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

by Erik Brynjolfsson

ASCI Red was the first computer to score above one teraflop—one trillion floating point operations* per second—on the standard benchmark test for computer speed. To reach this speed it used eight hundred kilowatts per hour, about as much as eight hundred homes would. By 1997, it had reached 1.8 teraflops. Nine years later another computer hit 1.8 teraflops. But instead of simulating nuclear explosions, it was devoted to drawing them and other complex graphics in all their realistic, real-time, three-dimensional glory. It did this not for physicists, but for video game players. This computer was the Sony PlayStation 3, which matched the ASCI Red in performance, yet cost about five hundred dollars, took up less than a tenth of a square meter, and drew about two hundred watts.

sensors like microphones, cameras, and accelerometers have moved from the analog world to the digital one. They became, in essence, computer chips. As they did so, they became subject to the exponential improvement trajectories of Moore’s Law.

Shapiro and Varian elegantly summarize these attributes by stating that in an age of computers and networks, “Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.”

Today’s most advanced automatic translation services, then, are not the result of any recent insight about how to teach computers all the rules of human languages and how to apply them. Instead, they’re applications that do statistical pattern matching over huge pools of digital content that was costly to produce, but cheap to reproduce.

Esto es sorprendente. Yo pensé que había una base de datos de frases traducidas.

For a while it also included the salty language–filled Urban Dictionary, but this archive of user-generated content was removed after, to the dismay of its creators, Watson started to include curse words in its responses.10

Technology research firm IDC estimates that there were 2.7 zettabytes, or 2.7 sextillion bytes, of digital data in the world in 2012, almost half as much again as existed in 2011.

Cisco predicts that global Internet Protocol traffic will reach 1.3 zettabytes by 2016.13 That’s over 250 billion DVDs of information.

This huge pool of digital words and phrases forms a base for what’s being called culturomics, or “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture.”

With their typical verbal flair, economists call innovations like steam power and electricity general purpose technologies (GPTs).

“deep new ideas or techniques that have the potential for important impacts on many sectors of the economy.”

the argument goes, their economic benefits have already been captured and now most new ‘innovation’ involves entertaining ourselves inexpensively online.

“The gains of the Internet are very real and I am here to praise them, not damn them. . . . Still, the overall picture is this: We are having more fun, in part because of the Internet. We are also having more cheap fun. [But] we are coming up short on the revenue side, so it is harder to pay our debts, whether individuals, businesses, or governments.”

Exacto! Hay más posibilidad de entretenerse que de generar contenidos y productos

“Is growth over?” We’ll respond on behalf of Weitzman, Romer, and the other new growth theorists with “Not a chance. It’s just being held back by our inability to process all the new ideas fast enough.”

she points her finger at a source of text such as a billboard, package of food, or newspaper article, the computer immediately analyzes the images the camera sends to it, then reads the text to her via the speaker.

In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge.

When a girl clicks on a YouTube video instead of going to the movies, she’s saying that she gets more net value from YouTube than traditional cinema.

There are 43,200 hours of new YouTube videos created each day,22 as well as 250 million new photos uploaded each day on Facebook.

But the rise in digital business innovation means we need innovation in our economic metrics. If we are looking at the wrong gauges, we will make the wrong decisions and get the wrong outputs.

We must think hard about what it is we really value, what we want more of, and what we want less of. GDP and productivity growth are important, but they are means to an end, not ends in and of themselves. Do we want to increase consumer surplus? Then lower prices or more leisure might be signs of progress, even if they result in a lower GDP. And, of course, many of our goals are nonmonetary. We shouldn’t ignore the economic metrics, but neither should we let them crowd out our other values simply because they are more measurable.

THE 3.5 TRILLION photos that have been snapped since the first image of a busy Parisian street in 1838, fully 10 percent were taken in the last year.

a rising tide of technical progress will lift

A slightly more complex model allows for the possibility that technology may not affect all inputs equally, but rather may be ‘biased’ toward some and against others.

The net effect has been to decrease demand for less skilled labor while increasing the demand for skilled labor.

Over millions of years, evolution has endowed us with billions of neurons devoted to the subtleties of recognizing a friend’s face, distinguishing different types of sounds, and using fine motor control. In contrast, the abstract reasoning that we associate with ‘higher thought’ like arithmetic or logic is a relatively recent skill, developed over only a few thousand years. It often requires simpler software and less computer power to mimic or even exceed human capabilities on these types of tasks.

it is also changing the way national income is divided between the owners of physical capital and labor (people like factory owners and factory workers)—the

When ‘winner-take-all’ markets become more important, income inequality will rise because pay at the very top pulls away from pay in the middle.2

Likewise, the fifteen people who created Instagram didn’t need a lot of unskilled human helpers and did leverage some valuable physical capital. But most of all, they benefitted from their talent, timing, and ties to the right people.

Suddenly second-rate producers can no longer count on consumer ignorance or geographic barriers to protect their margins.

In the years to come we will continue to benefit in the form of things that are relatively easy to measure, such as higher productivity, and things that are less susceptible to metrics, such as the boost we get from free digital goods.

Some observers advance what we will call the ‘strong bounty’ argument, which essentially says that a focus on spread is misleading and inappropriate, since bounty is the more important phenomenon and exists even at the bottom of the spread.

So here is the concern: economic inequality will lead to greater political inequality, and those who are further empowered politically will use this to gain greater economic advantage, stacking the cards in their favor and increasing economic inequality still further—a quintessential vicious circle. And we may be in the midst of

As Arthur C. Clarke is purported to have put it, “The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play.”

A second lesson of economics and business strategy is that it’s great to be a complement to something that’s increasingly plentiful.

Students themselves, leaders of the organizations that might hire them, educators, policy makers and elected officials, and many others also wonder which human skills and abilities, if any, will still be valued as technology continues to improve.

the advantage still came down to creating a new idea at some point.”5 As we look across examples of things we haven’t seen computers do yet, this idea of the “new idea” keeps recurring.

So ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and the most complex forms of communication are cognitive areas where people still seem to have the advantage, and also seem likely to hold on to it for some time to come.

They don’t need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.

Many economists on both the left and the right have agreed with King. Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.4

Mechanical Turk, which quickly became popular, was an early instance of what came to be called crowdsourcing, defined by communications scholar Daren Brabham as “an online, distributed problem-solving and production model.”

We’ve seen not just vast increases in wealth but also, on the whole, more freedom, more social justice, less violence, and less harsh conditions for the least fortunate and greater opportunities for more and more people.

Pero ahora la tecnologia pareciera estar en el lado contrario de la libertad y la riqueza. Esto ha sido escrito antes de que hayan trolles bots en internet y de las noticiss falsas.

As more and more work is done by machines, people can spend more time on other activities. Not just leisure and amusements, but also the deeper satisfactions that come from invention and exploration, from creativity and building, and from love, friendship, and community.

Otra vision contradecida por los avances. En este caso por las adicciones digitales.

Will we choose to have information widely disseminated or tightly controlled? Will our prosperity be broadly shared? What will be the nature and magnitude of rewards we give to our innovators? Will we build vibrant relationships and communities? Will everyone have the opportunities to discover, create, and enjoy the best of life?