The Second Machine Age Quotes

“the Sony PlayStation 3, which matched the ASCI Red in performance, yet cost about five hundred dollars, took up less than a tenth of a square meter, and drew about two hundred watts.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“ASCI Red was the first computer to score above one teraflop—one trillion floating point operations* per second—on”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“But smart people have been predicting the end of Moore’s Law for a while now, and they’ve been proved wrong over and over again.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Moore’s Law is coming to an end—in the next decade it will pretty much come to an end so we have 15 years or so.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“the roboticist Hans Moravec has observed, “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.”27”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” He later elaborated, “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the twentieth century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“What is a Sacramento memento?” instead of a “Sacramento souvenir” or any other factually correct response.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“A clue might ask, for example, for “A rhyming reminder of the past in the city of the NBA’s Kings.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Carnegie Mellon University: “We’re at the beginning of a ten-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Hemingway’s quote about how a man goes broke: “Gradually and then suddenly.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Google announced in an October 2010 blog post that its completely autonomous cars had for some time been driving successfully, in traffic, on American roads and highways.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“It was a car without blind spots. But the software doing the driving was aware that cars and trucks driven by humans do have blind spots. The laptop screen displayed the software’s best guess about where all these blind spots were and worked to stay out of them.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Arthur C. Clarke”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“third conclusion is less optimistic: digitization is going to bring with it some thorny challenges.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Weitzman puts it, “the long-term growth of an advanced economy is dominated by the behavior of technical progress.”12”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“second conclusion is that the transformations brought about by digital technology will be profoundly beneficial ones.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“building blocks are already in place for digital technologies to be as important and transformational to society and the economy as the steam engine.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

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

“any list of major human developments include the establishment of other major faiths like Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.3”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” —Plutarch”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

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

“With a greater volume of digital goods introduced each year that do not have a dollar price, this traditional GDP heuristic is becoming less useful.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“With their typical verbal flair, economists call innovations like steam power and electricity general purpose technologies (GPTs).”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“IBM’s Watson draws on a plethora of clever algorithms, but it would be uncompetitive without computer hardware that is about one hundred times more powerful than Deep Blue, its chess-playing predecessor that beat the human world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a 1997 match.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“On Star Trek, tricorders and person-to-person communicators were separate devices, but in the real world the two have merged in the smartphone.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“Moravec’s paradox, nicely summarized by Wikipedia as “the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies