The Second Machine Age Quotes

“Kodak employed 145,300 people at one point, one-third of them in Rochester, New York, while indirectly employing thousands more via the extensive supply chain and retail distribution channels required by companies in the first machine age.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“A team of just fifteen people at Instagram created a simple app that over 130 million customers use to share some sixteen billion photos (and counting).”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“more photos are now taken every two minutes than in all of the nineteenth century.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“OF THE 3.5 TRILLION photos that have been snapped since the first image of a busy Parisian street in 1838, fully 10 percent were taken in the last year.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“For the overall economy, the official GDP numbers miss the value of new goods and services added to the tune of about 0.4 percent of additional growth each year, according to economist Robert Gordon.*”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“In fact, Americans nearly doubled the amount of leisure time they spent on Internet between 2000 and 2011.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“And because our productivity data are, in turn, based on GDP metrics, the burgeoning availability of free goods does not move the productivity dial.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“From 2004 to 2008, the combined revenue from sales of music dropped from $12.3 billion to $7.4 billion—that’s a decline of 40 percent.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The value of music has not changed, only the price.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Even if Moore’s Law ground to a halt today, we could expect decades of complementary innovations to unfold and continue to boost productivity.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” —Milton Friedman”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The second machine age will be characterized by countless instances of machine intelligence and billions of interconnected brains working together to better understand and improve our world. It will make mockery out of all that came before.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“smartphones will outsell feature phones in the near future, and will make up about two-thirds of all sales by 2017.12”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“By 2012 there were more than six billion subscriptions, over 75 percent of which were in the developing world.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“In 2000, for example, there were approximately seven hundred million mobile phone subscriptions in the world, fewer than 30 percent of which were in developing countries.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“It is a remarkable and unmistakable fact that, with the exception of climate change, virtually all environmental, social, and individual indicators of health have improved over time, even as human population has increased.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“And here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines . . . by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald . . . astonishing advances.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The Nature of Technology, “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

“there was almost no economic growth for four centuries and probably for the previous millennium” prior to 1750, or roughly when the Industrial Revolution started.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Innovation is the outstanding fact in the economic history of capitalist society . . . and also it is largely responsible for most of what we would at first sight attribute to other factors.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker”—in”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“When its set of prefixes was expanded in 1991 at the nineteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures, the largest one was yotta, signifying one septillion, or 1024.15 We’re only one prefix away from that in the ‘zettabyte era.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“For a while it also included the salty language–filled Urban Dictionary, but this archive of user-generated content was removed after, to the dismay of its creators, Watson started to include curse words in its responses.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“properties of digital information: such information is non-rival, and it has close to zero marginal cost of reproduction.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“the Cray-2 supercomputer (introduced in 1985) and iPad 2 tablet (introduced in 2011) had almost identical peak calculation speeds.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“The iPhone 4S was about as powerful, in fact, as Apple’s top-of-the-line Powerbook G4 laptop had been a decade earlier.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“In less than ten years exponential digital progress brought teraflop calculating power from a single government lab to living rooms and college dorms all around the world. The PlayStation 3 sold approximately 64 million units. The ASCI Red was taken out of service in 2006.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies