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

by Erik Brynjolfsson

However, there’s never been a worse time to be a worker with only ‘ordinary’ skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots, and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate.

As the roboticist Hans Moravec has observed, “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

Sometimes a difference in degree (in other words, more of the same) becomes a difference in kind (in other words, different than anything else).

Making things free, perfect, and instant might seem like unreasonable expectations for most products, but as more information is digitized, more products will fall into these categories.

“Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.”

Among other things, they found that the number of words in English increased by more than 70 percent between 1950 and 2000,

As the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray observed, “Novelty has charms that our mind can hardly withstand.”1

Another interesting fact is that the majority of Kaggle contests are won by people who are marginal to the domain of the challenge—who, for example, made the best prediction about hospital readmission rates despite having no experience in health care—and so would not have been consulted as part of any traditional search for solutions.

investments in human capital will be increasingly important as routine tasks become automated and the need for human creativity increases.

This coinvention of organization and technology not only significantly increased productivity but tended to require more educated workers and reduce demand for less-skilled workers.

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play.”

Ideation in its many forms is an area today where humans have a comparative advantage over machines.

study hard, using technology and all other available resources to ‘fill up your toolkit’ and acquire skills and abilities that will be needed in the second machine age.

Robots and computers, as powerful and capable as they are, are not about to take all of our jobs.