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

by Erik Brynjolfsson

The deep Q-network built by the London-based startup Deepmind (since acquired by Google) taught itself to play classic Atari video games like Space Invaders and Breakout, simply by looking at the screen. After only a few hours of watching and practicing, it reached superhuman levels of performance on most of the games it was exposed to.

While the official U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 5.1 percent by August 2015, much of the decrease was from people who simply stopped looking for work, dropping out of the labor force.

modern Homo sapiens, equipped with language, fanned out from their African homeland some sixty thousand years ago.

what constitutes a truly important development?

Most of us share a sense that it would be an event or advance that significantly changes the course of things—one that ‘bends the curve’ of human history.