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

by Erik Brynjolfsson

When multiple GPTs appear at the same time, or in a steady sequence, we sustain high rates of growth over a long period. But if there’s a big gap between major innovations, economic growth will eventually peter out. We’ll call this the ‘innovation-as-fruit’ view of things, in honor of Tyler Cowen’s imagery of all the low-hanging fruit being picked. In this perspective, coming up with an innovation is like growing fruit, and exploiting an innovation is like eating the fruit over time. Another school of thought, though, holds that the true work of innovation is not coming up with something big and new, but instead recombining things that already exist. And the more closely we look at how major steps forward in our knowledge and ability to accomplish things have actually occurred, the more this recombinant view makes sense.