The Second Machine Age Quotes

“Capitalism allocates resources, generates innovation, rewards effort, and builds affluence with high efficiency, and these are extraordinarily important things to do well in a society. 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. The”
― 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. They’re”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Voltaire: “Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.”6”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Terry Guo of Foxconn has been aggressively installing hundreds of thousands of robots to replace an equivalent number of human workers. He says he plans to buy millions more robots in the coming years. The first wave is going into factories in China and Taiwan, but once an industry becomes largely automated, the case for locating a factory in a low-wage country becomes less compelling. There may still be logistical advantages if the local business ecosystem is strong, making it easier to get spare parts, supplies, and custom components. But over time inertia may be overcome by the advantages of reducing transit times for finished products and being closer to customers, engineers and designers, educated workers, or even regions where the rule of law is strong. This can bring manufacturing back to America, as entrepreneurs like Rod Brooks have been emphasizing. A”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Basic income is not part of mainstream policy discussions today, but it has a surprisingly long history and came remarkably close to reality in twentieth-century America. One of its early proponents was the English-American political activist Thomas Paine, who advocated in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice that everyone should be given a lump sum of money upon reaching adulthood to compensate for the unjust fact that some people were born into landowning families while others were not.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“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

“I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? . . . It came from . . . the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet, [the British Empire]. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. . . . They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.10 Of”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“large-frame pattern recognition, and the most complex forms of communication are cognitive areas where people still seem to have the advantage, and also seem likely to hold on to it for some time to come. Unfortunately, though, these skills are not emphasized in most educational environments today. Instead, primary education often focuses on rote memorization of facts, and on the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic—the”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.”6”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Ideation in its many forms is an area today where humans have a comparative advantage over machines.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“In more and more domains, intelligent and flexible machines, not humans in other countries, are the most cost-effective source for ‘labor.’ If”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson estimate that competition from China can explain about a quarter of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment.28”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“recent advances in technology have created both winners and losers via skill-biased technical change, capital-biased technical change, and the proliferation of superstars in winner-take-all markets. This has reduced the demand for some types of work and skills. In a free market, prices adjust to restore equilibrium between supply and demand, and indeed, real wages have fallen for millions of people in the United States. In”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor.16 The”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”15”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“John Maynard Keynes was less confident that things would always work out so well for workers. His 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” while mostly optimistic, nicely articulated the position of the second camp—that automation could in fact put people out of work permanently, especially if more and more things kept getting automated.”
― 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.1 The”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Digitization creates winner-take-all markets because, as noted above, with digital goods capacity constraints become increasingly irrelevant. A single producer with a website can, in principle, fill the demand from millions or even billions of customers.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Labor share averaged 64.3 percent from 1947 to 2000. In the United States, the share of GDP going to labor has declined over the past decade, falling to its lowest point in the third quarter of 2010, 57.8 percent.”36 What’s more, this is a global phenomenon. Economists Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago find that “the global labor share has significantly declined since the early 1980s, with the decline occurring within the large majority of countries and industries.”37 They argue that this decline is likely due to the technologies of the information age. FIGURE”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The top 1 percent increased their earnings by 278 percent between 1979 and 2007, compared to an increase of just 35 percent for those in the middle of the income distribution. The top 1 percent earned over 65 percent of income in the United States between 2002 and 2007. According to Forbes, the collective net worth of the wealthiest four hundred Americans reached a record two trillion dollars in 2013, more than doubling since 2003.13 I”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“the average American white woman without a high school diploma had a life expectancy of 73.5 years in 2008, compared to 78.5 years in 1990. Life expectancy for white men without a high school education fell by three years during this period.10 It’s”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“For almost two hundred years, wages did increase alongside productivity. This created a sense of inevitability that technology helped (almost) everyone. But more recently, median wages have stopped tracking productivity, underscoring the fact that such a decoupling is not only a theoretical possibility but also an empirical fact in our current economy. How’s”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Rapid advances in our digital tools are creating unprecedented wealth, but there is no economic law that says all workers, or even a majority of workers, will benefit from these advances. For”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Digital technologies can replicate valuable ideas, insights, and innovations at very low cost. This creates bounty for society and wealth for innovators, but diminishes the demand for previously important types of labor, which can leave many people with reduced incomes. The”
― 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”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“A few years ago, we had a very candid discussion with one CEO, and he explained that he knew for over a decade that advances in information technology had rendered many routine information-processing jobs superfluous. At the same time, when profits and revenues are on the rise, it can be hard to eliminate jobs. When the recession came, business as usual obviously was not sustainable, which made it easier to implement a round of painful streamlining and layoffs. As the recession ended and profits and demand returned, the jobs doing routine work were not restored. Like so many other companies in recent years, his organization found it could use technology to scale up without these workers. As”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“digital technologies tend to increase the economic payoff to winners while others become less essential, and hence less well rewarded. The overall gains to the winners have been larger than total losses for everyone else. That simply reflects the fact we discussed earlier: productivity and total income have grown in the overall economy. This good news offers little consolation to those who are falling behind. In some cases the gains, however large, have been concentrated among a relatively small group of winners, leaving the majority of people worse off than before. Skill-Biased”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“People will not spend time or effort on the tenth-best product when they have access to the best.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job. . .”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The theory of recombinant innovation stresses how important it is to have more eyeballs looking at challenges and more brains thinking about how existing building blocks can be rearranged to meet them.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies