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

by Erik Brynjolfsson

Morris has done thoughtful and careful work to quantify what he terms social development (“a group’s ability to master its physical and intellectual environment to get things done”) over time.*

none of the developments discussed so far has mattered very much, at least in comparison to something else—something that bent the curve of human history like nothing before or since. Here’s the graph, with total worldwide human population graphed over time along with social development; as you can see, the two lines are nearly identical: FIGURE 1.1 Numerically Speaking, Most of Human History Is Boring

the Industrial Revolution, which was the sum of several nearly simultaneous developments in mechanical engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, and other disciplines. So you’ve most likely figured out that these technological developments underlie the sudden, sharp, and sustained jump in human progress.

What Bent the Curve of Human History? The Industrial Revolution

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power—the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments—what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

Rapid and accelerating digitization is likely to bring economic rather than environmental disruption, stemming from the fact that as computers get more powerful, companies have less need for some kinds of workers. Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead.

Morris defines human social development as consisting of four attributes: energy capture (per-person calories obtained from the environment for food, home and commerce, industry and agriculture, and transportation), organization (the size of the largest city), war-making capacity (number of troops, power and speed of weapons, logistical capabilities, and other similar factors), and information technology (the sophistication of available tools for sharing and processing information, and the extent of their use). Each of these is converted into a number that varies over time from zero to 250. Overall social development is simply the sum of these four numbers.

famous Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.