The Second Machine Age Quotes

“Sometimes, one man’s creativity is another machine’s brute-force analysis.22”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The combination of bounty and spread challenges two common though contradictory worldviews. One common view is that advances in technology always boost incomes. The other is that automation hurts workers’ wages as people are replaced by machines. Both of these have a kernel of truth, but the reality is more subtle. 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.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Production in the second machine age depends less on physical equipment and structures and more on the four categories of intangible assets: intellectual property, organizational capital, user-generated content, and human capital.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“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

“mental power is at least as important for progress and development—for mastering our physical and intellectual environment to get things done—as physical power.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

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

“As futurist Kevin Kelly put it “You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.”7”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“second machine age: sustained exponential improvement in most aspects of computing, extraordinarily large amounts of digitized information, and recombinant innovation. These three forces are yielding breakthroughs”
― 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.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

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

“makes extensive use of sensor data; in fact, it essentially converts every car using it into a traffic-speed sensor and uses these data to calculate the quickest routes.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, brought our attention to the way productivity and employment have become decoupled,”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“that firms that use more IT tend to have higher levels of productivity and faster productivity growth than their industry competitors.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“sustained exponential improvement in most aspects of computing, extraordinarily large amounts of digitized information, and recombinant innovation. These three forces are yielding breakthroughs that convert science fiction into everyday reality, outstripping even our recent expectations and theories.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“a sufficiently advanced technology can be indistinguishable from magic.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupery”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“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

“Indeed, as noted by economist Menzie Chinn, there is no visible relationship between top tax rates and overall economic growth, at least in the ranges the U.S. experienced.39”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“the last time income taxes were substantially raised under Bill Clinton, the economy grew rapidly in the years that followed.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“research by our MIT colleague and Nobel Prize–winning economist Peter Diamond, in partnership with Clark Medal winner Emmanuel Saez, suggests that optimal tax rates at the very top of the income distribution might be as high as 76 percent.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“We do not find much evidence supporting the counter-argument that higher taxes on this population will harm economic growth by eroding high earners’ initiative.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“In all likelihood, we could raise more revenue by increasing marginal tax rates on the highest income earners, for instance by introducing new tax brackets at the one-million- and ten-million-dollar levels of annual income.”
― 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.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Google’s driverless car was a direct outgrowth of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenge that offered a one-million-dollar prize for a car that could navigate a specific course without a human driver.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“It’s pretty safe to say, in fact, that hardware, software, networks, and robots would not exist in anything like the volume, variety, and forms we know today without sustained government funding.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“innovation—“the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention”—and,”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“MIT’s Bengt Holmstrom and Stanford’s Paul Milgrom did pioneering work showing that strong incentives for achieving measurable goals can crowd out hard-to-measure goals.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Replacing a [bottom 5 percent] teacher with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“We need digital models of learning and teaching. Not just a technology overlay on old modes of teaching and learning.”*”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies