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

by Erik Brynjolfsson

• Create a national mutual fund distributing the ownership of capital widely and perhaps inalienably, providing a dividend stream to all citizens and assuring the capital returns do not become highly concentrated. • Use taxes, regulation, contests, grand challenges, or other incentives to try to direct technical change toward machines that augment human ability rather than substitute for it, toward new goods and services and away from labor savings. • Pay people via nonprofits and other organizations to do ‘socially beneficial’ tasks, as determined by a democratic process. • Nurture or celebrate special categories of work to be done by humans only. For instance, care for babies and young children, or perhaps the dying, might fall into this category. • Start a ‘made by humans’ labeling movement, similar to those now in place for organic foods, or award credits for companies that employ humans, similar to the carbon offsets that can be purchased. If some consumers wanted to increase the demand for human workers, such labels or credits would let them do so. • Provide vouchers for basic necessities like food, clothing, and housing, eliminating the extremes of poverty but letting the market manage income above that level. • Ramp up hiring by the government via programs like the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps to clean up the environment, build infrastructure, and address other public goods. A variant is to increase the role of ‘workfare,’ i.e., direct payments tied t...