The Second Machine Age Quotes

“The first is that we’re living in a time of astonishing progress with digital technologies—those that have computer hardware, software, and networks at their core. These technologies are not brand-new; businesses have been buying computers for more than half a century, and Time magazine declared the personal computer its “Machine of the Year” in 1982. But just as it took generations to improve the steam engine to the point that it could power the Industrial Revolution, it’s also taken time to refine our digital engines.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“So this is a book about the second machine age unfolding right now—an inflection point in the history of our economies and societies because of digitization. It’s an inflection point in the right direction—bounty instead of scarcity, freedom instead of constraint—but one that will bring with it some difficult challenges and choices.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“As the technologist Tim O’Reilly puts it, they’d be efforts to protect the past against the future.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“It is not the owner of a stage coach who builds railways.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Our recommendations about how people can remain valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age are straightforward: work to improve the skills of ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication instead of just the three Rs. And whenever possible, take advantage of self-organizing learning environments, which have a track record of developing these skills in people.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Adjusted for inflation, the combined net worth on Forbes’ billionaire list has more than quintupled since 2000, but the income of the median household in America has fallen.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Taken as a group, the top 20 percent got not 100 percent of the increase, but more than 100 percent.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“As Paul Samuelson and Bill Nordhaus put it, “While the GDP and the rest of the national income accounts may seem to be arcane concepts, they are truly among the great inventions of the twentieth century.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Analog dollars are becoming digital pennies.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“THE PREVIOUS FIVE CHAPTERS laid out the outstanding features of the second machine age: sustained exponential improvement in most aspects of computing, extraordinarily large amounts of digitized information, and recombinant innovation.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that make them more valuable.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“We know more than we can tell.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“acting in concert and without human control, built a rope bridge across a short chasm. There are plenty of other wild drone”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“This progression drives home the point that digital innovation is recombinant innovation in its purest form. Each development becomes a building block for future innovations. Progress doesn’t run out; it accumulates.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson Andrew McΑfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

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

“They write that “the impact of college is largely determined by individual effort and involvement in the academic, interpersonal, and extracurricular offerings on a campus.” 14 This work leads directly to our most fundamental recommendation to students and their parents: study hard, using technology and all other available resources to ‘fill up your toolkit’ and acquire skills and abilities that will be needed in the second machine age.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“creation of true machine intelligence and the connection of all humans via a common digital network, transforming the planet’s economics. Innovators”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“For instance, in Sweden, Finland, and Germany, income inequality has actually grown more quickly over the past twenty to thirty years than in the United States. 15”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Kodak made its founder, George Eastman, a rich man, but it also provided middle-class jobs for generations of people and created a substantial share of the wealth created in the city of Rochester after company’s founding in 1880. But 132 years later, a few months before Instagram was sold to Facebook, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. 8 Photography has never been more popular.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“But analog photography peaked in 2000.2”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The many years that we all spend in schools learning skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic—as well as the additional learning that happens on the job and on our own—makes us more productive and, in some cases, is intrinsically rewarding. It is also a contribution to the nation’s capital stock.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“To get a sense on the scale of this effort, consider that last year users collectively spent about 200 million hours each day just on Facebook, much of it creating content for other users to consume. 13 That’s ten times as many person-hours as were needed to build the entire Panama Canal. 14 None of this is counted in our GDP statistics as either input or output, but these kinds of zero-wage and zero-price activities still contribute to welfare.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“No matter how rich or poor we are, each of us gets twenty-four hours in a day. In order to consume YouTube, Facebook, or e-mail, we must ‘pay’ attention. In fact, Americans nearly doubled the amount of leisure time they spent on Internet between 2000 and 2011. This implies that they valued it more than the other ways they could spend their time. By considering the value of users’ time and comparing leisure time spent on the Internet to time spent in other ways, Erik and Joo Hee estimated that the Internet created about $ 2,600 of value per user each year. None of this showed up in the GDP statistics but if it had, GDP growth—and thus productivity growth—would have been about 0.3 percent higher each year. In other words, instead of the reported 1.2 percent productivity growth for 2012, it would have been 1.5 percent.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“However, as noted above, replacing a paid newspaper with an equivalent free new service would decrease GDP even though it increased consumer surplus. 9 In this case, consumer surplus would be a better measure of our economic well-being.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“And the data on everything from air quality to commodity prices to levels of violence show improvement over time.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth.”7”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. . . . Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least ten years.2”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts. As”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.4 The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents.5 Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation; and many working Americans didn’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to people who could work, but chose not to. By the time of his 1972 reelection campaign, Nixon had abandoned the Family Assistance Plan, and universal income guarantee programs have not been seriously discussed by federal elected officials and policymakers since then.* Avoiding”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies