Work, Progress & Prosperity InATimeOf Brilliant Technologies

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Our focus will be The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee ($16.03 + shipping or $12.99 Kindle from Amazon.com -- 320 pages).

Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and one of the most cited scholars in information systems and economics. Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business and the author of Enterprise 2.0.

Excerpts from the Washington Post book review of The Second Machine Age --

“Now come two professors from MIT with a more optimistic and intriguing hypothesis -- namely, that the global economy is on the cusp of a dramatic growth spurt driven by smart machines that finally take full advantage of advances in computer processing, artificial intelligence, networked communication and the digitization of just about everything.

“The big winners in this new era will be consumers, who will be able to buy a wider range of higher-quality goods and services at lower prices. The other winners will be those who create and finance the new machines or figure out how best to use them to gain competitive advantage. Great wealth will be created in the process.

“In the first machine age -- the age of Kodak (which employed 145,000 people) -- productivity, employment and median income all rose in tandem. In the second, the growth in productivity has essentially been decoupled from jobs and income. And this divergence has its roots not in labor law or tax codes, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, but in the very nature of the digital economy, in which a set of goods and services can be provided to an infinite number of additional customers, all at the same time, at a cost that is often close to zero.”
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Ted Gurney
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Work, Progress & Prosperity InATimeOf Brilliant Technologies

Post by Ted Gurney »

Originally proposed Sat Aug 08 1:45 pm -- 9 views before being transplanted here.


I, Ted Gurney, propose that we read The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (W.W. Norton & Co., 2014 -- $16.03 + shipping or $12.99 Kindle from Amazon.com – 257 pages apart from various supplements).

This book was strongly recommended by several of my college classmates* as an excellent prediction of good jobs and investments and a warning not to sink funds in outmoded technology. It has a very hopeful outlook but also has warnings for those who do not keep up with developments. I thought the discussions of job opportunities and the recently distorted income distribution were especially good.

The authors are two professors at MIT's Center for Digital Business.


* Reading Liberally Editorial Note -- Ted graduated from Harvard in 1961. [He then received his PhD from Yale in 1965 and taught at the University of Utah 1974-2004 with his wife Elizabeth (“Tucker”) Gurney, who was also a Biology Professor and has also been a long-time Reading Liberally regular.]

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