental labor by machine intelligence. There were social consequences of the first machine age in terms of pollution of the environment and the exploitation of child labor, which got addressed over a period of time. There will be consequences this time around as well, claim the authors.

Exponential advances in digital devices are leading to very cheap phones, cameras, sensors etc. As well as to Robots like Rethink technologies' Baxter as well as cognitive machines like IBM’s Watson which defeated Jeopardy champions. Recombination of separate existing ideas is leading to newer ideas. Digital revolution in mobile phones has led to increased connectivity to most of the world’s population. For example, fish prices stabilized immediately after mobile phones came about in the Indian state of Kerala. Prices dropped but margins increased for fisherman due to efficiencies in the market.

An interesting observation made by the authors is that there is lag between a revolution and the productivity. Productivity did not improve for 30 years after electricity was introduced into factories. Old plant layout was retained and only change was that the steam engine was replaced with a big electric motor. The next generation of engineers and managers changed the layout and introduced separate motors for each machine and laid out the machines in the sequence required for doing the work efficiently. Similarly, computers did not bring productivity unless investments were made in software, training, business process re-engineering etc.

Production in second machine age depends less on physical equipment and structures and more on the four categories of intangible assets like intellectual property, organizational capital like business processes and models, user-generated content like writings on Wikipedia and the store, and human capital like training.

Due to machine intelligence, some work is going away from humans to the machines. All the routine work, whether cognitive work like tax preparation or manual work like data entry are fading away. Turbotax software is putting lot of tax preparers out of work. While nonroutine work whether cognitive like Financial analysis, or manual like hairdressing have held for now.

Another disturbing trend is that in this second machine age, the incomes are becoming very skewed. It is leading to a “winner-take-all” society. The inequality is not due to tax policy, greater overseas competition, ongoing government waste, or Wall Street Shenanigans. People with capital assets, either nonhuman like equipment, structures, intellectual property, and financial assets, or human capital such as training, education, experience, and skills have gained.

In a traditional market, someone who is 90% as skilled or works 90% as hard creates 90% as much value and thus can earn 90% as much money. That is absolute performance. A software programmer who writes a slightly better mapping application-one that loads a little faster, or has slightly more complete data, or prettier icons might completely dominate a market. Digital goods have enormous economies of scale, giving the market leader a huge cost advantage and the room to beat the price of any competitor.

Cooks, gardeners, repairmen, carpenters, dentists, and home health aides are not about to be replaced in short term. These professions involve sensorimotor work, which means understanding one’s environment and moving around to do work. Computers and Robots are still not good at these kind of tasks. In addition, anything involving large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication are also the weaknesses of the machines. The authors visualize that a partnership between a human being and a Robot will be far more creative and robust than any of them working alone.

An excellent analysis of the current trends and where it is leading us.

So, I haven't purchased or read this book. I would like to. However, when the store is pricing the paperback at $3.98 and the Kindle version at $8.98 (when the paperback costs money to produce and Kindle version doesn't), I know I'm being manipulated and won't play the game. If the store can get the pricing right, I would be interested in reading this book. The authors should know that the store's manipulations are costing them sales.

I would recommend this book as required reading for all high school students and policy makers. It causes a lot of pain thinking what trivial things we fight about these days when we have such significant problems to solve with the rapid automation of vast percentage of jobs.

I like how the author illustrates exponential growth. I also like the examples of bounty, spread and growth of winner take all environments.

Living in this digital age is both fulfilling and frightening. The fast changing interactions between humans and technology will continue at a blistering pace and if we aren't able to harness it to benefit ALL mankind, the vast majority of us, our loved ones and neighbors will be left behind. Our leaders must act responsibility to make sure this doesn't occur or it will be a travesty of each and every one of us.

This is one of the most interesting books I have read in a while for its broad commentary on technological progress, its impact on our labor markets and the ways it will change our society, including thought-provoking policy ideas for how to navigate this radical change in our economy. Let me temper this by saying that I do not work in the tech field or read a lot of books in this field. So I do not know if the ideas are unique. But this book elegantly captures many threads of thought on technology, labor, society and economy and weaves them together in a way that makes me feel like a lot of oddities I have noticed in the current economy and political landscape finally make sense and fit a pattern that I hadn't recognized before. I highly recommend this book.

The insights and analysis of the rapidly evolving tech world are the best parts of the book. They are concentrated in the first half. As thre authors turn to economics and economic theory the analysis and theses are shakier. When dealing with the problems of American education the authors are strong proponents of distance learning and put a lot of faith in its future as if there is no debate about the value and utility of distance learning. This is only one example of the book trying to cover too much territory in a single volume. The detail that is devoted to the development of robotics is exemplary. But having set that standard other concerns are dealt with at a more superficial level and/or economic analyses and theories that are debatable are too frequently treated as givens. On balance a worthwhile read but that old teacher's saw: could-a done better. The authors give consistent credit to their many colleagues, a plus, but the adjectival praise for the works and studies they quote is devalued by repetition. Every book and study is "brilliant" "smart" "intelligent". Relax, I assume that author's choose their sources because they are the best they can find. Academics tipping hats to each other is unnecessary fawning.

An excellent analysis that approaches the current human condition as it has evolved with technology. Our condition is analyzed through multiple lenses, from psychology and statistics to economics and politics. The most beautiful part of this piece of art is not the answers it gives, or attempts to give, but rather the questions it asks, which, inherently, is an absolutely analog approach to innovation. For a book that is entirely about technology, this approach is beautiful in its irony.

Recommended highly for any thinker of the future that is rapidly approaching.

The Second Machine Age is a book that uses the past to predict the future, specifically with regards to the large technological advances made by the human race. The main focus of the book is actually on the ways our technological advances are impacting and will impact the economy, especially for the average consumer.

The book is split into a trio of sections, each of which deals with a different facet of the discussion regarding the coming “second machine age.” The first six chapters describe the defining characteristics and criteria of this coming age of technology, specifically by citing many different examples of technological advancements that aim to bring us closer to the second machine age. This portion is the easiest and smoothest reading, as it combines descriptions of current innovations with predictions for future ones in a free flowing narrative meant to help us clarify exactly what is meant by their term “the second machine age.”

The second section, consisting of chapters seven through eleven, is the densest reading of the book, as it attempts to clarify exactly what is meant by the economic terms “bounty” and “spread,” and how the coming machine age will impact these measures of economics. Specifically, bounty refers to the increase in quality, volume, and availability of many goods, where the increase is brought about via improvements and changes in technology. Spread, on the other hand, represents the ever-widening gap between people in economic wealth, especially regarding the difference between the wealthiest few and the middle class.

The final section, which consists of the final four chapters, describes the predictions and suggestions that the authors have related to the coming “second machine age,” with regards specifically to how we can attempt to combat the growing amount of spread present in our economy without compromising the growth of bounty and widespread technological progress.

Given that the book was written in 2014, it is not necessarily as current as it could be, and a lot of the statistics it cites are only valid up to the point of 2014. However, two years is a relatively small amount of time, and many of the general ideas the book deals with are still in progress in the world today. It does have a rather significant amount of time that is spent looking to the future, which is appropriate considering the book primarily aims at identifying the new movement taking place, and the potential ramifications of this movement.

This is not a book for everyone. The second section falls especially victim to this fault, but in general The Second Machine Age has a tendency to rely purely on citations of previous studies and stories of previous inventions, instead of attempting to describe its own ideas and views related to the idea of a coming technological revolution. Don’t be mistaken; the book still has plenty of original thoughts and ideas, it just has a tendency to spend too much time focused on thoughts and ideas made by others before it. Many of the names and inventions mentioned are forgotten about by the time the next page is turned, an inherent flaw related to the format used.

Personally, this book interested me, not because of the specific examples and references given, but because of the apparent inevitability of this coming time of progress. I would agree with Brynjolfsson and McAfee related to the idea that we are quickly approaching a time of exponential growth, as most of natural history also models this exponential style of evolution. While I may not necessarily be as personally concerned about the growing gap between the rich and the middle class, it’s important to keep an eye especially on the quality of life for the middle class, and whether it is overall improving. If this improvement is apparent, then it doesn’t matter nearly as much whether the rich are rich.

This book updates and amplifies Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s 2012 ‘Race Against the Machine’, but basically conveys the same message and conclusions. Their first 4 chapters are racy and journalistic but somewhat superficial, making broad sweep claims with little justification, and taking several pages to explain the arithmetic power of exponential growth. Ironic that the text on automation includes the typo ‘The authors cite driving a vehicle in traffic as an example of such as task’  (page 18).

Chapter 5 takes us deeper, arguing convincingly that ICT (information and communication technology) is a general purpose technology, and that its combination with other technologies will overcome any apparent ‘productivity paradox’ of ICT slowing productivity growth. Productivity will continue to soar, driven by artificial intelligence and global interpersonal networking. They give lots of interesting examples. They correctly point out that GDP understates economic growth by ignoring the increased consumer surplus of technology driven price reductions, and the abundance of new digital service consumer value. They present the social cost of reduced wages and vastly increased inequality. Their policy recommendations are education, entrepreneurship, and a negative income tax.

They do admit that computers perform less well at tasks like pattern recognition, but dubiously they expect ever more from digitisation which is essentially ‘bottom up’, compared to ‘top down’ analogue human perceptions. Classic cases of this distinction are the human ability to distinguish one person’s face whether they are smiling or scowling, and computer difficulty to translate newspaper headline phrases like ‘Foot heads arms body’ or ‘Canadian left waffles on Falklands’. They don’t address Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of the scope and capability of artificial intelligence. They close their book with a statement that they are not persuaded that technology is deterministic – ‘Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny’ (page 257) without mentioning the extensive discussion of these issues in the literature on the philosophy of technology. They could have included some discussion of how technology gets or fails to get to market by analysis of its downstream business case, competitive price/performance positioning, and viable value chain. These gaps weaken their discussion.

The economic analysis is also weak. In a thought experiment of a totally automated economy with a machine plugged into the earth to produce the total GDP, there would be no wages. This is an extreme of the present position they present of declining real wages. There would be no demand in the economy rather than the deficient demand we have now. It’s a Keynesian problem. The only solution to this would be the distribution of government vouchers, or a basic, or citizen’s income. Brynjolfsson and McAfee reject basic income proposals on the grounds that this would disincentivise work, but Malcolm Torry’s recent book on citizen income ‘Money for All’ shows this argument to be wrong. Citizen income is the only solution to ultimate pervasive automation.

Geoff Crocker
Author ‘A Managerial Philosophy of Technology : Technology and Humanity in Symbiosis’ Palgrave Macmillan 2012
www dot philosophyoftechnology dot com.

Once, when I was a boy, I was in an editing suite with my father as he and others pulled together a TVC or two from some video they’d shot. And I recall the client, who, inexplicably was there that day (though perhaps not so inexplicably; the client was from somewhere in the Midwest and the shoot and edit were an excuse for him to boondoggle in the city that never sleeps), making the observation, as the session went into the evening and his theatre tickets (or whatever) were in jeopardy: “Remember how all this technology was going to make our lives easier? Faster? More efficient? Robots and computers were going to give us all sorts of free time, more than we’d know what to do with. We were all gonna be sittin’ back drinkin’ beers all day. Remember that?”

My father looked up briefly from a conversation he was having with an editor and said “machines didn’t promise us more free time; they promised us more options. If you want more free time, we can choose that option right now.”

This is, in its way, the central – and frankly the brilliant - observation that lies at the heart of Brynjolfsson & McAfee’s really tremendous “The Second Machine Age”. And why we recommend that you stop what you’re doing right now and read it. Really.

Now, we know that there (to read the rest of this review, please visit the-agency-review.com/second-machine-age)

A well-researched and thoughtful treatment of "the second half of the chess board" and why seemingly unautomatable processes are being automated ... And how the human race should deal with it. Ultimately I found fewer answers than I wanted but that is because pure clear answers are only going to be revealed with more time and experience. Miss this book at your peril.

The authors of the book feel that a lot of routine jobs are not coming back. The possibility is that we’re in the middle of a new industrial revolution, facing potential mass technological unemployment. Jobs are lost due to technological change. As the co-authors of the book say in this book companies have yet to fulfill current technology, just as it took decades to harness the transformative power of electricity. The authors have concern that having a concentration of wealth in a few hands raises the prospect of a plutocracy.

In the first machine age, innovators figured how to to substitute machines for human physical labor. The advent of steam engines, steel, and combustion lead to a human civilization no longer bound by the limits of human physical strength.

In the second machine age, offer authors Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Jeff Cummings, computers will do for our brains what machines did for our bodies: development will no longer be bound by the limits of human mental ability. The result, manifested in what the authors call “bounty”––abundance of goods––and “spread”––unequal distribution of goods––will be even more profound.

The most interesting insight of The Second Machine Age is not the impending consequences of bounty and spread, but the timing of those consequences. The second machine age is not going to happen years from now, but now. Today. The authors submit that the development of “smart” machines has hit an inflection point, meaning a steep and unprecedented period of development in the fields of computing and robotics is imminent.

To prove their points, the authors leverage famous, cutting-edge technologies, such as IBM’s Watson and Google’s driverless cars. The result of using notorious examples is rhetorical clarity, but the trite examples might leave technologists wanting.

The book concludes with a discussion of how individuals and nations should prepare for The Second Machine Age. It explores a workforce in which humans will be compensated for how well they work “alongside” computers and robots. (It occurs to me, writing on my laptop, that this is perhaps this is not such a groundbreaking insight.) The authors also provide policy advice for forward-looking nations concerned about employing their masses.

Tech-watchers may find The Second Machine Age a redundant but necessary book for coffee table discussion. Its concepts may be more foreign, and therefore more essential reading, for policy-makers.

Many interesting views and projections into our future. It's not a dull read, even with its analysis. The current strengths of humans versus machines in innovation and large pattern recognition is an interesting topic.

a book that reviews much about nothing...title speaks for itself, we are at the Second Industrial Revolution. Half of the book described the past history and benefits of the First Industrial Revolution. Mainly steam power: the power that exponentially spread more than just Moore's Law, but the secondary technological, social adjustment that propel technology itself to drive faster. The same analogy to the eyes' evolutionary development and progression from all living organisms in the past hundred million years. Then the core of these books: GDP is enhanced by technology, but it has no direct relationship with it after passing certain points. How to survive in high tech world: pretty much you are on your own, upgrade yourself, because although now we are in the so called university degree inflation period (everyone has an university degree); if one is not continuously upgrading oneself, he or she will be left out by this great technological social engine. Winner takes all: the Rich takes all, because their rich can exponentially grow. So simply authors point out the failure of slow speed public education, but to promote entrepreneurial spirit. If you do not have the money, crowdsourcing can help you (to become rich and powerful and winner takes all). The prediction of permanent or technical job loss is described: so go to read the book by Jim Clifton on Coming Job War. Overall, this book is scatterly describing one thing: the world is going to have major fluctuation economically, BUT it is temporarily. And it is too bad this our generation has to go through it, suck it up, it is coming. Adapt, adopt yourself with new knowledge. Stop complaining, start acting, away from the boredom, greed, and do nothing. I can see the central theme of this book. Hope others can.

I gave this 5 stars for covering the important key issues and being a call to action on the most important subject of our time. Looking at the exponential growth of technology in the last 100+ years. Its critical to understand and look at the problems we face today through a new lens. For example, in the US we are adding approximately 250,000 jobs each month, but they are in general, low paying. The uneducated would blame this dynamic on the government, but the fact is that every day, new technologies are depressing the value of physical/human labor. On the other hand, If you have the ability to leverage digital technology, then your earning potential is vast. The division between rich and poor will continue to grow as this dynamic continues. And this is not just in the US. Robotics are replacing factory workers in China by the millions. Its not all bad. We have incredible opportunities for creating a bright future, but the first step is understanding the real issues and opportunities.

In The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business contend that we have entered an era during which machines will extend our mental powers in the same way that they've already extended our physical might. The authors point to Google's driverless cars and Apple's Siri as the early examples of what will soon be a flood of smart machines. The authors don't map the exact channels that this flood will follow, but by showing how digital capabilities have become ever more sophisticated (and will continue to gain in sophistication in the future), they make a compelling case that smart machines will shift and blur the line between the human and digital domains. Routine tasks both manual and cognitive that were heretofore reserved for humans will increasingly become digitized.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are convinced that the overall effect of smart digital technologies will be profoundly beneficial. They predict that the growth of these technologies will yield an exponential increase in the trajectory of human social development for the foreseeable future. As digital technologies are combined and recombined, abundance will replace scarcity as the norm in economics, bringing greater choice and freedom. For instance, digital technology should help us live more lightly on the planet than the machine technologies that preceded it.

Although it's not a connection the authors make directly, the diminished physical scale of digital technologies, in comparison with their mechanical and human counterparts, is a major contributor to the authors' principal concern for the future: the uneven distribution of the economic bounty that will accompany the second machine age. Machine technologies like the railroad and the automobile changed the physical landscape, which in turn created a vast ecology of new blue-collar and white-collar jobs. But the migration of work to computers will probably result in significant job losses. And if digital change occurs faster than displaced workers can acquire new skills, they may never catch up.

Further, because of the winner-take-all nature of digital innovation (recall that when Facebook acquired WhatsApp for US$19 billion, WhatsApp had only 55 employees), society could become highly polarized, with a small group of well-paid digital knowledge workers on one side, and on the other, a vast pool of low-paid service workers performing the non-routine tasks that computers can't yet do. Median wages could be very low, indicating huge income disparities between the haves and the have-nots (see "Economics: All Things Being Unequal," by Daniel Gross). These problems, together with the multiple significant changes in policy and practice required to address them, could place an enormous burden on governments.

The authors offer some recommendations for sidestepping these problems and prospering in the second machine age. They say that the focus of educational institutions and students should shift from rote learning to "the skills of ideation, broad-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication"--which machines can't deliver, as yet. Governments should support basic research and offer prizes for innovation (like the kind awarded by DARPA that played such an important role in the development of driverless cars), adopt tax incentives to encourage employment, and radically reform economic metrics such as GDP that fail to capture much that is relevant to human well-being. They make a strong case, but I'd be remiss if I neglected to note that changing education curricula, financial incentives, and economic metrics are often accompanied by unintended consequences that are neither obvious nor benign.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee's ultimate goal is the development of a "freestyle" civilization where people and machines work together to become powerful hybrids. As an example of such a hybrid, they cite chess, where computers can now routinely beat grandmasters, but grandmasters working with machines can muster a combination of strategic acuity and tactical knowledge that is more powerful still. If we translate this idea to the corporate arena, it suggests that in the future, a company's competitive advantage will lie in the ability of its employees to sense and integrate while its computers are busy scanning and calculating.

The first machine age was the Industrial Revolution which ran from about 1760 to the middle of the 19th century. It changed everything, disrupting the agrarian-based life of most people and hurling everyone into the world we see around us. This book, by two MiT professors, suggests that we're now in a second machine age, a second industrial revolution, driven by technological development that will change the world even more fundamentally, and much, much faster. They present an excellent argument, drawing on the knowledge of people at the cutting edge of all the disruptive changes now affecting every aspect of life - from Silicon Valley pioneers to economists and academics.

It's certainly an important book for the times, bringing together all the many strands that cause those queasy fears that many experience as comforting familiarities fall away. But why should you read it? Because as with the first industrial revolution, there will be winners and losers (in the 18th century, the losers were all those poor field workers who had to uproot to work in the dark satanic mills. The winners were those who seized control of the emerging technologies). If you're planning your future, your career, or thinking ahead for your children's sake, there is vital information contained within. Tip: don't become an accountant, a driving instructor, or do any task that involves repeating a process. And really, truly, do not give up on education - go as far as you can.

The winners will be people who have ideas, who can create, whether in business or art. They'll set up their own businesses, get hired as freelancers, and be handsomely rewarded. The losers will be anyone who offers their labour, who performs a task for the benefit of others. Read the book to find out why this is true, and what is means for society.

The authors make their case with an easy-reading style backed up with lots of solid evidence, but it loses a point, possibly unfairly, for an issue that is probably beyond their control. Two chapters are devoted to recommendations, short term and long term, that can help us get the best out of the massive change that is coming to the world in the next ten years. But they are generally far too broad brush. That's because, as the authors point out, it's so hard to predict how fast these changes are going to come: the rate of disruption is accelerating and the churn is getting wilder because one small innovation influences a great many more.

The book is not wholly comforting - the pressures on society are going to be huge - although it could be. The message is plain. We can't resist these changes. They're coming whether we like them or not, and if we try to fight them, all our energy will be wasted in a futile endeavour. But if we try to manage that change we can minimise the destructive elements and maximise the vast potential benefits for society as a whole. All we need to do is to pay attention now.

For someone who doesn't spend much time thinking about technology and it's future this was an enjoyable read. It was thought provoking how this book mixed so many different topics in relation to technology and it's impact on our future on so many different levels. If your not a computer tech wiz, but want to learn about what new innovations are here already and what's just around the corner this book is for you.

Good thing or bad thing ... love it or fear it ... artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate the very near future of all advanced nations. It will dominate in ways most people can barely imagine. "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it will achieve." This book brilliantly reveals just how far we have actually come and how near-at-hand our new future actually is. Are there legitimate reasons to be fearful and cautious? Of course. Are there reasons to be excited and optimistic? Without a doubt - it all comes down to your personal attitude and mindset. One thing you have no right to is a negative opinion on the potential of cutting-edge new technology, without personal knowledge. Read this book to get the knowledge. Ignorance & apathy are the two greatest reasons why most people find themselves "left behind in a world which no longer exists."

This book is a scholarly literature with many references. It is fillled with concise facts, viable recommendations, and interesting predictions. I enjoyed his writing with clarity. I cannot put this book down once I started it.

Recommendations as to how we should teach our children was rather weak. Analysis of challenges we face was excellent. General recommendation that we work with machines rather than attempt to beat them is superb.

This book is a thrilling survey of the high-growth first machine age with its costs and benefits, and the exponential second machine age constrained only lightly by physical limits.

Some of the dystopian possibilities are open to macroeconomic mitigation which is described in the book cautiously -- attempting to not offend any political sensibilities. At the risk of actually doing so, here's a book that may help round out the excellent treatment The Second Machine Age gives us: End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman.

The steam engine developed and improved by James Watt et al in the second half of the 18th century was the most important technology development. Prior to Watt, steam engines harnessed only about 1% of the energy provided by burning coal - his tinkering between 1765 and 1776 more than tripled this, and initiated the biggest and fastest transformation in world history. Authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (EBAM) contend that we're now into the second machine age, thanks to computers and other digital advances now doing for mental power what the steam engine et seq. did for muscle power. Computers, first laughably bad at a lot of things, have now started diagnosing diseases, listening and speaking to us (eg. Siri), translating, and writing high-quality prose, while robots are scurrying around warehouses and driving cars.

Computers are going to continue to improve - we're now at an inflection point akin to that of the first industrial revolution. But this time it's different - the steam engine doubled in performance every 70 years, while computers get better, faster than anything else, ever. 'A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.'

Like the Industrial Revolution, digitization will bring both innumerable benefits, and problems. The Industrial Revolution brought pollution, digitization will bring economic disruption caused by the reduced need for some kinds of workers. Remember - it was only a few years earlier few thought computers would be able to drive cars and the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge (a 150-mile course through the Mojave Desert) produced a 'winner' that covered only 7.4 miles before veering off-course and getting stuck.

Google cars still can't handle complicated city traffic, off-road driving, or any location not already mapped in advance by Google. And Siri can't answer 'Where is Elvis buried?' because it thinks the person's name is Elvis Buried. But don't forget that Watson first performed poorly when training for Jeopardy.' When Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Donner was asked how he'd prepare for a chess match against a computer, he replied 'I'd bring a hammer.'

New robots are designed to be cheap ($20,000 - $4/hour total cost) and easily programmable by workers with less than an hour of training in that regard, capable of performing two unrelated tasks at the same time, and able to handle non-precise material locations. DARPA expects to see robots in 2014 that can drive, climb a ladder, and replace a pump. Forbes uses computer-generated corporate earnings reports generated by Narrative Science. The U.S. Army is considering replacing thousands of troops with robots, per General Cone, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command; it already is testing 'AlphaDog' as a military Sherpa that carries heavy equipment to soldiers.

Innovation doesn't always result in immediate improvement. Early steam-engine powered plants transmitted power via a large central axle which drove a series of pulleys, gears, and smaller crankshafts. Machines requiring the most power needed to be clustered near the main power source - this was maximized via putting equipment also on floors above and below the central steam engine. When electricity first replaced the steam engine, engineers simply bought the largest electric motor they could find and placed it where the steam engine used to be. Later, replacing this large single motor with smaller individual motors allowed natural workflow and productivity improvements of 2X - 3X.

The authors also suggest that software can add to income inequality. Example - $39 TuboTax. Those few individuals that developed this software are reaping large benefits, while tens of thousands of tax preparers' jobs and incomes have been lost or are endangered. Another example - Kodak declared bankruptcy recently (employed 145,000 at its peak, mostly middle-class jobs), was decimated by digital photography. The big stock-market stars of today - Facebook (4,600), Groupon, Instagram (15), etc. have very few employees. Extrapolating these examples suggests the new technology threatens to decimate the middle class. Another aspect - formerly a high-performing individual/company would have difficulty satisfying total demand for his services/its products, thus allowing less attractive others to continue operations. This is no longer true, at least in software - winner can take all, becoming very wealthy, while the rest get nothing at all.

Economist Tyler Cowen speculates that the future belongs to the 10-15% of workers whose skills will augment intelligent machines, and the rest can look forward to long-term stagnation or worse. Growing numbers of low-skilled workers won't be employable at any wage. We already have inflation-adjusted lower median household and median worker incomes today than 1997, increased income inequality, and the employment-to-population ratio has fallen.

There is no economic law that says technological progress needs to economically benefit everyone, or even a majority. EBAM concludes that successful workers in the future will not race these machines, but race with them. Regardless, we're still left with the question - 'How will our economic system work when there are far fewer jobs than people?'

Bottom-Line: 'The Second Machine Age' is interesting and contains important messages.

This book has many wild inaccuracies. Speculation is fine, but definitive statements like computers are bad at pattern recognition, and algorithms (all algorithms) do not take everything into account is absurd. Computers are excellent at pattern matching, in fact it is one of the things they excel at. Not all algorithms are perfect, nor is every algorithm a simplification.

These statements indicate that the author severely lacks knowledge on the subject of modern computers and robotics. His speculation may be interesting, but it is tainted by a large knowledge deficiency. This is troubling since the author makes claims about conducting research on the topic.

For someone who doesn't spend much time thinking about technology and it's future this was an enjoyable read. It was thought provoking how this book mixed so many different topics in relation to technology and it's impact on our future on so many different levels. If your not a computer tech wiz, but want to learn about what new innovations are here already and what's just around the corner this book is for you.

The worst part about this book is that it was written by economists. However the first few chapters have a great review of the impact of the steam engine during the first industrial revolution, and how quickly computer technology is progressing today. The parallel between the two ages is well argued and definitely exciting.

Unfortunately this is not a carefully researched and thought out text. They authors constantly refer to the work of other economists, as if it had merit. They also invoke "Nobel Prize" winners in economics for authority. Unfortunately a Nobel Prize in economics is just slightly more reputable than a Nobel Prize in literature. As a mediocre continuation of the dismal science the second and final thirds of the book are entirely predictable and are not worth your time.

Read the first few chapters for fun and to get motivated to participate in the rapidly evolving tech sector, then close the book.

Disappointing.

I gave extra star only for nice illustration of exponential growth. Otherwise the books was boring with basic massage that we should invest in education etc. Authors probably worked on report with recommendations for some agency and then converted it to a book.