Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee

These are profoundly important issues. But too often, they are variants of a single question: What will technology do to us? And that’s not the right question. Technology is a tool. That is true whether it’s a hammer or a deep neural network. Tools don’t decide what happens to people. We decide. The lesson we’ve learned from studying thousands of companies over our careers is that while technology creates options, success depends on how people take advantage of these options. The success of a venture almost never turns on how much technology it can access, but on how its people use that technology, and on what values they imbue in the organization.

we should ask not “What will technology do to us?” but rather “What do we want to do with technology?”