The Second Machine Age Quotes

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.” —Elbert Hubbard”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” —Albert A. Bartlett”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.” —Freeman Dyson”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“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.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. . . . As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“There is no better resource for improving the world and bettering the state of humanity than the world’s humans—all 7.1 billion of us.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“When technology advances too quickly for education to keep up, inequality generally rises.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“But they are useless. They can only give you answers.” —Pablo Picasso, on computers”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“To invent something is to find it in what previously exists.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Not only are the new technologies exponential, digital, and combinatorial, but most of the gains are still ahead of us. In the next twenty-four months, the planet will add more computer power than it did in all previous history. Over the next twenty-four years, the increase will likely be over a thousand-fold.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The Gross National Product does not include the beauty of our poetry or the intelligence of our public debate. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” —Robert F. Kennedy”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.” —Mahatma Gandhi”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Albert Einstein once said that black holes are where God divided by zero, and that created some strange physics. While the marginal costs of digital goods do not quite approach zero, they are close enough to create some pretty strange economics.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“This reflects the career advice that Google chief economist Hal Varian frequently gives: seek to be an indispensable complement to something that’s getting cheap and plentiful.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“As a system capitalism is not perfect, but it’s far better than the alternatives. Winston Churchill said that, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”2 We believe the same about capitalism.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” —Voltaire”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“originated at the California research institute SRI International and was purchased by Apple in 2010, listened to what iPhone users were saying to it, tried to identify what they wanted,”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The argument that technology cannot create ongoing structural unemployment, rather than just temporary spells of joblessness during recessions, rests on two pillars: 1) economic theory and 2) two hundred years of historical evidence. But both of these are less solid than they first appear. First, the theory. There are three economic mechanisms that are candidates for explaining technological unemployment: inelastic demand, rapid change, and severe inequality. If technology leads to more efficient use of labor, then as the economists on the National Academy of Sciences panel pointed out, this does not automatically lead to reduced demand for labor. Lower costs may lead to lower prices for goods, and in turn, lower prices lead to greater demand for the goods, which can ultimately lead to an increase in demand for labor as well.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Between 1811 and 1817, a group of English textile workers whose jobs were threatened by the automated looms of the first Industrial Revolution rallied around a perhaps mythical, Robin Hood–like figure named Ned Ludd and attacked mills and machinery before being suppressed by the British government.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“As Hans Moravec put it, “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Reengineering consultants like to tell the story of how, in the seventeenth century, cows roamed around Boston Common and the neighboring areas. Over time, these cow paths became well-worn, and as shops and homes were constructed, people used the same paths for their carts and carriages. Eventually cobblestones were installed, and by the twentieth century most of the paths had been paved over with asphalt, with no more cows to be seen. As anyone who’s tried to drive in Boston can appreciate, having traffic flow designed by cows may not be the best way to lay out a modern city.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Mechanical Turk, which quickly became popular, was an early instance of what came to be called crowdsourcing, defined by communications scholar Daren Brabham as “an online, distributed problem-solving and production model.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“We are also skeptical of efforts to come up with fundamental alternatives to capitalism. By ‘capitalism’ here, we mean a decentralized economic system of production and exchange in which most of the means of production are in private hands (as opposed to belonging to the government), where most exchange is voluntary (no one can force you to sign a contract against your will), and where most goods have prices that vary based on relative supply and demand instead of being fixed by a central authority. All of these features exist in most economies around the world today. Many are even in place in today’s China, which is still officially communist.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Americans collectively spend over one hundred billion hours stuck in traffic jams, a testament to the fact that road pricing is not yet widely adopted. By some estimates, the revenues from optimal congestion pricing would be enough to eliminate all state taxes in California.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Congestion-reducing activities like carpooling, off-peak commuting, bicycling, telecommuting, and mass transit would all increase with congestion pricing in effect. Already Pigovian principles have been applied to revenue-generating segments of infrastructure like toll roads and London’s congestion zone, which reduces traffic and takes in money by charging motorists to drive into the city center during peak times. Meanwhile, Singapore has implemented an Electronic Road Pricing System that has virtually eliminated congestion.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“In cases like these, most economists advocate taxing the pollution. Such taxes are called “Pigovian” after Arthur Pigou, a British economist of the early twentieth century who was one of their early champions. The taxes have two important benefits. First, they reduce the amount of undesirable activity; if a utility gets taxed based on the amount of sulfur dioxide it releases into the atmosphere, it has strong incentives to invest in scrubber technology that leaves the air cleaner. Second, Pigovian taxes raise revenue for the government, which could be used to compensate those harmed by the pollution (or for any other purpose). They’re a win-win. Taxes of this type are popular across the political spectrum and among people in many fields; members of the “Pigou Club,” a group of advocates identified by economist Gregory Mankiw, include both Alan Greenspan and Ralph Nader.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Foreign-born people make up less than 13 percent of the country’s population in recent years, but between 1995 and 2005 more than 25 percent of all new engineering and technology companies had at least one immigrant cofounder, according to research by Wadhwa, Saxenian, and their colleagues.32 These companies in total had more than $52 billion in 2005 sales, and employed almost 450,000 people.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“In many cases, we can expect to see schools ‘flip the classroom’ by having students listen to lectures at home and work through traditional ‘homework’—exercises, problem sets, and writing assignments—in school, where peers, teachers, and coaches are available to help them.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies