Erik Brynjolfsson

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pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Bundling benefits both superstars and niche providers by creating a more complete product offering and increasing sales to consumers with different opinions about the values of the bundled products. But markets in which bundling is common also tend to be winner-take-all markets. See Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, Management Science 45, no. 12 (1999); Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Bundling and Competition on the Internet,” Marketing Science 19, no. 1 (2000): 63–82, doi:10.1287/mksc.19.1.63.15182. 16. See Michael D. Smith and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Consumer Decision-making at an Internet Shopbot: Brand Still Matters,” NBER (December 1, 2001): 541–58. 17. Catherine Rampell, “College Degree Required by Increasing Number of Companies,” New York Times, February 19, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html. 18.

—Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and author of The Immigrant Exodus Also by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee RACE AGAINST THE MACHINE How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy Also by Erik Brynjolfsson WIRED FOR INNOVATION Also by Andrew McAfee ENTERPRISE 2.0 New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges Copyright © 2014 by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W.

Congressional Budget Office, The 2013 Long-Term Budget Outlook, September 2013, p. 95. http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44521-LTBO2013.pdf. 4. Robert Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987. 5. Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Productivity Paradox of Information Technology,” Communications of the ACM 36, no. 12 (1993): 66–77, doi:10.1145/163298.163309. 6. See, e.g., Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt, “Paradox Lost: Firm Level Evidence on the Returns to Information Systems,” Management Science 42, no. 4 (1996): 541–58. See also Brynjolfsson and Hitt, “Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (2000): 23–48, which summarizes much of the literature on this question. 7.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

. ‡‡‡ The surprising economics of bundling and sharing for information goods were worked out in a series of papers by Erik with Yannis Bakos, and other coauthors. See, for example, Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits, and Efficiency,” Management Science 45, no. 12 (1999): 1613–30; Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Bundling and Competition on the Internet,” Marketing Science 19, no. 1 (2000): 63–82; and Yannis Bakos, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Douglas Lichtman, “Shared Information Goods,” Journal of Law and Economics 42, no. 1 (1999): 117–56. §§§ The rates are periodically reassessed by a special set of judges on the congressional Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), where Erik had the pleasure of testifying in 2005 about the economics of the industry.

Norton, 292–94 Xiaomi, 203 Yahoo, 232–33 Yates, Joanne, 311 Yellow Cab Cooperative, 201 YouTube, 77, 231, 273 Zayner, Josiah, 272 Zervas, Georgios, 223 Zuckerberg, Mark, 8, 10 Also by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies Race against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy Also by Erik Brynjolfsson Wired for Innovation Also by Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges Copyright © 2017 by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W.

Meehl, “Causes and Effects of My Disturbing Little Book,” Journal of Personality Assessment 50, no. 3 (1986): 370–75, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa5003_6. 42 Working with the US Census Bureau: Erik Brynjolfsson and Kristina McElheran, “Data in Action: Data-Driven Decision Making in US Manufacturing,” 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2722502. Early work using a smaller sample found similar results: Erik Brynjolfsson, Lorin M. Hitt, and Heekyung Hellen Kim, “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?” 2011, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=1819486. 43 7.5 billion: Worldometers, “Current World Population,” accessed February 26, 2017, http://www.worldometers.info/world-population. 43 “Because System 1 operates automatically”: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p. 28. 44 “1.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

Paul Krugman, “Robots and Robber Barons,” New York Times, 9 December 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?_r=0. 13. Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders, “What the GDP Gets Wrong,” MIT Sloan Management Review, fall 2009, http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-the-gdp-gets-wrong-why-managers-should-care/. Accessed 27 March 2013. 14. See, for example, “What Good Is the Internet?” Economist, 8 March 2013, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/technology. Accessed 27 March 2013. 15. Erik Brynjolfsson and JooHee Oh, “The Attention Economy: Measuring the Value of Free Digital Services on the Internet,” MIT working paper, July 2012.

But they are also the foundation of long-term growth.11 We find it hard to think straight about productivity anyway. Kelly is comfortable with the idea of robots taking over far more of the work people currently undertake. Some economists have recently, on the contrary, been worried about increasing automation. Paul Krugman waded into the debate, on the heels of the MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their book Race against the Machine. Krugman wrote in his New York Times column: “What’s striking about their examples is that many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers. Still, can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general?

A related issue is how to account for the value of a specific type of intangible product or service, the purely digital items such as online music, search engines, apps, crowd-sourced encyclopedias or software, and so on. Often these have a price of zero, and with no market price they are not captured in GDP statistics. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders put it, in a nod to the famous statement by Robert Solow about computers, “We see the influence of the information age everywhere, except in the GDP statistics.”13 So, for example, the record industry’s sales of music have declined in dollar terms, but there is almost certainly more rather than less listening to music.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Vijay Gurbaxani and Seungjin Whang, “The Impact of Information Systems on Organizations and Markets,” Communications of the ACM 34, 1 (1991), 59–73. 10. Ibid., 71. 11. Ibid., 71–72. 12. See, for example, Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt, “Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, 4 (2000): 23–48, or Timothy F. Bresnahan, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Lorin M. Hitt, “Information Technology, Workplace Organization, and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (2002): 339–376, or Prasanna Tambe, Lorin Hitt and Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Extroverted Firm: How External Information Practices Affect Innovation and Productivity,” Management Science 58(2012): 678-697. 13.

Some that were quite influential early on were with Odile Beniflah, Lauren Capelin, Shelby Clark, Sunil Paul, Jessica Scorpio, Erica Swallow, Molly Turner, and Hal Varian. Some of the others that were especially notable and/or frequent were with Bhavish Aggarwal, Alisha Ali, Douglas Atkin, Michel Avital, Emily Badger, Mara Balestrini, Yochai Benkler, Rachel Botsman, danah boyd, Nathan Blecharczyk, Jennifer Bradley, Erik Brynjolfsson, Valentina Carbone, Emily Castor, David Chiu, Marc-David Chokrun, Sonal Choksi, Peter Coles, Chip Conley, Ariane Conrad, Arnab Das, Cristian Fleming (and his team at the Public Society), Richard Florida, Natalie Foster, Justin Fox, Liz Gannes, Lisa Gansky, Marina Gorbis, Neal Gorenflo, Alison Griswold, Vijay Gurbaxani, Tanner Hackett, Aassia Haroon Haq, Scott Heiferman, Jeremy Heimans, Sara Horowitz, Sam Hodges, Milicent Johnson, Noah Karesh, Stephane Kasriel, Sarah Kessler, David Kirkpatrick, Marjo Koivisto, Karim Lakhani, Kevin Laws, Michael Luca, Benita Matofska, Andrew McAfee, Ryan McKillen, Lesa Mitchell, Amy Nelson, Jeff Nickerson, Melissa O’Young, Janelle Orsi, Jeremy Osborn, Jeremiah Owyang (to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude for his remarkably selfless sharing of ideas and data), Wrede Petersmeyer, Ai-Jen Poo, Andrew Rasiej, Simone Ross, Anita Roth, Chelsea Rustrum, Carolyn Said, Marcela Sapone, Marie Schneegans, Trebor Scholz, Swati Sharma, Clay Shirky, Dane Stangler, Alex Stephany, James Surowiecki, Jason Tanz, Marie Ternes, Henry Timms, Viv Wang, Cheng Wei, Adam Werbach, Jamie Wong, Caroline Woolard, and numerous members of the OuiShare collective (including Flore Berlingen, Julie Braka, Albert Cañigueral, Simone Cicero, Javier Creus, Arthur De Grave, Elena Denaro, Diana Fillipova, Marguerite Grandjean, Asmaa Guedira, Ana Manzanedo, Bernie Mitchell, Edwin Mootoosamy, Ruhi Shamim, Maeva Tordo and especially Francesca Pick).

Gurbaxani and Whang, however, maintain that either type of growth may be promoted by digital technologies, and that the direction or shift of economic activity cannot be clearly predicted. So, what has transpired since? Digital technologies permeate the economy today, but the enduring changes have not moved the organization of economic activity in any one specific direction. As MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson and his collaborators (Lorin Hitt of the University of Pennsylvania, Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford University, and my NYU colleague Prasanna Tambe, among others) have discovered in a series of studies, digital technologies hold the potential to dramatically improve the productivity of economic activity organized within companies, but such productivity gains only accrue to those firms (about 20% of all firms in their studies) that also invest in a series of “complementary organizational changes,” like the redesign of work, an increase in performance-based pay, an increased empowerment of workers, and a flattening of the hierarchy.12 We have also witnessed a wide range of outsourcing that has been enabled by digital technologies, as Dartmouth’s James Quinn described in detail in his MIT Sloan Management Review article.13 Today, for example, a vast majority of firms outsource all or part of their employee tech support and call-center operations, and almost all of high-tech manufacturing is done by a few giant firms based in China, Taiwan, and South Korea.


pages: 72 words: 21,361

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Race Against the Machine How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee Digital Frontier Press Lexington, Massachusetts © 2011 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about quantity discounts, email info@raceagainstthemachine.com www.RaceAgainstTheMachine.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brynjolfsson, Erik Race against the machine : how the digital revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the economy.

Ever-greater investments in education, dramatically increasing the average educational level of the American workforce, helped prevent inequality from soaring as technology automated more and more unskilled work. While education is certainly not synonymous with skill, it is one of the most easily measurable correlates of skill, so this pattern suggests that demand for upskilling has increased faster than its supply. Studies by this book’s co-author Erik Brynjolfsson along with Timothy Bresnahan, Lorin Hitt, and Shinku Yang found that a key aspect of SBTC was not just the skills of those working with computers, but more importantly the broader changes in work organization that were made possible by information technology. The most productive firms reinvented and reorganized decision rights, incentives systems, information flows, hiring systems, and other aspects of organizational capital to get the most from the technology.

The MIT Center for Digital Business (CDB) has been the ideal home from which to conduct this work, and we’re particularly grateful to our colleague David Verrill, executive director of the CDB. David makes the place run beautifully; he’ll be the last person ever replaced by a machine. We claim sole ownership of virtually none of the ideas presented here, but we’re emphatic that all the mistakes are 100% ours. Authors Erik Brynjolfsson is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, Chairman of the Sloan Management Review, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and co-author of Wired for Innovation: How IT Is Reshaping the Economy. He graduated from Harvard University and MIT.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

For other parts of the book, there were people I spent whole days with, such as Timothy Buchman at the Emory medical center in Atlanta and Nick Dokoozlian in the grape vineyards of central California and Michael Haydock in suburban Minneapolis. Many others were interviewed for this book. They include Sam Adams, Brooke Barrett, Richard Berner, Patrick Bosworth, Thomas Botts, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Calkins, Murray Campbell, Dennis Charney, Herbert Chase, Jeffrey Chester, Sharath Cholleti, Adam D’Angelo, Arne Duncan, Sue Duncan, Tony Fadell, Edward Felten, David Ferrucci, Rachana Shah Fischer, Brian Gehlich, Jim Goodnight, Nagui Halim, Hendrik Hamann, Glenn Hammerbacher, Lenore Hammerbacher, Danny Hillis, Jeffrey Immelt, Jon Iwata, James Kalina, Kaan Katircioglu, Gary King, Jon Kleinberg, Martin Kohn, Randy Komisar, Patricia Kovatch, Edward Lazowska, and Michael Linderman.

The librarian choice is entirely logical, until you get the data Kahneman knew in advance. The data makes you rethink your intuition. The prospect of such data-animated nudges to sharpen decision making, repeated countless times, up and down corporations, throughout the economy, is the why Erik Brynjolfsson believes big data will bring a “management revolution.” Brynjolfsson is an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and an intellectual champion for the transformative power of big data. He is tall, with deep-set eyes, reddish-brown hair, and a trimmed beard and mustache.

Today, the manufacturing share of the labor force has declined to about 8 percent, even as the nation’s manufacturing output has increased sharply in value over the decades. Yet even techno-optimists have second thoughts as they see smarter machines likely to take on cognitive tasks long reserved for humans—when what is being replaced is not sweat but synapses. In The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT make the case for a technology-led surge in productivity and growth in the future, but one that will have more sweeping and disruptive effects on society than previous waves of automation. The book, published in 2014, calls for adaptive changes in policy, education, and skills training to prevent more and more workers from being left behind.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Our friendships, economy, and society now depend on billions of social media connections around the world and no one on the planet understands them better than Sinan Aral. In this lively, engaging masterpiece, drawing on his twenty years of pioneering research, Aral separates hype from reality, clarifies our most pressing challenges, and explains how we must respond.” —ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and bestselling co-author of The Second Machine Age “In a sea of books about social media, this is the one to read. Sinan Aral understands the new social age like no one else, and The Hype Machine offers the single best examination of how social media works, what it does to us, and how we can make it better for consumers, citizens, and democracies.

In that moment, sitting in Dewey Library, I had an epiphany: Digital social networking was going to turbocharge how information, behavior, economic opportunity, and political ideology flowed between people. It was going to transform society as we knew it and affect everything from business to politics to public health. I remember running to the nearest Pine terminal (a computer program for sending email) and sending an email to my PhD adviser, Erik Brynjolfsson, to request a meeting. I met Erik the next day and explained that I wanted to focus my PhD dissertation on digital social networks. I told him that I thought these networks were going to be the next big thing in personal computing and that they were going to transform society. Now, Erik didn’t study social networks, and he hadn’t ever formally thought about graph theory.

Are we more likely to be swayed by the opinions of our friends when shopping for high-status goods, like a Rolex watch or a luxury car, or experience goods, like hotels and restaurants, which require us to experience the products or to hear about the experiences of others to evaluate them? To find out, Shan Huang, Jeffrey Hu, Erik Brynjolfsson, and I conducted an even larger, more comprehensive experiment in collaboration with WeChat, the largest social platform in China. We randomly assigned the number of social cues shown to 37 million WeChat users in their “moments” ads across seventy-one products in twenty-five categories and analyzed the differences in social advertising effectiveness across products.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The-Numbers.com—Cukier interviews with Bruce Nash, October 2011 and July 2012. [>] Brynjolfsson study—Erik Brynjolfsson, Lorin Hitt, and Heekyung Kim, “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?” working paper, April 2011 (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819486). [>] On Rolls-Royce—See “Rolls-Royce: Britain’s Lonely High-Flier,” The Economist, January 8, 2009 (http://www.economist.com/node/12887368). Figures updated from press office, November 2012. Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Michael Sorell, and Feng Zhu, “Scale Without Mass: Business Process Replication and Industry Dynamics,” Harvard Business School working paper, September 2006 (http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-016.pdf also http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5532.html). [>] On the movement toward increasingly large data holders—See also Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits, and Efficiency,” Management Science 45 (December 1999), pp. 1613–30. [>] Philip Evans—Interviews with the authors, 2011 and 2012. 8.

In another case, Nash informed the IMAX studio that a sailing documentary would probably be profitable only if its $12 million budget was reduced to $8 million. “It made the producer happy—the director less so,” says Nash. From whether to make a movie to what shortstop to sign, the shift in corporate decision-making is beginning to show up on bottom lines. Erik Brynjolfsson, a business professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and his colleagues studied the performance of companies that excel at data-driven decision-making and compared it with the performance of other firms. They found that productivity levels were as much as 6 percent higher at such firms than at companies that did not emphasize using data to make decisions.

Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Michael Sorell, and Feng Zhu, “Scale Without Mass: Business Process Replication and Industry Dynamics,” Harvard Business School working paper, September 2006 (http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-016.pdf also http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5532.html). [>] On the movement toward increasingly large data holders—See also Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits, and Efficiency,” Management Science 45 (December 1999), pp. 1613–30. [>] Philip Evans—Interviews with the authors, 2011 and 2012. 8. Risks [>] On the Stasi—Much of the literature unfortunately is in German, but one well researched exception is Kristie Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (Cambridge University Press, 2008); a very personal story is shared in Timothy Garton Ash, The File (Atlantic Books, 2008).


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

suffer stagnant wages: Robert Allen, “Engel’s Pause: A Pessimist’s Guide to the British Industrial Revolution,” University of Oxford Department of Economics Working Papers, April 2007, https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/department-of-economics-discussion-paper-series/engel-s-pause-a-pessimist-s-guide-to-the-british-industrial-revolution. technologies that “really matter”: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014), 75–77. “the great decoupling”: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “Jobs, Productivity and the Great Decoupling,” New York Times, December 11, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/opinion/global/jobs-productivity-and-the-great-decoupling.html. doubled its share: Eduardo Porter and Karl Russell, “It’s an Unequal World.

The ramifications of these breakthroughs will cut across dozens of industries, with the potential to fundamentally alter economic processes and even social organization. These are what economists call general purpose technologies, or GPTs. In their landmark book The Second Machine Age, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee described GPTs as the technologies that “really matter,” the ones that “interrupt and accelerate the normal march of economic progress.” Looking only at GPTs dramatically shrinks the number of data points available for evaluating technological change and job losses. Economic historians have many quibbles over exactly which innovations of the modern era should qualify (railroads?

In recent years, he has been warning against the no-questions-asked optimism around technological change and employment. “The answer is surely not to try to stop technical change,” Summers told the New York Times in 2014, “but the answer is not to just suppose that everything’s going to be O.K. because the magic of the market will assure that’s true.” Erik Brynjolfsson has issued similar warnings about the growing disconnect between the creation of wealth and jobs, calling it “the biggest challenge of our society for the next decade.” AI: PUTTING THE G IN GPT What does all this have to do with AI? I am confident that AI will soon enter the elite club of universally recognized GPTs, spurring a revolution in economic production and even social organization.


Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport

Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch

It’s not yet clear at what pace managers will adopt these new approaches. But h ­ istory would indicate that it’s unlikely. After all, small data a­nalytics have been around for decades, yet many managers still make gutbased decisions—and power and politics certainly are unlikely to disappear from organizations anytime soon. And while my friends Erik ­Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee talk and write often about the decline in importance of the “Hippo”—the highest-paid person’s Chapter_01.indd 27 03/12/13 3:24 AM 28 big data @ work opinion—such animals are hardly extinct in the organizations I visit (though it would certainly be desirable if this transpired quickly).19 If you count on the disappearance of power and politics from decision making, you are likely to be disappointed—at least in the short run.

Appendix.indd 205 03/12/13 2:14 PM 206  Appendix The following questions are largely modified from a set used by the ­International Institute for Analytics to assess analytical capabilities. I have also drawn in small measure from questions created to assess big data readiness by MIT researchers Erik ­Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee.1 The questions can be applied to an entire organization or to a business unit within it. Whoever replies to the questions should be familiar with the entire organization or unit’s approaches to big data. Data ——— We have access to very large, unstructured, or fast-moving data for analysis. ——— We integrate data from multiple internal sources into a data warehouse or mart for easy access. ——— We integrate external data with internal to facilitate ­high-value analysis of our business environment. ——— We maintain consistent definitions and standards across the data we use for analysis. ——— Users, decision makers, and product developers trust the quality of our data.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira, “The Unreasonable ­Effectiveness of Data,” IEEE Intelligent Systems, March 2009, 8–12. 18. Pew Research Center, Internet Users Don’t Like Targeted Ads, March 13, 2012, http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/internet-users-dont-like-targeted-ads/. 19. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Big Data: The Management ­Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, October 2012, 60–68. Chapter 2 1. “88 Acres: How Microsoft Quietly Built the City of the Future,” http://www .microsoft.com/en-us/news/stories/88acres/88-acres-how-microsoft-quietly-builtthe-city-of-the-future-chapter-1.aspx. 2.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Digital technologies that have computer hardware, software and networks at their core are not new, but in a break with the third industrial revolution, they are becoming more sophisticated and integrated and are, as a result, transforming societies and the global economy. This is the reason why Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have famously referred to this period as “the second machine age”2, the title of their 2014 book, stating that the world is at an inflection point where the effect of these digital technologies will manifest with “full force” through automation and and the making of “unprecedented things”.

Here, in particular, I thank members of the Emerging Technologies taskforce: David Gleicher, Rigas Hadzilacos, Natalie Hatour, Fulvia Montresor and Olivier Woeffray – and the many others who spent time thinking deeply about these issues: Chidiogo Akunyili, Claudio Cocorocchia, Nico Daswani, Mehran Gul, Alejandra Guzman, Mike Hanley, Lee Howell, Jeremy Jurgens, Bernice Lee, Alan Marcus, Adrian Monck, Thomas Philbeck and Philip Shetler-Jones. My deep gratitude also goes to all members of the Forum community who helped shape my thinking about the fourth industrial revolution. I am particularly thankful to Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson for inspiring my ideas on the impact of technological innovation and the great challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, and to Dennis Snower and Stewart Wallis for underscoring the need for values-based narratives if we are to succeed in harnessing the fourth industrial revolution for the global good.

SharpBrains, USA, Nov 10 http://sharpbrains.com/blog/2015/11/10/10-neurotechnologies-about-to-transform-brain-enhancement-and-brain-health/ Notes 1 The terms “disruption” and “disruptive innovation” have been much discussed in business and management strategy circles, most recently in Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald, What is Disruptive Innovation?, Harvard Business Review, December 2015. While respecting the concerns of Professor Christensen and his colleagues about definitions, I have employed the broader meanings in this book. 2 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. 3 James Manyika and Michael Chui, “Digital Era Brings Hyperscale Challenges”, The Financial Times, 13 August 2014. 4 The designer and architect Neri Oxman offers a fascinating example of what I just described.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb not only understand its essence but also deliver deep insights into its economic implications and intrinsic trade-offs. If you want to clear the fog of AI hype and see clearly the core of AI’s challenges and opportunities for society, your first step should be to read this book.” — ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON, MIT professor; author, The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd “ Prediction Machines is a must-read for business leaders, policy makers, economists, strategists, and anyone who wants to understand the implications of AI for designing business strategies, decisions, and how AI will have an impact on our society

In particular, we thank Abe Heifets of Atomwise, Liran Belanzon of BenchSci, Alex Shevchenko of Grammarly, Marc Ossip, and Ben Edelman for the time they spent with us in interviews, as well as Kevin Bryan for his comments on the overall manuscript. Also, we thank our colleagues for discussions and feedback, including Nick Adams, Umair Akeel, Susan Athey, Naresh Bangia, Nick Beim, Dennis Bennie, James Bergstra, Dror Berman, Vincent Bérubé, Jim Bessen, Scott Bonham, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andy Burgess, Elizabeth Caley, Peter Carrescia, Iain Cockburn, Christian Catalini, James Cham, Nicolas Chapados, Tyson Clark, Paul Cubbon, Zavain Dar, Sally Daub, Dan Debow, Ron Dembo, Helene Desmarais, JP Dube, Candice Faktor, Haig Farris, Chen Fong, Ash Fontana, John Francis, April Franco, Suzanne Gildert, Anindya Ghose, Ron Glozman, Ben Goertzel, Shane Greenstein, Kanu Gulati, John Harris, Deepak Hegde, Rebecca Henderson, Geoff Hinton, Tim Hodgson, Michael Hyatt, Richard Hyatt, Ben Jones, Chad Jones, Steve Jurvetson, Satish Kanwar, Danny Kahneman, John Kelleher, Moe Kermani, Vinod Khosla, Karin Klein, Darrell Kopke, Johann Koss, Katya Kudashkina, Michael Kuhlmann, Tony Lacavera, Allen Lau, Eva Lau, Yann LeCun, Mara Lederman, Lisha Li, Ted Livingston, Jevon MacDonald, Rupam Mahmood, Chris Matys, Kristina McElheran, John McHale, Sanjog Misra, Matt Mitchell, Sanjay Mittal, Ash Munshi, Michael Murchison, Ken Nickerson, Olivia Norton, Alex Oettl, David Ossip, Barney Pell, Andrea Prat, Tomi Poutanen, Marzio Pozzuoli, Lally Rementilla, Geordie Rose, Maryanna Saenko, Russ Salakhutdinov, Reza Satchu, Michael Serbinis, Ashmeet Sidana, Micah Siegel, Dilip Soman, John Stackhouse, Scott Stern, Ted Sum, Rich Sutton, Steve Tadelis, Shahram Tafazoli, Graham Taylor, Florenta Teodoridis, Richard Titus, Dan Trefler, Catherine Tucker, William Tunstall-Pedoe, Stephan Uhrenbacher, Cliff van der Linden, Miguel Villas-Boas, Neil Wainwright, Boris Wertz, Dan Wilson, Peter Wittek, Alexander Wong, Shelley Zhuang, and Shivon Zilis.

Otherwise, it is too time consuming, with too many possible situations to specify what to do in each situation in advance. So, for the hard questions, Ada calls in the humans for their judgment. Experience can sometimes make judgment codifiable. Much experience is intangible and so cannot be written down or expressed easily. As Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson wrote: “[S]ubstitution (of computers for people) is bounded because there are many tasks that people understand tacitly and accomplish effortlessly but for which neither computer programmers nor anyone else can enunciate the explicit ‘rules’ or procedures.”1 That, however, is not true of all tasks.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

‘This is when a leader needs to hear the perspectives of the team,’ he said. 45 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51169484_Differences_Between_Tight_and_Loose_Cultures_A_33-Nation_Study 46 Stephen Sales, ‘Economic Threat as a Determinant of Conversion Rates in Authoritarian and Nonauthoritarian churches’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, September 1972, 23(3), pp. 420–8. 47 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-rob-hall-1348607.html 48 It is likely that Harris and Hansen were dead when Hall spoke his last words. See also Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air. 4: Innovation 1 Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future (Profile, 2011). 2 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton, 2014). 3 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. 4 Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (W. W. Norton, 2017). 5 Shaw Livermore, ‘The Success of Industrial Mergers’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 50, Issue 1, November 1935, pp. 68–96. 6 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24092915_The_Decline_of_Dominant_Firms_1905–1929 7 https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/suitcase-wheels-turns-40-radical-idea-now-travel/story?

The line gradually slopes upwards over the course of the millennia. But one innovation had an impact beyond any other, shifting the curve from near horizontal to near vertical: the Industrial Revolution. Morris writes: ‘The western-led take-off since 1800 made a mockery of all the drama of the world’s earlier history.’ Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two professors at the MIT Sloan School of Management, concur: ‘The industrial revolution ushered in humanity’s first machine age – the first time our progress was driven primarily by technological innovation – and it was the most profound time of transformation our world has ever seen.’2 But there was one anomaly in this picture.

Cappella, Friend and Foe by Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, Der Spiegel, Inside 9/11, Infotopia by Cass R. Sunstein, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, What Works by Iris Bohnet, Give and Take by Adam Grant, Principles by Ray Dalio, The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama, The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, Wiser by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, Creative Conspiracy by Leigh Thompson, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony by Kevin N. Laland, Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Social Physics by Alex Pentland, Scale by Geoffrey West, Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella, The Geography of Thought by Richard E.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Piketty, Capital, 26. 7. Piketty, Capital, 22; Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans:Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016), 119–20. 8. Avent, Wealth of Humans, 119–20. 9. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age:Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 118. 10. Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Michael Spence. ‘New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014 <https://www.foreignaffairs. com/articles/united-states/2014-06-04/new-world-order> (accessed 8 December 2017). 11.

Good Old-Fashioned Capital Good old-fashioned capital—land, shares, industrial machinery, and so forth—will be an important source of income in the digital lifeworld. The value of a particular item of capital will always depend on how productive and how scarce it is. The more productive and scarce it is, the greater the wealth it is likely to generate.8 In The Second Machine Age (2014) Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson suggest that in the future, production will depend less on physical assets and more on intangible ones like intellectual property, organizational capital (business processes, production techniques, and the like), and ‘user-generated content’ (YouTube videos, Facebook photos, and online ratings).

Susskind and Susskind, Future of the Professions, 157; Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010), 166–7; Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (London: John Murray, 2014), 5; Shanahan, Technological Singularity, xviii; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (NewYork: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), 49;Wendell Wallach, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 67. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Notes 375 51.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

In my 2009 book The Lights in the Tunnel, I wrote that “while technologists are actively thinking about, and writing books about, intelligent machines, the idea that technology will ever truly replace a large fraction of the human workforce and lead to permanent, structural unemployment is, for the majority of economists, almost unthinkable.” To their credit, some economists have since begun to take the potential for widespread automation more seriously. In their 2011 ebook Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped bring these ideas into the economic mainstream. Prominent economists including Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs have likewise written about the possible impact of machine intelligence.60 Nonetheless, the idea that technology might someday truly transform the job market and ultimately demand fundamental changes to both our economic system and the social contract remains either completely unacknowledged or at the very fringes of public discourse.

Yet, the message of this chapter has been that the ongoing race between technology and education may well be approaching the endgame: the machines are coming for the higher-skill jobs as well. Among economists who are tuned in to this trend, a new flavor of conventional wisdom is arising: the jobs of the future will involve collaborating with the machines. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been especially strong proponents of this idea, advising workers that they should learn to “race with the machines”—rather than against them. While that may well be sage advice, it is nothing especially new. Learning to work with the prevailing technology has always been a good career strategy.

In other words, they get less practice and, over time, the nearly instinctual reactions that professional pilots develop over countless hours of training can begin to degrade. Carr worries that a similar effect is likely to cascade across offices, factories, and other workplaces as automation continues its advance. This idea that engineering “design philosophy” is the problem has also been embraced to some degree by economists. MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, for example, has called for a “New Grand Challenge for Entrepreneurs, Engineers and Economists” to “invent complements, not substitute[s] for labor” and “replace [the] labor saving and automation mindset with [a] maker and creator mindset.”8 Suppose that a start-up company were to rise to Brynjolfsson’s challenge and build a system specifically designed to keep people in the loop.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

—Chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner, when asked what strategy he would use against a computer The title of this book was inspired by a series of Thomas Friedman’s columns in The New York Times. Friedman expanded on this idea in a chapter in his book with Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us, entitled “Average Is Over.” I owe a debt of gratitude to their work and thinking on this very important subject. I also recommend to the reader Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s Race Against the Machine, a book that came out while I was doing the research and writing on this one. I have benefited considerably from reading their work and from conversations with them. Contents Also by Tyler Cowen Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PART I Welcome to the Hyper-Meritocracy 1 Work and Wages in iWorld 2 The Big Earners and the Big Losers 3 Why Are So Many People Out of Work?

What is happening is an increase in the ability of machines to substitute for intelligent human labor, whether we wish to call those machines “AI,” “software,” “smart phones,” “superior hardware and storage,” “better integrated systems,” or any combination of the above. This is the wave that will lift you or that will dump you. The fascination with technology and the future of work has inspired some important writings, including Martin Ford’s classic The Lights in the Tunnel, the more recent and excellent eBook Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and Ray Kurzweil’s futuristic work on how humans will meld with technology. Debates about mechanization periodically resurface, most prominently in the 1930s and in the 1960s but now once again in our new millennium. Average Is Over builds upon these influential works and attempts to go beyond them in terms of detail and breadth.

Exactness of execution becomes more important relative to an accumulated mass of brute force. 2. Consistent coordination over time is a significant advantage. 3. Morale is extremely important to motivate production and cooperation. Recent research bears out these principles. Economists Timothy F. Bresnahan, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Lorin M. Hitt performed an extensive poll of managers, combined with follow-up interviews. They found that in the opinions of managers, computer use increases the need for skilled workers, computers tend to increase workers’ autonomy, and computers increase the need and ability for management to monitor their workers.


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Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

An alternative version of the Lost Golden Age story agrees that we live in an age of sluggish growth, but it claims we can be reasonably confident that growth will return—perhaps even faster than before. We may not live in the postwar golden age, but we can hope for a new economic dawn in the future, ushered in by new technology. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age holds that we are living in an age in which growth is low because new technologies are bedding in.25 Our economic fields look bare, but wait a bit and a bumper harvest will come in, delivered by rapidly increasing computing power and its application to every domain of human endeavour.

There is also a second-order effect, one that relates to the disappointments of modern technology. As we’ve seen, one of the peculiarities of twenty-first-century stagnation is the disconnect between low economic growth and the lavish hopes and predictions of the tech sector: the flying cars that were promised but never showed up. Economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson link this state of technological disappointment to intangibles.2 Specifically, they note that for new technologies to deliver economic benefit, they need plenty of other intangible investment alongside them to make them useful: new processes, new business relationships, new worker skills.

These three effects would combine to produce exactly the effect that we see: lower TFP in an economy in which intangible investment is abundant but growing slowly. The intangible explanation for slow productivity growth is consistent with other findings about slowing productivity growth. It helps explain the concerns about slowing technological progress voiced by Robert Gordon, Tyler Cowen, and Erik Brynjolfsson, providing an underlying explanation for why this slowing should be happening now. It is also consistent with two explanations of declining TFP made by Dietrich Vollrath in his book Fully Grown. Vollrath points out that a significant fraction of the fall in US TFP between 2000 and 2016 is explained by lower business dynamism (the fact that productive small businesses grow and replace incumbents less quickly) and by the long-term shift from manufacturing (where TFP growth has historically been high) to services (where TFP growth has historically been lower).4 Both of these causes have an intangible angle: lower business dynamism relates to the growing leader/laggard gap that intangibles are exacerbating.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Korinek and Stiglitz, “Artificial Intelligence and Its Implications for Income Distribution and Unemployment.” 63. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 257. 64. Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, “Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work,” NBER Working Paper 24196, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2018, https://www.nber.org/papers/w24196.pdf. 65. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “Brynjolfsson and McAfee: The Jobs That AI Can’t Replace,” BBC, September 13, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34175290. 66. Erik Brynjolfsson, “Technology Is Changing the Way We Live, Learn and Work.

If we broaden and strengthen an economic dignity net and pass something like a UBI to Rise, we will be closer to what Korinek and Stiglitz described as a “first-best economy in which individuals are fully insured against any adverse impacts of innovation.”62 But beyond such policy measures to deal with the negative effects of technological change, we should ask what we can do to structure change. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee conclude in The Second Machine Age, “Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.”63 Economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo argue that automation and AI will take some tasks from workers and lower demand for some jobs—what they call “displacement” effects. However, they also believe that the creation of new tasks—“shaped by the decisions of firms, workers, and other actors in society”—in which labor has an edge over automation can provide a countervailing influence to the displacement effects.64 Notably, the process of creating those new tasks is Acemoglu and Restrepo’s framework thus underscores the fact that the decisions we make as a nation can have a powerful influence over what technological innovation means for our country.

There would be little reason to create new health coach jobs in a fee-for-service model. It is only when health care is paid by virtue of value and results that there are more avenues for humans to add value beyond automation. Iora shows that smarter health policy could lead to more health jobs that leverage technology to create better care for patients. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee also highlight 99Degrees Custom, an apparel maker in Lawrence, Massachusetts, as an example of how technology can generate jobs. “99Degrees Custom embraces a highly engineered, partially automated production line to make highly customized textile products.”70 That approach has allowed 99Degrees Custom to create new jobs that are “more varied, more highly skilled, and better paid” than “the old [textile] factory jobs.”71 The Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development gave the company a $2.8 million tax credit provided that the company hire 350 additional workers by 2023.72 Why shouldn’t all states provide tax credits for such companies that marry dignified labor and new technology?


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Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

Marvin Minsky, the MIT researcher typically credited as the father of artificial intelligence, was reported to have said in 1970 that “in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” These fears never materialized. But today, AI anxiety is burning bright again, fueled by popular books like Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots and Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, both of which made the case that AI was going to fundamentally change society and transform the global economy. Academic studies of the future of work, like an Oxford University study that estimated that as many as 47 percent of U.S. jobs were at “high risk” of automation within the next two decades, added to the sense of impending doom.

“Humans and AI will collaborate, not compete.” Optimists also argue that much of today’s AI is designed to work with humans, rather than substituting for them, and that we should think of our relationship with AI as a collaborative opportunity, rather than a competitive threat. In The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee suggest replacing the phrase “race against the machines” with “race with the machines.” Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson, two executives at the consulting firm Accenture, write in their book Human + Machine that human-AI collaborations will be a cornerstone of the twenty-first-century economy.

If you’re looking to start your own robot-themed bookshelf, I’d recommend starting here. Artificial Unintelligence by Meredith Broussard (2018). Broussard, an experienced data journalist and NYU professor, is a savvy guide to the foibles and limitations of AI, and her book is a forceful argument against what she calls “technochauvinism.” The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014). This book by two MIT professors was years ahead of its time. I find myself going back to it frequently. Humans Are Underrated by Geoff Colvin (2015). Colvin, a longtime writer and editor at Fortune, makes a compelling case for the economic value of human skills.


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Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The large number of relevant texts include: Ad Hoc Committee, ‘The Triple Revolution’, International Socialist Review 24: 3 (1964); Donald Michael, Cybernation: The Silent Conquest (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962); Paul Mattick, ‘The Economics of Cybernation’, New Politics 1: 4 (1962); David Noble, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995); Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1997); Martin Ford, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (US: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009); Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 16.These estimates are for the US and European labour markets, though similar numbers undoubtedly hold globally and, as we argue later, may even be worse in developing economies.

, New Left Review II/84 (November–December 2013), p. 137. 101.Sukti Dasgupta and Ajit Singh, Manufacturing, Services and Premature Deindustrialization in Developing Countries: A Kaldorian Analysis, Working Paper Series, World Institute for Development Economics Research, 2006, at ideas.repec.org, p. 6; Breman, ‘Introduction’, p. 2; Fields, Working Hard, Working Poor, p. 58; Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 15. 102.Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 175; Breman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–8; George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), Chapter 9. 103.Sassen, Expulsions, Chapter 2. 104.Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, p. 69. 105.Davis, Planet of Slums, pp. 181–2. 106.Rather than a 30–40 per cent manufacturing share of total employment, the numbers are closer to 15–20 per cent, and manufacturing now begins to decline as a share of GDP at per capita levels of around $3,000, rather than $10,000. Dani Rodrik, ‘The Perils of Premature Deindustrialization’, Project Syndicate, 11 October 2013, at project-syndicate.org, p. 5. 107.Over 30 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 1996. Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee and Michael Spence, ‘New World Order’, Foreign Affairs, August 2014. 108.Manfred Elfstrom and Sarosh Kuruvilla, ‘The Changing Nature of Labor Unrest in China’, ILR Review 67: 2 (2014) 109.Real wages rose by 300 per cent between 2000 and 2010. ILO, Global Wage Report 2012/13: Wages and Equitable Growth (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2013), pdf available at ilo.org, p. 20. 110.ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, p. 29. 111.International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics: Industrial Robots 2014 (Frankfurt: International Federation of Robotics, 2014), pdf available at worldrobotics.org, p. 19; Lee Chyen Yee and Clare Jim, ‘Foxconn to Rely More on Robots; Could Use 1 Million in 3 Years’, Reuters, 1 August 2011; ‘Guangzhou Spurs Robot Use amid Rising Labor Costs’, China Daily, 16 April 2014, at chinadaily.com.cn; Angelo Young, ‘Nike Unloads Contract Factory Workers, Showing How Automation Is Costing Jobs of Vulnerable Emerging Market Laborers’, International Business Times, 20 May 2014. 112.Majority of Large Manufacturers Are Now Planning or Considering ‘Reshoring’ from China to the US, Boston Consulting Group, 24 September 2013, at bcg.com; Stephanie Clifford, ‘US Textile Plants Return, with Floors Largely Empty of People’, New York Times, 19 September 2013. 113.Dani Rodrik, Premature Deindustrialization, BREAD Working Paper No. 439, Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, 2015, at ipl.econ.duke.edu, p. 2. 114.Fiona Tregenna, Manufacturing Productivity, Deindustrialization, and Reindustrialization, World Institute for Development Economics Research, 2011, at econstor.eu, p. 11. 115.Out of a labour force of 481 million, approximately 1 million work in this sector.

Eventually, with legal and insurance changes, consumers will be forced into adopting this technology. 28.Isaac Arnsdorf, ‘Rolls-Royce Drone Ships Challenge $375 Billion Industry: Freight’, Bloomberg, 25 February 2014, at bloomberg.com; BBC News, ‘Amazon Testing Drones for Deliveries’, BBC News, 2 December 2013; Danielle Kucera, ‘Amazon Acquires Kiva Systems in Second-Biggest Takeover’, Bloomberg, 19 March 2012, at bloomberg.com; Vicky Validakis, ‘Rio’s Driverless Trucks Move 100 Million Tonnes’, Mining Australia, 24 April 2013, at miningaustralia.com.au; Elise Hu, ‘The Fast-Food Restaurants that Require Few Human Workers’, NPR.org, 29 August 2013, at npr.org; Christopher Steiner, Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2012); Mark Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Daniel Beunza, Donald MacKenzie, Yuval Millo and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Impersonal Efficiency and the Dangers of a Fully Automated Securities Exchange (London: Foresight, 2011). 29.For a slightly outdated but still useful summary of various automation processes, see Ramin Ramtin, Capitalism and Automation: Revolution in Technology and Capitalist Breakdown (London: Pluto, 1991), Chapter 4. 30.Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), Chapters 2–4. 31.Ibid., Chapter 1; Frey and Osborne, Future of Employment, p. 44. 32.Paul Lippe and Daniel Martin Katz, ‘10 Predictions About How IBM’s Watson Will Impact the Legal Profession’, ABA Journal, 2 October 2014, at abajournal.com. 33.Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, Chapter 2. 34.Dave Cliff, Dan Brown and Philip Treleaven, Technology Trends in the Financial Markets: A 2020 Vision (London: Foresight, 2011), p. 36.


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Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

For a while he stood alone, much in the tradition of Rifkin’s 1995 The End of Work, but as the recession dragged on and mainstream economists continued to have trouble explaining the absence of job growth, he was soon joined by an insurgency of technologists and economists warning that technological disruption was happening full force. In 2011, two MIT Sloan School economists, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, self-published an extended essay titled “Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.” Their basic theme was as follows: “Digital technologies change rapidly, but organizations and skills aren’t keeping pace.

“They remind us Moore’s Law predicts endless exponential growth of the performance capability of computer chips, without recognizing that the translation from Moore’s Law to the performance-price behavior of ICT equipment peaked in 1998 and has declined ever since,” he noted in a 2014 rejoinder to his initial paper.45 Gordon squared off with his critics, most notably with MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, at the TED Conference in the spring of 2013. In a debate moderated by TED host Chris Anderson, the two jousted over the future impact of robotics and whether the supposed exponentials would continue or were rather the peak of an “S curve” with a decline on the way.46 The techno-optimists believe that a lag between invention and adoption of technology simply delays the impact of productivity gains and even though exponentials inevitably taper off, they spawn successor inventions—for example the vacuum tube was followed by the transistor, which in turn was followed by the integrated circuit.

Norton & Co, 1963), 358–373. 22.Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1995), xvii. 23.John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all. 24.Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). 25.Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Ben Sand, “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks,” NBER Working Paper No. 18901, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2013, http://www.economics.ubc.ca/files/2013/05/pdf_paper_paul-beaudry-great-reversal.pdf. 26.Ibid. 27.James Manyika, Susan Lund, Byron Auguste, and Sreenivas Ramaswamy, “Help Wanted: The Future of Work in Advanced Economies,” McKinsey Global Institute, March 2012, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/employment_and_growth/future_of_work_in_advanced_economies. 28.Robin Harding, “US Has Lost 2M Clerical Jobs since 2007,” Financial Times, April 1, 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cm/s/0/37666e6c-9ae5-11e2-b982-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3V2czZqsP. 29.Melody Johnson, “Right-Wing Media Attack Obama for Accurate Remarks on Business’ [sic] Investment in Automated Machines,” MediaMatters for America, June 15, 2011, http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/06/15/right-wing-media-attack-obama-for-accurate-rema/180602. 30.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

As if that was not enough, it turns out that only 58.1% of the population was working, the lowest level in nearly three decades.3 Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated that even if we could somehow create 208,000 new jobs per month, every month, for the foreseeable future, it would still take until 2023 to fill that gap.4 As of January 2012, thanks to massive efforts from both the private sector and the government, the unemployment rate fell to 8.3%.5 A very mild consolation, considering that people employed part-time for economic reasons, marginally attached to the labor force, discouraged workers, and long-term unemployment, changed very little over the year. To make things even worse, the labour force participation rate is 63.7%, its all time lowest since 1983, when women had not entered the work force in large numbers, and it is dropping consistently every year.6 MIT Economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make a lucid analysis of this problem in their book Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy7, which deals with the current unemployment crisis and tries to offer some solutions, particularly by reforming education, the system of economic incentives, and by promoting entrepreneurship.

I had many discussions regarding the issue of technological unemployment, particularly during my Graduate Study Program at Singularity University, NASA Ames Research Center, where I had the opportunity to speak with some of the greatest minds on the field, including the authors of the book “Race Against the Machine” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, founding executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. I stand by my thesis, that the economy will not abide in creating new jobs at the same pace with which technology destroys them. Many disagree with me, and we could have a discussion about that, but I think this is missing the point.

Bureau Of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf 6 Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate. Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 7 Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2011. Digital Frontier Press. http://raceagainstthemachine.com 8 The End of Work Website, Jeremy Rifkin. http://www.foet.org/books/end-work.html 9 The End of Work, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work 10 A rough 10 years for the middle class, Annalyn Censky, 2011.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Others argue that machines will never have general intelligence because the practical problems of achieving this are just so hard we will never solve them, or if we do, it will be far beyond the lifetimes of anyone alive today. Here there is clearly room for differing viewpoints. Some people, like my former student and now colleague Erik Brynjolfsson and his coauthor Andrew McAfee, suggest that continuing advances in computer hardware together with the surprisingly rapid progress in artificial intelligence make it likely that machines may possess general intelligence soon.10 Others, like artificial intelligence expert Rodney Brooks, say that it may take hundreds of years.11 In fact, progress in the field of artificial intelligence has been notoriously difficult to predict ever since its early days, in the 1950s.

In the early 1800s, as power looms eliminated jobs previously held by human weavers, industrial activists called Luddites burned factories and destroyed machinery in protest.1 In the 1960s, as computers eliminated large numbers of clerical jobs in the back offices of banks and insurance companies, President Lyndon Johnson created a National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress to study the problem.2 And in the 2010s, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (see here) have warned about the risks of artificial intelligence putting many humans out of work, not just in blue-collar and clerical jobs but in white-collar jobs, too.3 But people have consistently underestimated the ability of the superminds we call markets to adapt to changes like these.

Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–24. 8. Edsger W. Dijkstra, “The Threats to Computing Science,” presented at the ACM South Central Regional Conference, Austin, TX, November 1984. 9. Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence, 1,021. 10. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 11. Brooks, “Artificial Intelligence Is a Tool”; Rodney Brooks, “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions,” MIT Technology Review, October 6, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609048/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-ai-predictions/. 12.


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Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

With a well-developed services sector that itself may face the challenge of increasing automation, what is there to employ the middle-class workers displaced in data-rich markets? Is this the advent of a “second machine age”—the neat phrase to describe the coming displacement through automation of white-collar jobs coined by MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee? It is likely, as we suggested in Chapter 6, that there will be less work for humans in the future; but no matter what happens to overall labor force participation, it is almost certain that the types of jobs available will be quite different from the jobs people hold today.

It is the vision that humanity will soon overcome resource scarcity, and the belief that machines, and their seemingly infinite ability to accomplish complex tasks at low or practically no cost, will recycle the resources we have forever, essentially taking us into a true utopia. In it, humans, freed from daily chores, will enjoy life and have the means to live it to the fullest. The end of scarcity has been predicted before, perhaps most vocally in the 1970s by conservative economist Julian Simon. Now an expanded version of the idea is resurfacing. Erik Brynjolfsson, a business school professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and coauthor of an influential book about the consequences of artificial intelligence on human labor, seems sympathetic. “A world of increasing abundance, even luxury, is not only possible, but likely,” he suggests. Proponents of this view use the term “fully automated luxury communism” (conjuring images of Leonid Brezhnev wearing Gucci loafers) for the idea that we all can work less and still enjoy whatever we want.

labor force has declined from its peak: The participation rate in 2017 was around 63 percent, down from over 67 percent in 2000, and below the level it had been in more than three decades; see U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Participation Rates, data sets and graphs available at https://data.bls.gov. forecast depressing employment figures: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? (Oxford, UK: Oxford Martin School, September 17, 2013), http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of _Employment.pdf.


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The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

The Conference Board, HR Executive Review (New York) 3(1):2 (1995). 22. Timothy H. Bresnahan, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Lorin M. Hitt, "Information Technology, Workplace Organization and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm Level Evidence," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, no. 7136, May 1999, p. i. 23. Paul A. David, "Understanding Digital Technology's Evolution and the Path of Measured Productivity Growth: Present and Future in the Mirror of the Past," in Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools, and Research, ed. Erik Brynjolfsson and Brian Kahin (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), p. 54. 24. Quoted by Alan Greenspan in "Remarks at the 81st Annual Meeting of the American Council on Education," Washington, D.C., February 16,1999, p. 2.

In 1989 the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity wrote of "new patterns of workplace organization" in U.S. manufacturing that required the "creation of a highly skilled workforce" and that was incompatible with "the ways of thinking and operating that grew out of the mass production model."20 In 1995 Louis Csoka, then research director for human resources/organizational effectiveness at the Conference Board, a leading corporate lobbyist, described how throughout the economy employees are "working in concert with others, [forming] work groups that become high performing teams through teambuilding, teamwork and interdependence."21 In 1999 human resource experts surveyed by economists Timothy Bresnahan, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Lorin Hitt also claimed that "IT use is complementary to a new workplace organization that includes broader job responsibilities for front line workers, decentralized decision making, and more self-managing teams."22 In 2000 economist Paul David of Stanford, now professor of economics at Oxford, wrote of the "process of transition to a new information-intensive techno-economic regime" with "new kinds of workforce skills" and "new organizational forms" that would "accomplish the abandonment or extensive transformation . . . of the technological regime identified with Fordism."23 Neither the plant and office-level evidence, nor the evidence of the trade literature, supports this vision of a newly skilled workforce empowered by information technology going about its business within autonomous, self-directed teams.


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The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

,” New York Times, January 23, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/opinion/sunday/what-happened-to-the-price-of-oil.html. 2. Mohamed A. El-Erian, “Good, Bad and Ugly of Lower Oil Prices,” Bloomberg View, December 1, 2014, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-01/good-bad-and-ugly-of-lower-oil-prices. 3. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014). 4. See, for example, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011).

HARNESSING DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION The ongoing technological revolution is a second factor that contributes to a relatively unstable distribution of future potential outcomes. It is a revolution that combines two critical elements: empowering individuals to an extent that was deemed unlikely, if not unthinkable, not so long ago; and deploying big data, artificial intelligence, and what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have dubbed “the second machine age.”3 Many observers and researchers have referred to these revolutionary and transformational forces as among the most powerful in history. In a March 2015 conference on the Future of Work, organized by WorldPost, a joint venture between Nicolas Berggruen’s Institute and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post, Andrew McAfee added that it is “the only free lunch that economists can agree on.”


pages: 292 words: 76,185

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

BE DISCERNING ABOUT YOUR LEARNING Even with the pace of change, all hope of strategically positioning yourself for success in our economy is not lost. Instead, focus your energy on how you spot skills that are needed, particularly those rooted in your existing strengths. In their book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make the point that the fundamental metrics of our economy have changed, saying, “More and more what we care about in the second machine age are ideas, not things . . . interactions, not transactions.” According to Brynjolfsson and McAfee, there are some guidelines to keep in mind regarding what skills and opportunities to pursue to complement technology, rather than compete against it.

These books provide in-depth coverage of areas where I just scratched the surface. I encourage you to dig deeper into anything that grabbed you. For the full reading list, visit PivotMethod.com/toolkit. Introduction A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha Plant The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks Body of Work by Pamela Slim Choose Yourself by James Altucher Scan So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman Tribes by Seth Godin Stand Out by Dorie Clark Essentialism by Greg McKeown Pilot The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Eat That Frog!

Downing, “Contemporary Models of Intelligence,” in Handbook of Intelligence, ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). In his 1951 book: Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (New York: Vintage, 1951), 32. complement technology, rather than compete: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 153–54, 189–200. Leverage refers to: Ibid. it is futile to ask: Geoff Colvin, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015), 42, 44; Oliver Burkeman, “Are Machines Making Humans Obsolete?”


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Part of the importance of the recent global integration of developing countries is that it has taken place exactly when it did: during a period of some of the greatest advances in technology in the last two hundred years. Just as the industrial revolution can be traced to James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, which drove innovations and changes across the economic landscape, much of the current technological revolution can be traced back to the semiconductor and the computer, a history that Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee recount in The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.14 There are multiple examples, but I will focus on technological advances in four areas that have been important to developing countries: transportation, agriculture, information, and health.

Just as China wants other countries to honor its legitimate interests, it must honor the legitimate interests of its neighbors and other countries in its border disputes, trade arrangements, military maneuvers, commercial negotiations, and other issues. Managing the peaceful rise of China will be one of the most important global challenges of the next two decades, with profound effects on global development progress. TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION We live in a period of some of the most dramatic technological changes in history—what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee called “the second machine age.”10 Many view the microprocessor as the single most important invention since the steam engine kicked off the industrial revolution. Advances in information technology, energy, transportation, health, and agriculture have propelled the world economy forward.

The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development (Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank on behalf of the Commission on Growth and Development, 2008), p. 2, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/6507/449860PUB0Box3101OFFICIAL0USE0ONLY1.pdf?sequence. 14. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 15. “History of Containerization,” World Shipping Council, www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/history-of-containerization. 16. Daniel Bernhofen, Zouheir El-Sahli, and Richard Kneller, “Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade,” working paper 4136, Center for Economic Studies and the Ifo Institute, February 2013, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2228625.


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Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Anyone with a role involving tasks, skilled or not, that a programmer could write software to perform, from warehouse stackers, car welders and travel agents to taxi drivers, paralegal clerks and heart surgeons. This wave of digital automation is still in its infancy, but it has already led to what the digital economy expert Erik Brynjolfsson has called the ‘great decoupling’ of production from jobs, seen most clearly in the United States. From the end of the Second World War until 2000, US productivity and employment were closely intertwined, but they have strongly diverged ever since: while productivity has kept on rising, employment levels have fallen flat.71 Technology has of course replaced workers before, and it can be to society’s broad benefit when it frees people up to engage in other productive enterprise.

At the same time, invest far more in skilling people up where they beat robots hands-down: in creativity, empathy, insight and human contact – skills that are essential for many kinds of work, from primary school teachers and artistic directors to psychotherapists, social workers and political commentators. As Erik Brynjolfsson and his co-author Andrew McAfee put it, ‘Humans have economic wants that can be satisfied only by other humans, and that makes us less likely to go the way of the horse.’75 That’s reassuring, but only partly, because if most workers continue to earn income just from selling their labour alone, they will simply not earn enough.

‘If growth wanes,’ she warned a TED audience in 2015, ‘the risk to human progress and the risk to social and political instability rises and societies become dimmer, coarser, and smaller.’28 Since economic growth is deemed a political necessity by the keep-on-flying crowd – no matter how wealthy a country already is – it is no surprise to hear them argue that further growth in high-income countries is possible because it is coming and it can be made environmentally sustainable. First, growth is on the way, argue technology optimists such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: thanks to the exponential growth in digital processing power, we are entering the ‘second machine age’, in which the fast-rising productivity of robots will drive a new wave of GDP growth.29 What’s more, argue green growth advocates such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, OECD and EU, future growth can become green by decoupling GDP from ecological impacts.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Zero marginal cost production See, for example, Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave, 2014). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT What’s more, owners of the best systems Erik Brynjolfsson calls a situation where AI takes over more and more of the economy, locking large numbers of people in an equilibrium where they have no work, no wealth, and no meaningful power, the “Turing Trap.” Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence,” Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Jan. 11, 2022, arxiv.org/​pdf/​2201.04200.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Little wonder there is talk See, for example, Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (New York: Encounter Books, 2020).

Or the worst. No one recognizes and explains the epic challenges ahead better than Mustafa Suleyman. Thought-provoking, urgent, and written in powerful, highly accessible prose, this is a must-read book for anyone interested in understanding the staggering power of these technologies.” —Erik Brynjolfsson, professor, Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence “One of the greatest challenges facing the world is to devise forms of governance that harness the benefits of AI and biotech while avoiding their catastrophic risks. This book provides a deeply thoughtful account of the ‘containment challenge’ of these two technologies.

Particular thanks go to the many people who read the entire draft and commented in detail; their generosity and extraordinary level of insight were completely invaluable in getting to the final manuscript. A huge thanks to Gregory Allen, Graham Allison (and the faculty and staff of Harvard’s Belfer Center more widely), Sahar Amer, Anne Applebaum, Julian Baker, Samantha Barber, Gabriella Blum, Nick Bostrom, Ian Bremmer, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ben Buchanan, Sarah Carter, Rewon Child, George Church, Richard Danzig, Jennifer Doudna, Alexandra Eitel, Maria Eitel, Henry Elkus, Kevin Esvelt, Jeremy Fleming, Jack Goldsmith, Al Gore, Tristan Harris, Zaid Hassan, Jordan Hoffman, Joi Ito, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Danny Kahneman, Angela Kane, Melanie Katzman, Henry Kissinger, Kevin Klyman, Heinrich Küttler, Eric Lander, Sean Legassick, Aitor Lewkowycz, Leon Marshall, Jason Matheny, Andrew McAfee, Greg McKelvey, Dimitri Mehlhorn, David Miliband, Martha Minow, Geoff Mulgan, Aza Raskin, Tobias Rees, Stuart Russell, Jeffrey Sachs, Eric Schmidt, Bruce Schneier, Marilyn Thompson, Mayo Thompson, Thomas Viney, Maria Vogelauer, Mark Walport, Morwenna White, Scott Young, and Jonathan Zittrain.


pages: 138 words: 40,787

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

By the time the servants got to the sixty-fourth square, the man had more than eighteen quintillion rice grains (18 x 1018), or more than all the wealth in the land. But his wealth and ability to outsmart the emperor came with a price — he ended up being decapitated. In their recent book, Race Against the Machine,1 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, referenced the fable of the chess and rice grains to make the point that “exponential increases initially look a lot like linear, but they are not. As time goes by — as we move into the second half of the chessboard — exponential growth confounds our intuition and expectations.”

The space is ripe for further innovation and experimentation because it offers specific opportunities to be realized in the short term. In the following chapters we will look at specific examples and companies. We will also continue our discussions with industry experts about what is happening, what might happen, and what needs to happen to bring about the vision of the Internet of Things. 1 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011), p.297. 2 Nokia, Machine-to-Machine: Let Your Machines Talk (2004). http://www.m2mpremier.com/uploadFiles/m2m-white-paper-v4.pdf. 3 The observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

The three technological impulses that launched these are very different and thus had very different effects. Oversimplifying to make the point, the Great Transformation was launched by the Steam Revolution and all the mechanization that followed. This technology took the horse out of horsepower; it created better tools for people who worked with their hands as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out in their seminal 2014 book, The Second Machine Age.4 It was mostly about goods, and it shifted the masses from making farm goods to making manufactured goods. Office work grew more productive, but mostly due to the fruits of industrialization (office machinery, electricity, etc).

A. 370, no. 1960 (2012): 534–543, http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/370/1960/534.full.pdf. 3. Kevin Roose, “His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming,” New York Times, February 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/technology/his-2020-campaign-message-the-robots-are-coming.html. 4. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton & Company, 2014). 5. Jack Welch and John Byrne, Jack: Straight from the Gut (Warner Business Books, 2001). PART I Historical Transformations, Upheavals, Backlashes, and Resolutions 2 We’ve Been Here Before: The Great Transformation Catherine Spence and her infant starved to death in the London Docklands.

Varian’s law is thus: digital components are free while digital products are highly valuable. Innovation explodes as people try to get rich by working through the nearly infinite combinations of components in search of valuable digital products. In their breakthrough book, The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee point out the implications. A big difference between digital technology and traditional technology is that new products and components can be reproduced costlessly, instantly, and perfectly. Imagine how much faster the Industrial Revolution would have spread if Newcomen’s steam engine could have been reproduced costlessly, instantly, and perfectly.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The Chapman University geographer Joel Kotkin has broken down what he calls this “new feudalism” into different classes, including “oligarch” billionaires like Thiel and Uber’s Travis Kalanick, the “clerisy” of media commentators like Kevin Kelly, the “new serfs” of the working poor and the unemployed, and the “yeomanry” of the old “private sector middle class,” the professionals and skilled workers in towns like Rochester who are victims of the new winner-take-all networked economy.81 The respected MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who are cautiously optimistic about what they call “the brilliant technologies” of “the Second Machine Age,” acknowledge that our networked society is creating a world of “stars and superstars” in a “winner-take-all” economy. It’s the network effect, Brynjolfsson and McAfee admit, reflecting the arguments of Frank and Cook—a consequence, they say, of the “vast improvements in telecommunications” and the “digitalization of more and more information, goods and services.”

But while all this technology might be novel, it hasn’t transformed the role of either power or wealth in the world. Indeed, when it comes to the importance of money and influence, Silicon Valley is about as traditional as those three thousand bottles of vintage wine in the Battery’s illustrious cellar. History is, in many ways, repeating itself. Today’s digital upheaval represents what MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call the “second industrial revolution.” “Badass” entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick and Peter Thiel have much in common with the capitalist robber barons of the first industrial revolution. Internet monopolists like Google and Amazon increasingly resemble the bloated multinationals of the industrial epoch.

Keith recommended me to Paul Carr and Jon Orlin at TechCrunchTV, and my show Keen On . . . was the first program on the network, running for four years and including over two hundred interviews with leading Internet thinkers and critics. In particular, I’d like to thank Kurt Andersen, John Borthwick, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Nicholas Carr, Clayton Christensen, Ron Conway, Tyler Cowen, Kenneth Cukier, Larry Downes, Tim Draper, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Walter Isaacson, Tim Ferriss, Michael Fertik, Ze Frank, David Frigstad, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Peter Hirshberg, Reid Hoffman, Ryan Holiday, Brad Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Kelly, David Kirkpatrick, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Robert Levine, Steven Levy, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew McAfee, Gavin Newsom, George Packer, Eli Pariser, Andrew Rasiej, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Schroeder, Tiffany Shlain, Robert Scoble, Dov Seidman, Gary Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Micah Sifry, Martin Sorrell, Tom Standage, Bruce Sterling, Brad Stone, Clive Thompson, Sherry Turkle, Fred Turner, Yossi Vardi, Hans Vestberg, Vivek Wadhwa, and Steve Wozniak for appearing on Keen On . . . and sharing their valuable ideas with me.


The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market by Paul de Grauwe, Anna Asbury

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit motive, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, very high income

In other words, there is no internal regulator for the environment to put pressure on external costs. That regulator must come from outside the market system and can only be organized by the government. Technological progress, however, may be able to offer some relief. Digital technologies create unprecedented possibilities for increased productivity. This is strongly emphasized in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s recent book.13 These authors see almost infinite new possibilities, which can also be used to tackle pollution. That is a very optimistic vision of the future: new technologies will save us from our downfall. If that is true, we are still left with the question I posed in Chapter , namely whether those technological revolutions will offer alternatives in time.

Arrow, ‘Gifts and exchanges’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, / (), pp. –. . Ronald Coase, ‘ The Nature of the Firm’, Economica, / (November ), pp. –. . See Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: The Best and Worst of Human Nature (London: Granta Books, ). See also Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (London: Penguin Books, ). . Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, ). . Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life (London: Allen Lane, ). .


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

The Luddites viewed James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny in the nineteenth century with the same anxious suspicion that today’s pessimists view Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web in the twenty-first century. See Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (2001). 29 David Autor, ‘Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth’, NBER Working Paper 20485, National Bureau of Economic Research (2014). 30 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014). Also see Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine (2011). 31 Kasparov, ‘The Chess Master and the Computer’. 32 <http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/> (accessed 23 March 2015). Also see John Kelly and Steve Hamm, Smart Machines (2013). 33 Autor, ‘Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth’, 38. 34 Autor, ‘Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth’, 38. 35 David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard J.

Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, The Innovative University (2011). 12 Joseph Schumpeter describes the process of ‘creative destruction’ in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1994), foreshadowing this contemporary literature. See part II, ch. VII. 13 See e.g. <http://www.data.gov> for the USA, <http://data.gov.uk> for the UK, and <http://www.data.go.jp> for Japan. 14 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (2014), ch. 12. 15 Most notably, the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (enacted 30 July 2002), known also as the ‘Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act’. This is part of the federal law of the USA. 16 See e.g. Glasgow Herald, 18 Nov.1985, p. 15. 17 <http://www.ey.com> (accessed 23 March 2015). 18 Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (2010), 34. 19 Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, 36. 20 See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks—How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006). 21 <http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk>. 22 See Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now (2015), on driverless cars and doctorless patients. 23 Penelope Eckert, ‘Communities of Practice’, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed.

And they are given some academic support for this claim by the MIT economist David Autor, who suggests that ‘many of the tasks currently bundled into these jobs cannot readily be unbundled … without a substantial drop in quality’.29 However, this is simply not the experience of those who are working at the vanguard of the professions (see Chapter 2), nor of the current work of ‘process analysts’ (see section 6.8). Others argue that the most efficient future lies with machines and human beings working together. Human beings will always have value to add as collaborators with machines. This is one of the central arguments of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age,30 and is also in the spirit of Garry Kasparov, the former chess world champion, who claims that a strong human player with a modest laptop can beat an extraordinarily powerful supercomputer.31 This position also aligns with IBM’s work on Watson. They speak of a ‘new partnership between people and computers’.32 We accept the force of this position in 2015.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Source: authors’ calculations based on INTAN-Invest database (www.intan-invest.net). This raises an interesting question: Is it possible that the rise of intangible investment is nothing more than a consequence of improvements in IT? Is the intangible economy a sort of corollary of Moore’s Law or an epiphenomenon of what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call the Second Machine Age? It is difficult to prove causality in technological change, but there are grounds to think it is a bit more complicated than that. It is certainly true that some intangibles operate through computers—indeed, for one category of intangibles, software, computers are a necessary precondition.

But the gains were realized through organizational and business practice changes in a low-tech sector. Or, to put it another way, there were big synergies between Walmart’s investment in computers and its investment in processes and supply chain development to make the most of the computers. It’s a relationship that has been documented in detail by Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at MIT and a guru of the digital economy. Brynjolfsson’s research showed that organizational investment and tech investment were highly complementary; that is to say, the businesses that got the most out of their whizzy software were the ones that invested in organizational change too (Brynjolfsson, Hitt, and Yang 2002).

And in the last years computers have gotten even smarter: issuing boarding passes, checking you out at supermarkets, and answering routine questions over the phone. As these computers have gotten cheaper and cheaper, it’s become more and more worthwhile for firms to replace low-skilled workers with computers. Demand for those workers has fallen and so, therefore, have their wages. More recently, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) have warned that, because of the speed with which information technology improves, computers may start replacing humans much faster than we are used to. This “race against the machine” or “rise of the robots” could be expected to make poorer workers redundant, to the benefit of rich capitalists.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Yet several months later the cover of Forbes was still asking if anyone could catch Nokia. Innovation is not steady and predictable like the orbit of the Moon or the accumulation of interest on a certificate of deposit. It’s instead inherently jumpy, uneven, and random. It’s also combinatorial, as Erik Brynjolfsson and I discussed in our book The Second Machine Age. Most new technologies and other innovations, we argued, are combinations or recombinations of preexisting elements. The iPhone was “just” a cellular telephone plus a bunch of sensors plus a touch screen plus an operating system and population of programs, or apps.

I call this situation one of superstars and zombies within an industry; the more common phrase for it within economics is winner take all or winner take most. Van Reenen writes, “Many of the patterns are consistent with a… view where many industries have become ‘winner take most/all’ due to globalization and new technologies rather than a generalized weakening of competition due to relaxed antitrust rules or rising regulation.” Erik Brynjolfsson and I agree with this view.I We argued in 2008 that concentration was increasing because of tech progress, and that it would continue to do so. We made a simple point supported by a great deal of historical evidence: it’s extremely difficult for companies, even well-managed ones, to understand and extract the full value of powerful new technologies such as the steam engine, electrification, the smartphone, or artificial intelligence.

Back home at MIT my colleagues at the Initiative on the Digital Economy created an ideal environment for this work and lots of other research. David Verrill and Christie Ko kept the place running smoothly, Adjovi Koene took a lot of tasks off my plate, and Seth Benzel and Daniel Rock were great sounding boards for the work as it progressed. By this point it should go without saying that Erik Brynjolfsson, my frequent coauthor and collaborator, sharpened my thinking with every conversation. The research team that spun up around More from Less included three generations of MIT Sloan MBA students. Atad Peled led off, then passed the shared folders to Aya Suchi. She advanced the cause greatly, then handed off to the team of Maor Zeevi and Gal Schwartz, who worked with me to get things over the finish line before they graduated.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

That’s right—when I was running around in 2004 declaring that the world was flat, Facebook didn’t even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, “applications” were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error. All of those technologies blossomed after I wrote The World Is Flat—most of them around 2007. So a few years later, I began updating in earnest my view of how the Machine worked. A crucial impetus was a book I read in 2014 by two MIT business school professors—Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—entitled The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. The first machine age, they argued, was the Industrial Revolution, which accompanied the invention of the steam engine in the 1700s. This period was “all about power systems to augment human muscle,” explained McAfee in an interview, “and each successive invention in that age delivered more and more power.

He believes all the big gains were made in the “special century” between 1870 and 1970—with the likes of automobiles, radio, television, indoor plumbing, electrification, vaccines, clean water, air travel, central heating, women’s empowerment, and air-conditioning and antibiotics. Gordon is skeptical that today’s new technologies will ever produce another leap forward in productivity comparable to that special century. But MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson has countered Gordon’s pessimism with an argument I find even more compelling. As we transition from an industrial-age economy to a computer-Internet-mobile-broadband-driven economy—that is, a supernova-driven economy—we are experiencing the growing pains of adjusting. Both managers and workers are having to absorb these new technologies—not just how they work but how factories and business processes and government regulations all need to be redesigned around them.

The primal one is this: Are things just getting too damned fast? The intellectual one is: Since the technological forces driving this change in the pace of change are not likely to slow down, how do we adapt? If your answer to the first question is “yes,” then let me assure you that you are not alone. Here is my favorite story in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s book The Second Machine Age: The Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner was asked how he’d prepare for a chess match against a computer, like IBM’s Deep Blue. Donner replied: “I would bring a hammer.” Donner isn’t alone in fantasizing that he’d like to smash some recent advances in software and artificial intelligence (AI).


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

John Cochrane, “The Fed Needn’t Rush to ‘Normalize,’” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fed-neednt-rush-to-normalize-1442441737. Chapter 6: The Myth That Progress Hollows Out the Middle Class 1. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 202. 2. Christopher Matthews, “How Silicon Valley Is Hollowing Out the Economy (and Stealing from You to Boot),” Time, May 7, 2013, http://business.time.com/2013/05/07/how-silicon-valley-is-hollowing-out-the-economy-and-stealing-from-you-while-theyre-at-it. 3. Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine: A Hamilton Project Policy Forum,” National Press Club, Washington, DC, February 19, 2015, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/legacy/files/download_and_links/2015_02_24_THP_Future_of_Work_in_Machine_Age_tran script_unedited.pdf. 4.

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 3. Lawrence Summers, “U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound,” Business Economics 49, no. 2 (February 24, 2014), http://larrysummers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/NABE-speech-Lawrence-H.-Summers1.pdf. 4. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 202. 5. Alan Krueger, “Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States,” remarks at the Center for American Progress, January 12, 2012, https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/krueger_cap_speech_final_remarks.pdf. 6.


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Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Where exactly we draw the line is not all that important because, when we think about what work is threatened, it’s all of the above. Why Worry About Less Work? Machines are becoming so capable that, today, it is hard to see the higher cognitive ground that many people could move to. That is making some very smart people worry. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee, for example, in their acclaimed book, The Second Machine Age, note that the anticipated recovery in labor markets has been just around the corner for a long time. The persistence of high unemployment levels in Western economies might mean that the dislocation caused by the last wave of skill-biased technical change is permanent.

As Levy writes in a 2010 working paper for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it involves not only listening to the patient’s words, but also his body language, tone of voice, eye contact, and incomplete sentences. He notes, “The doctor must be particularly alert for the famous ‘last minute’ of an appointment when the patient, on his way out the door, looks over his shoulder and says ‘By the way, my wife says I should tell you about this pain I have in my stomach.’”6 Levy’s MIT colleagues Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee agree with pattern recognition and complex communication as uniquely human traits, and they add a third: ideation. “Scientists come up with new hypotheses,” they write. “Chefs add a new dish to the menu. Engineers on a factory floor figure out why a machine is no longer working properly.

It’s definitely a realm in which some humility on the part of humans is called for. In one-on-one matches, we know the best chess players are computers these days. Yet the trouncing isn’t so complete as you might have been led to believe. The economist Tyler Cowen (not surprisingly, a chess champion in his youth) and The Second Machine Age authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee use the example of “freestyle chess,” in which human chess players are free to use as much help from computers as they wish.11 The two of us personally don’t play chess much (we like to get paid for thinking that hard), but we gather that under these rules, people often manage to beat the best programs.


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Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

Or the proliferation of outsourcing—of hiring others to do everything from walking dogs to cleaning homes to grocery shopping and chauffeuring—may further increase the “commodification of intimate life” and lead to additional pressure to make enough to pay for market services.28 Hiring workers off of platforms risks creating platform monopolies. As noted by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, when more and more people use a platform or tool, a “network effect” arises, which is economist speak for the idea that certain goods become more valuable as more and more people use them. The most frequently given example is that of a fax machine. If only one person has a fax machine, it’s not very useful.

Additionally, earning a high wage for a gig or two doesn’t take into account the costs of benefits—sick leave, paid time off, unemployment or health insurance—that commonly equal 20 to 30 percent of compensation. As a result, the gig economy also raises issues related to inequality and stratification. Even though services market their platforms as bringing entrepreneurship to the masses, the real winners are individuals with capital to spare. In Race against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee note that rapid technological change is destroying jobs faster than they are created, resulting in a “great decoupling” as productivity increases but employment decreases.59 Fellow economist David Autor disagrees with Brynjolfsson and McAfee about the robust increase in productivity but acknowledges that not all technological changes have been good.

May, Patrick. 2015. “Apple Says It’s Created 1 Million Jobs, App Store Is Going Gangbusters.” San Jose Mercury News, January 8. McAfee, Andrew. N.d. “The Great Decoupling of the US Economy.” Andrew McAfee (website). http://andrewmcafee.org/2012/12/the-great-decoupling-of-the-us-economy/. McAfee, Andrew, and Erik Brynjolfsson. 2017. Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future. New York: W.W. Norton. McKinney, K. (1994). “Sexual Harassment and College Faculty Members.” Deviant Behavior 15(2):171–91. McKinney, Sarah. 2013. “A Growing Segment of Sharing Economy Users? Entrepreneurs.” Forbes, November 9.


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The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The extreme risk is apocalyptic: the robots become smarter than we are and take over the world, rendering humans powerless on their own planet. An equally troubling but less existential, and more realistic, risk is that the robots increasingly deprive us of our jobs. Some researchers, such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, see the automatons inevitably gobbling up more and more meaningful slices of our work.9 Oxford University researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne caused a tremendous stir in September 2013, when they asserted in a seminal paper that A.I. would put 47 percent of current U.S. employment “at risk.”10 The paper, “The Future of Employment,” is a rigorous and detailed historical review of research on the effect of technology innovation upon labor markets and employment.

AJung Moon, “Machine Agency,” Roboethics info Database 22 April 2012, http://www.amoon.ca/Roboethics/wiki/the-open-roboethics-initiative/machine-agency. 8. Jason Kravarik and Sara Sidner, “The Dallas shootout, in the eyes of police,” CNN 15 July 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers (accessed 21 October 2016). 9. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (rev.), W.W. Norton, 2016, http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Second-Machine-Age (accessed 21 October 2016). 10. Michael A. Osborne and Carl Benedikt Frey, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?


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Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

An exabyte (EB) is 1024 petabytes, a zettabyte (ZB) is 1024 exabytes and a yottabyte (YB)—named after the Star Wars character Yoda—is 1024 zettabytes. 20 Statistics from the Library of Congress 21 According to Google Books software engineer Leonid Taycher, the actual figure was 129,864,880 books as of 2010. 22 Allowing for an average of 1 megabyte (MB) equivalent of storage required for each book, and accounting for approximately 9 zettabytes of content generated in 2014, we get the above figures. 23 “Michelle Phan: From YouTube Star to $84 Million Startup Founder,” Re/code, 27 October 2014. 24 You can check it out at http://www.businessinsider.com.au/chart-of-the-day-smartphones-us-saturation-2013-1. 25 Kate Dreyer, “Mobile Internet Usage Skyrockets in Past 4 Years to Overtake Desktop as Most Used Digital Platform,” comScore, 13 April 2015. 26 “Your Phone Loses Value Pretty Fast,” Priceonomics, February 2012. 27 Jeff Desjardins, “The Market has no bite without FANG stocks,” Visual Capitalist, 20 November 2015, http://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-market-has-no-bite-without-the-fang-stocks-chart/. 28 4.7 per cent in the United States and 8.6 per cent in the United Kingdom by 2014 29 Author’s own analysis from Business Insider, LinkedIn raw data/sources 30 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Richmond, VA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). See also Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (London: W. W. Norton, 2014). Chapter 2 The Augmented Age “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This is in stark contrast to previous booms like the manufacturing boom of the United States in the early 20th century, which was credited for being responsible for the broad creation of the middle class. The Internet, and with it broad technology automation, has created a more serious problem for employment. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last five years that advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years.30 Figure 1.11: Productivity changes related to employment and median family income (Credit: HBR) Brynjolfsson and McAfee analysed the last 70 years of employment data and found that while productivity has continued to improve, employment has not kept up pace in recent years.


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The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Currently youth unemployment in the United States is 12 percent, more than twice the nation’s overall average, and it is far higher in most of the rest of the world. If entry-level restaurant jobs are reduced or eliminated, how much harder will it be to get a first job? How about a second? There are earlier precedents for these types of job declines. MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson calls it “the great paradox of our era. Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and our organizations aren’t keeping up.”

As he explained in a 2012 New York Times article: John Markoff, “Skilled Work, without the Worker,” New York Times, August 19, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. But wages in China: Keith Bradsher, “Even as Wages Rise, China Exports Grow,” New York Times, January 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/business/international/chinese-exports-withstand-rising-labor-costs.html?hpw&rref=business. During the recent recession: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier, 2011). Two Oxford University professors: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”

The Obama operation was about: Zac Moffatt, “Successes of the Romney and Republican Digital Efforts in 2012,” Targeted Victory, December 11, 2012, http://www.targetedvictory.com/2012/12/11/success-of-the-romney-republican-digital-efforts-2012/; “Inside the Cave.” And my dad looks at me: Dan Wagner, interview with Ari Ratner, May 28, 2014. And you can do that now: Ibid. Typically large data analysis: Michael Slaby, interview with Ari Ratner, December 2, 2013. Big data’s really just: Ibid. It examines small facts and aggregates: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “The Big Data Boom Is the Innovation Story of Our Time,” Atlantic, November 21, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/the-big-data-boom-is-the-innovation-story-of-our-time/248215/; Zeynep Tufekci, “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics,” First Monday 19, no. 7 (2014), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097.


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The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

To learn, AlphaGo first watched previously played professional Go games, and then it played millions of games against itself, steadily improving its performance. Its training data set, consisting of thirty million board positions reached by 160,000 professional players, was far greater than the experience any professional player could accumulate in a lifetime. The event marks what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have called the “second half of the chessboard.”5 As Scientific American marveled, “An era is over and a new one is beginning. The methods underlying AlphaGo, and its recent victory, have huge implications for the future of machine intelligence.”6 Deep Blue may have beaten Kasparov at chess.

In the early days of automation, the training and retraining of employees often took longer than expected, and many companies did not fully appreciate the obstacles involved in getting machines, computers, and sophisticated software to work together effectively. In a number of studies, the economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Timothy Bresnahan, and Lorin Hitt consistently found that investments in computer technology contributed to firm productivity mainly when complementary organizational changes were made.68 In the 1980s, the computer revolution centered on productivity improvements in individual tasks, such as word processing and manufacturing operations control.

They may or may not have sufficient internal expertise to hire good data scientists, which is why we can expect to see heterogeneity in productivity as this new skill percolates through the labor markets.84 For these reasons, Amara’s Law will likely to apply to AI, too. Myriad necessary ancillary inventions and adjustment are required for automation to happen. Erik Brynjolfsson, who was among those investigating the role of computer technologies in the productivity boom of the late 1990s, thinks that the trajectory of AI adoption is likely to mirror the past in this regard. In a joint paper with Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson, two economists, he argues that as happened with computers back in the 1990s, the adoption of AI will require not only improvements in the technology itself, but significant complementary investment and plenty of experimentation to exploit its full potential.85 During this phase, history tells us, the economy goes through an adjustment process with slow productivity growth


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Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In the process of teaching and learning about platforms, I came to meet Tom Eisenmann, who has been a great friend and collaborator. His ideas have contributed significantly to this work. I was also fortunate to meet our coauthor Sangeet Choudary, who has worked at and consulted with numerous platform firms. His experience has been wonderfully complementary to my own. I thank Erik Brynjolfsson, Andy McAfee, Dave Verrill, and the great team at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). The IDE has been instrumental in hosting the MIT Platform Summit and providing Marshall and me with the opportunity to work with multiple companies as part of our effort to bridge practice and academia.

I look forward to many more years of entertainment and fascination as we continue the journey. MARSHALL W. VAN ALSTYNE Thank you, Erik and Alexander, for your love, support, and patience while Dad worked on this book. Thank you, Joyce, for carrying through on a project that’s finally over. Family will always matter most. I thank my advisors at MIT: Erik Brynjolfsson, Chris Kemerer, Stuart Madnick, Thomas Malone, Wanda Orlikowski, and Lones Smith. The standards you set were remarkable. I also thank the MIT community for letting me be a part of it, for its openness, and for its joy in experimentation. There is a reason that Open CourseWare, edX, PET scans, RSA encryption, spreadsheets, and condensed soup sprang from people in this environment.

There is a reason that Open CourseWare, edX, PET scans, RSA encryption, spreadsheets, and condensed soup sprang from people in this environment. It is one of the most grueling and at the same time one of the best intentioned and most rewarding places anywhere. I join Geoff in thanking the members of the great team at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, including Dave Verrill, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andy McAfee, Glenn Urban, Tommy Buzzell, and Justin Lockenwitz. Thank you Michael Schrage for good wine and deep thoughts. You all are where great ideas gain great influence. Our work on platforms draws heavily on that of Tom Eisenmann and Andrei Hagiu at Harvard Business School, whose teaching materials are excellent.


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Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, full text search, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, information trail, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Joi Ito, lifelogging, moveable type in China, Network effects, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, power law, RFID, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, The Market for Lemons, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Vannevar Bush, Yochai Benkler

Why should it make sense to offer customers combined access to, say, a database of legal precedents together with a database containing the full text of leading newspapers and newswires? At least at first glance, lawyers searching for precedents and journalists researching stories seem to have little in common. But such a strategy is, as professors Yanos Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson have shown, eminently sensible, and preferable to selling separately access to individual information sets.38 Their reasoning is straightforward: Information vendors do not know exactly what information their customers want, and the smaller and more focused an information set is, the harder it is to know whether it meets customer preferences.

Essaies: religious meditations : places of perswasion and disswasion : seene and allowed. London: John Laggard. 1606. Baker, John C. et al. Mapping the Risks: Assessing the Homeland Security Implications of Publicly Available Geospatial Information. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. 2004. Bakos, Yannis and Erik Brynjolfsson. “Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits and Efficiency.” Management Science 45 (Dec. 1999): 1613–30. Balkin, Jack M. “The Constitution in the National Surveillance State.” Minnesota Law Review 93 (2008): 1–25. Bannon, Liam J. “Forgetting as a Feature, Not a Bug: The Duality of Memory and Implications for Ubiquitous Computing.”


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The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Unwilling to give up on traditional American ideals like the free market, a capitalist economy and indeed the Protestant work ethic, he advocates a universal basic income of only $10,000 a year - a level low enough to leave the incentive to find work in place. Even so, he is pessimistic about the prospect of persuading his fellow Americans to adopt the idea: “a guaranteed income will probably remain unfeasible for the foreseeable future.” Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson As a pair of MIT professors[xxxiv], McAfee and Brynjolfsson bring academic credibility to their book on AI automation, “The Second Machine Age”. They have helped to validate the discussion of the possibility of technological unemployment. Their book (and their argument) is in three parts.

But while technology company executives sound breezy about the prospects for continued unemployment as machine intelligences get smarter, some of the academic authors who broadly agree with them sound more tentative. In chapter 3.1 we saw that in their book “The Second Machine Age”, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee believe that for many years to come, humans will be better than machines at generating new ideas, and complex forms of communication. They think that capitalism should be defended and retained, but they sound less confident about what will happen in the medium term. They argue for an overhaul of the US education system, but they don’t sound convinced that will be enough, and they speculate that a negative income tax may eventually become necessary.


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Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

The technology has got to the point of indispensability. People are spending considerable amounts of time online. In the UK this doubled between 2007 and 2017, to reach 24 hours a week, one-seventh of what would be possible without sleep. There is other evidence about the high value we place on it. Erik Brynjolfsson asked how much people would need in compensation for giving up digital services such as search or social media for a certain period of time. The average person was willing to give up all search engines for a year in return for about $17,000, which is around half the US median income. For email, the figure was $6,000.

The lectures also reflect work with wonderful co-authors: Mo Abdirahman, Stephanie Diepeveen, Richard Heys, Penny Mealy, Cahal Moran, Leonard Nakamura, David Nguyen, Marianne Sensier, Will Stewart, Manuel Tong, Adrian Weller, Timothy Yeung. I am grateful to many other colleagues in Cambridge and beyond for their comments and conversations helping stimulate my thinking at various stages through the years, including Matthew Agarwala, Anna Alexandrova, Eric Beinhocker, Tim Besley, Sam Bowles, John Bowers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Wendy Carlin, Vasco Carvalho, Jagjit Chadha, Carol Corrado, Jacques Crémer, Meredith Crowley, Partha Dasgupta, Mark Fabian, Marco Felici, Amelia Fletcher, Jason Furman, Tim Gardam, Rachel Griffith, Dennis Grube, Andrew Haldane, Jonathan Haskel, Cameron Hepburn, Cecilia Heyes, Bill Janeway, Dale Jorgenson, Saite Lu, Derek McAuley, Philip Marsden, David Miles, John Naughton, Jennifer Rubin, David Runciman, Paul Seabright, Margaret Stevens, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeni Tennison, Alex Teytelboym, Jean Tirole, Flavio Toxvaerd, Romesh Vaitilingam, Bart Van Ark, Tony Venables, Anna Vignoles, Dimitri Zenghelis.


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The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

While it’s not unusual for companies to wait until a recovery is well established before recruiting new workers, this time the hiring lag seemed interminable. Job growth remained unusually tepid, the unemployment rate stubbornly high. Seeking an explanation, and a culprit, people looked to the usual suspect: labor-saving technology. Late in 2011, two respected MIT researchers, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, published a short electronic book, Race against the Machine, in which they gently chided economists and policy makers for dismissing the possibility that workplace technology was substantially reducing companies’ need for new employees. The “empirical fact” that machines had bolstered employment for centuries “conceals a dirty secret,” they wrote.

Government Printing Office, 1962), 721. 22.Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 14. The emphasis is Aronowitz and DiFazio’s. 23.Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1995), xv–xviii. 24.Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, Mass.: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). Brynjolfsson and McAfee extended their argument in The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W.


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The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Ellis, “The End of Active Investing?,” Financial Times, January 19, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/6b2d5490-d9bb-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e (accessed June 27, 2019). 29. William H. Davidow, Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet (New York: Delphinium Books,2011), 79. 30. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine Platform Crowd (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 171–174. 31. Ashlee Vance, “How Two Brothers Turned Seven Lines of Code into a $9.2 Billion Startup,” Bloomberg, August 1, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-01/how-two-brothers-turned-seven-lines-of-code-into-a-9-2-billion-startup (accessed June 27, 2019). 32.

“Economic News Release,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 2, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm. 43. “Fifty Years of Federal Deficits as Pct GDP,” U.S. Government Debt, https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_2010_2020USp_19s2li011lcn_G0f_Fifty_Years_Of_Federal_Deficits_As_Pct_GDP-view (accessed August 15, 2019). 44. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 221. 45. Bill Snyder, “You’ll Never Get Google Fiber—But You Don’t Need It Anyway,” InfoWorld, December 6, 2012, https://www.infoworld.com/article/2616265/you-ll-never-get-google-fiber----but-you-don-t-need-it-anyway.html. 46.


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How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

When we don’t know how to solve a big problem, we shove it into the classroom and make underpaid and overworked teachers responsible for fixing it. The bigger and more amorphous the problem, the more we hand it off to schools to fix. So, for example, in their excellent bestselling The Second Machine Age—about the economic impact of Moore’s Law on society—the MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make education their number one policy recommendation for solving the American future. “Teach the children well,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee conclude, speaking of the need to pay teachers better and make them more accountable for their pedagogical work, particularly the teaching of “hard-to-measure skills like creativity and unstructured problem-solving.”

More, Utopia, 51. 10. Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Little Brown, 2017). 11. Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books, 2016). 12. Albert Wenger, World After Capital (worldaftercapital.org 2016). 13. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (Norton, 2014), 213. 14. Lee Rainie, “The Future of Jobs and Jobs Training,” Pew Research Center, May 3, 2017. 15. Danielle Pacquette, “Bosses Believe Your Work Skills Will Soon Be Useless,” Washington Post, May 3, 2017. 16.


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Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

For a global perspective on the interaction between part-time employment and women’s entry into the labour force, see Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor’, World Development 17:7, 1989; and Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited’, World Development 27:3, 1999. 7 There is sizeable mainstream literature arguing that new technology has altered the nature of work by adding intangible organizational assets to the production process; see Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt, ‘Beyond Computation’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 14:4, 2000; Brynjolfsson and Hitt, ‘Computing Productivity’, MIT-Sloan Working Paper 4210–01, 2003; Brynjolfsson, Hitt, and Shinkyu Yang, ‘Intangible Assets’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Macroeconomics, vol. 1, 2002; Timothy Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, and Hitt, ‘Information Technology, Workplace Organization, and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 117:1, 2002; Marshall Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson, ‘Global Village or Cyber-Balkans’, Management Science, 2004.

Brenner, Robert, and Mark Glick, ‘The Regulation Approach: Theory and History’, New Left Review 188, 1991, pp. 45–119. Bresnahan, Timothy, and Manuel Trajtenberg, ‘General Purpose Technologies: “Engines of Growth?” ’, NBER Working Paper No. 4148, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1992. Bresnahan, Timothy, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Loren Hitt, ‘Information Technology, Workplace Organization, and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 117:1, 2002, pp. 339–76. Brewer, Anthony, Marxist Theories of Imperialism, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 1990. Brownbridge, Martin, and Charles Harvey, Banking in Africa, Oxford: Currey, 1998.

Usher, Abbott, ‘The Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe’, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. Usher, Abbott, ‘The Origins of Banking: The Primitive Bank of Deposit, 1200–1600’ in Enterprise and Secular Change, ed. Frederic Lane and Jelle Riemersma, Homewood, IL: Richard Irwin. Originally published in Economic History Review, 1934, IV, pp. 399–428, 1953. Van Alstyne, Marshall, and Erik Brynjolfsson, ‘Global Village or Cyber-Balkans: Modeling and Measuring the Integration of Electronic Communities’, Management Science, 2004. Van Els, Peter, Alberto Locarno, Julian Morgan, and Jean-Pierre Villetelle, ‘Monetary Policy Transmission in the Euro Area: What Do Aggregate and National Structural Models Tell Us?’


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

., David Wolf, Randall Pickett, Zack Davis, Tom Bell, Harry Hawk, Adam Kolber, Dean Menk, Randall Mayes, Karen Maloney, Brian Tomasik, Ramez Naam, John Clark, Robert de Neufville, Richard Bruns, Keith Mansfield, Gordon Worley, Giedrius, Peter Garretson, Christopher Burger, Nithya Sambasivam, Zachary Weinersmith, Luke Somers, Barbara Belle, Jake Selinger, Geoffrey Miller, Arthur Breitman, Martin Wooster, Daniel Boese, Oge Nnadi, Joseph Mela, Diego Caleiro, Daniel Lemire, Emily Perry, Jess Riedel, Jon Perry, Eli Tyre, Daniel Erasmus, Emmanuel Saadia, Erik Brynjolfsson, Anamaria Berea, Niko Zinovii, Matthew Farrell, Diana Fleischman, and Douglas Barrett. I have received no financial assistance for this book and its related research, other than the freedom that academic tenure has provided me. I deeply thank my GMU colleagues for granting me that unusual privilege.

Journal of Law and Economics 42(2): 611–642. Angier, Natalie. 2005. “Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore.” New York Times, September 20. Anwar, Shamena, Patrick Bayer, and Randi Hjalmarsson. 2014. “The Role of Age in Jury Selection and Trial Outcomes.” Journal of Law and Economics 57(4): 1001–1030. Aral, Sinan, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Marshall Van Alstyne. 2007. “Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence.” NBER Working Paper No. 13172, June. Aral, Sinan, and Dylan Walker. 2012. “Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks.” Science 337(6092): 337–341. Armstrong, Stuart, and Kaj Sotala. 2012.

“Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.” Science 330(6004): 686–688. Wout, Félice van’t, Aureliu Lavric, and Stephen Monsell. 2015. “Is It Harder to Switch Among a Larger Set of Tasks?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 41(2): 363–376. Wu, Lynn, Ben Waber, Sinan Aral, Alex Pentland, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Alex Pentland. 2008. “Mining Face-to-Face Interaction Networks Using Sociometric Badges: Predicting Productivity in an IT Configuration Task.” International Conference on Information Systems 2008 Proceedings. 127. Yang, Mu-Jeung, Lorenz Kueng, and Bryan Hong. 2015. “Business Strategy and the Management of Firms.”


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Yet we continue to optimize our businesses and our economy for growth, even as we transition toward an entirely different technological and social landscape—one with very different potentials. This is why the leading voices today are those that still treat the emerging digital economy as Industrialism 2.0 or, as Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee put it in the title of their respected business book, The Second Machine Age. It’s no wonder such ideas captivate the business community: for all their revolutionary bravado they are actually promising business as usual. Workers will continue to be displaced by automation, corporations will remain the major players in the economic landscape, and it’s up to people to keep up with the pace of technological change if they want to survive.

Women of the late Middle Ages in Europe were taller than at any other period until the 1970s. Bernard Lietaer and Stephen Belgin, New Money for a New World (Boulder, Colo.: Qiterra Press: 2011). 3. Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How Corporations Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2009), 8. 4. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2014). 5. Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, “Netizen: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet,” First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet 3, no. 7 (July 6, 1998). 6.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

In a broad swath of service sectors, rich nation workers could find themselves in direct wage competition with poor nation workers providing their labor services remotely. But of course, this challenge to rich nation workers would be an opportunity for poor nation workers. To put these changes in perspective, it is worth drawing a parallel with the discussions of how disruptive Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be. According to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of The Second Machine Age, the near future will be marked by a very systematic use of AI to operate robots that replace humans in high-wage nations.6 The authors point out that this would have large effects for workers ranging from truck drivers to investment managers.

For details, see Richard Baldwin, and Javier Lopez-Gonzalez, “Supply-Chain Trade: A Portrait of Global Patterns and Several Testable Hypotheses,” World Economy 38, no. 11 (2015): 1682–1721. 5. See David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, Melissa S. Kearney, “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market,” NBER Working Paper 11986, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2006. 6. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014). Acknowledgments This book was a very long time in the making. The original idea came from a paper I wrote in late 2006 for the Finnish prime minister’s project “Globalization Challenges for Europe and Finland.”


pages: 255 words: 92,719

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

Henry Ford doubled his workers pay to $5 a day in 1914, the legend goes, so that his workers could afford what they made (Ford may also have been encouraging them to quit less often); Bob Crow used to ask how robots were going to be able to buy the cars they make. But who owns the robots? A new robot costs between £30,000 and £50,000. Who gets the robots’ share of a company’s profit? We might be happy to let robots heave car bonnets, but less so to have them looking after our children. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in The Second Machine Age (2014) that while robots can take on routine tasks, even writing simple share price reports successfully, they have trouble with non-routine tasks, both of thinking and doing. They’re not good hair-dressers, care workers, handymen, poets, financial analysts and cooks.

The figures for workers at Swindon in 1965 were taken from an English Heritage Conservation Bulletin, the current figures from The Manufacturer, the ratio of robots to workers was drawn from articles in the Financial Times and The Manufacturer. Bob Crow shared his view on robots during a Lunch with the FT interview of 25 March 2011, and the price of a robot was taken from the FT. My account of what robots can and can’t do comes from Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee’s The Second Machine Age (Norton, 2014). The video introducing the idea of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ can be seen on Novara Media’s YouTube channel. Selling I’ve drawn my account of Belfast’s markets from the Belfast City tourism website and a short BBC archive film from 1959, ‘Roving Reporter: Smithfield Market’, available online.


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The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

A truck driver making a left turn on a busy city street, Levy and Murhane note, has to process visual and aural information about what’s happening on the street; tactile information about the truck’s probable speed once he hits the accelerator; and split-second calculations about probable trajectories for people and other vehicles. All this is well beyond the ability of a computer.8 Or so it seemed when Levy and Murnane wrote their book. In 2011 their MIT colleagues Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Sloan School of Management wrote that this conclusion had become obsolete by the end of 2010. In October of that year Google automated a fleet of Toyota Priuses and put them on the road (with human drivers behind the wheel as safety backups). The robocars navigated from Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters to its Santa Monica office, taking a detour along the way to wind down San Francisco’s Lombard Street (“the crookedest street in the world”).

.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 13–25; and Farhad Manjoo, “Will Robots Steal Your Job?,” Slate, Sept. 26–30, 2011, at http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011/09/will_robots_steal_your_job.html. Levy and Murnane’s book grew out of a 2003 paper that they wrote with MIT’s David Autor. 9. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, e-book, 2011), chap. 2; and Sebastian Thrun, “What We’re Driving At,” The Official Google Blog, Oct. 9, 2010, at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html. 10.


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The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

They have already begun. The subject of the future of work in a digital economy has been well covered – in serious magazines, including but by no means limited to my employer, The Economist, and in a growing number of important books. Worries and speculation have grown more intense and more common since 2011, when Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee published Race Against the Machine,19 which laid out in compelling detail how quickly the capabilities of clever software and robots were improving. Authors like Martin Ford, whose 2015 book Rise of the Robots20 described a vision of a post-work world, argue that robots and machine intelligence will create a world wholly different from anything that has come before, and that a techno-socialism of sorts will need to be adopted to keep society functioning.

Yet that, they say, should in no way convince us that future progress will be similarly disappointing. On the contrary, a long period of modest progress is precisely what we would expect to see from a technology improving in exponential fashion from a very modest starting point. In an influential 2012 book, Race Against the Machine, two MIT scholars of technology and business, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, argue that people aren’t very good at assessing the pace of exponential technological progress (for example, the repeated doubling in microchip power described by Moore’s law).11 They borrow a parable popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil.12 In the legend, a wise man invents the game of chess and presents it to his king.


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Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

htmlfid=IMC14702USEN&appname=wwwsearch. 15 Douglas Laney, “Methods for Monetizing Your Data,” Gartner Webinar, 22 August 2015, www.gartner.com/webinar/3098518. 16 Information variety represents a greater challenge than volume or velocity because it cannot be solved simply by scaling or swapping infrastructure. 17 Sue Hildreth, “Data+ Awards: Florida Youth Welfare Agency Pinpoints Aid with BI,” Computerworld, 26 August 2013, www.computerworld.com/article/2483944/enterprise-applications/data--awards--florida-youth-welfare-agency-pinpoints-aid-with-bi.html. 18 “Cashing in on Improved Profitability through Pattern Detection and Big Data Analytics,” emcien.com, 2015, http://emcien.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/NCR-Success-Story.pdf. 19 Denise Winterman, “Tesco: How One Supermarket Came to Dominate,” BBC News Magazine, 09 September 2013, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23988795. 20 “Data Analytics Solution Used to Optimize Refrigerators and Reduce Energy Costs in Grocery Stores,” ibm.com, www-03.ibm.com/software/businesscasestudies/mx/es/corp. 21 “FleetRisk Advisors Helps Clients Reduce Accident Rates and Driver Turnover,” IBM, accessed 09 February 2017, http://presidionwp.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FleetRisk.pdf. 22 IBM, “FleetRisk Advisors.” 23 Andrew McAffee, and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Big Data: The Management Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, October 2012, http://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution/ar/2. 24 Passur.com, accessed 09 February 2017, www.passur.com/success-stories-airlines.htm. 25 “IBM Enables Infinity Property & Casualty Insurance to Combat Fraud,” youtube.com, uploaded 05 May 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?

However, in the current information-driven society and increasingly digitalized world, sentiments are shifting from the economics of tangible assets to the economics of information—“infonomics”—and other intangible assets. I have relegated the examination of information economics toward the end of this book, not just because it is the “-nomics” in the “infonomics” portmanteau, but because it is opening a portal to an unexplored universe of ideas. Thought leaders like Barb Wixom and Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT have researched and taught on monetizing information and the information economy, and UCSD’s Jim Short is researching data valuation. Others like Gartner’s Andrew White, Alan Duncan, Alan Dayley, and Brian Lowans, along with practitioners including John Ladley, James Price, Tony Fisher, Thomas Redman, Kelle O’Neal, Danette McGilvray, Theresa Kushner, Maria Villar, and Rob Hillard, have been pushing the envelope on how to manage information more like an asset.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

., “Toward Understanding the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Labor,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no.14 (2019): 6531–9. 77 John Hawksworth, Richard Berriman, and Saloni Goel, Will Robots Really Steal Our Jobs? An International Analysis of the Potential Long-Term Impact of Automation (PwC, February 2018). 78 For key works in the sprawling literature on the future of work, see Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011); Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Kaplan, Humans Need Not Apply (2015); Alec Ross, The Industries of the Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); and Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, The Future of the Professions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 79 David Autor, David Mindell, and Elisabeth Reynolds, “The Work of the Future: Shaping Technology and Institutions,” MIT Work of the Future, November 17, 2020, https://workofthefuture.mit.edu/research-post/the-work-of-the-future-shaping-technology-and-institutions/. 80 The acronym CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” which refers to a region of DNA that, with various CRISPR-associated proteins, functions like genetic scissors, enabling a cell or scientist to edit DNA or its messenger RNA very precisely.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

A very different logic now seems to be at work – innovation has caused an atomization of demand, and atomized demand has driven ever faster rates of innovation in nearly all fields of economic activity. It is not an illusion that life today feels like a sequential wrestling with one new thing after another, in a vertiginous cycle of change. 6.5 Rate of adoption of new products, 1900-2005[146] In Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee conjectured that this frenzy of innovation has been a major reason for the stagnant economic growth since 2008. “The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring,” they argued.

[144] “74% want to audit the Federal Reserve,” Rasmussen Reports, November 8, 2013, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/general_business/november_2013/74_want_to_audit_the_federal_reserve, and “US investors trust financial adviser over Bernanke, survey finds,” SmartBrief, February 7, 2012, http://www.smartbrief.com/02/07/12/us-investors-trust-financial-advisers-over-bernanke-survey-finds#.UpNjicTkv75. [145] My photo. [146] Copyright: New York Times, Nicolas Felton, illustrator. [147] Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, (Digital Frontier Press, 2011), 9, 40. [148] Tony Elwin, “The Cost of Culture, a 50% turnover of the Fortune 500,” http://www.tobyelwin.com/ the-cost-of-culture-a-50-turnover-of-the-fortune-500/


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The internet’s open system led to niche repositories for highly specialized information appealing to smaller audiences distributed around the world. Chris Anderson of Wired magazine famously detailed this phenomenon from a business perspective in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Building from the research of Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, Anderson explained how online access creates not just lower prices but increased product variety. In the pre-internet era, where traditional local markets offered only a small range of high-selling goods, the World Wide Web offered an opportunity for things like books, music, and homemade goods to be sold at lower volumes over an extended period.

Anderson was right about the internet bringing us together, but his optimism about preference has not been borne out. Unlimited variety and choice have somehow divided us, made us angry for reasons we can’t explain and bitter toward our own countrymen, friends, and family who don’t share our preferences. Similarly, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, in their 2017 book Machine, Platform, Crowd, describe how modern crowds, empowered by smartphone technology, now contribute to the knowledge of society and can work together to identify solutions. They explain how, before barriers were lowered with the internet, societal elites and their institutions maintained collections of knowledge that they used to power their products and further their agendas.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Like any good upper crust, the creative class would feel a sense of noblesse oblige toward its inferiors: “To build true social cohesion,” Florida warned, “the members of the Creative Class will need to offer those in other classes a tangible vision of ways to improve their own lives by becoming part of the Creative Economy or, at the very least, by reaping some of its rewards.” More recently, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s influential 2014 book The Second Machine Age argued that the American economy inevitably will be characterized by a “bounty” of fabulous economic gains for workers and entrepreneurs with the right skills, but also a widening “spread” between those winners and the growing army of losers whose jobs will disappear under a tidal wave of technological change.32 That book won approving reviews or front-cover blurbs from public figures many Millennials have grown up respecting, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and someone whose job title is “chief maverick” at Wired magazine.

Philip Oreopoulos, Till von Wachter, and Andrew Heisz, “The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4, no. 1 (2012). 31. Richard Florida, “Preface to the Original Edition,” in The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 32. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014). 33. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Plume, 2013). 34. Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

We hope this drives home the point that getting a sense of this labor is hard because of the constant churn among workers and the challenges of seeing and following the workers behind ghost work. [back] 9. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2017); Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier, 2012).


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

A Foreign Affairs article from 2016 provides a typical example: “By studying lots of examples, identifying relevant patterns, and applying them to new examples, computers have been able to achieve human and super-human levels of performance in a range of tasks: recognizing street signs, parsing human speech, identifying credit fraud, modeling how materials will behave under different conditions, and more.” Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Human Work in the Robotic Future,” Foreign Affairs, June 13, 2016. See also the “Deep Image” system and its media coverage: Ren Wu et al., “Deep Image: Scaling up Image Recognition,” ArXiv Preprint ArXiv:1501.02876, July 8, 2015; Alex Hern, “Computers Now Better than Humans at Recognising and Sorting Images,” Guardian, May 13, 2015.

Dávila. “The Biology of Knowing and the Biology of Loving: Education as Viewed from the Biological Matrix of Human Existence.” Prelac 2 (2006): 30–39. Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. The Tree of Knowledge, rev. ed. Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala Press, 1998. McAfee, Andrew, and Erik Brynjolfsson. “Human Work in the Robotic Future.” Foreign Affairs, June 13, 2016. McCarthy, John. Defending AI Research: A Collection of Essays and Reviews. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI Publications, 1996. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 2013.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

“We are shifting from the world where executives expressly collude in smoke-filled hotel rooms to a world where pricing algorithms continually monitor and adjust to each other’s prices and market data.”37 Surrender scruples or face unpleasant consequences. Uneasy lies the head that built the algorithm. Is AI a friend or foe? Will self-learning algorithms replace more human roles, including programmers, than industries of the future can create? In their book, The Second Machine Age, authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee dismiss the fear that the job market will vanish. They anticipate jobs no one has yet thought of thanks to staggering technological progress.38 Who foresaw jobs in electronics, data processing, or telecommunications when agricultural and manufacturing jobs began to disappear?

Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, “Artificial Intelligence & Collusion: When Computers Inhibit Competition,” University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2017, No. 5, p. 1775. 38. Steven Pearlstein, review of The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Washington Post, January 17, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/review-the-second-machine-age-by-erik-brynjolfsson-and-andrew-mcafee/2014/01/17/ace0611a-718c-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html. 39. David Autour, “Are the Robots Taking Our Jobs?” Columbus Museum of Art, https://youtu.be/uNw3ik7g1Ss @ approx. 22:24. 40. Daniel Susskind, A World without Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), Kindle edition, p. 5, location 268. 41.


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Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Already, cloud, social networking, mobile, and new ways to interact with computing from tablets to glasses are fueling the desire for cognitive systems that will, for example, both harvest insights from social networks and enhance our experiences within them. Should we fear the cognitive machines? MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee warn in their book, Race Against the Machine, that one of the side effects of this generation of advances in computing is they are coming at the expense of existing jobs. We believe, though, that the most important effect of these technologies will be in assisting people to do what they are unable to do today, vastly expanding the problems we can solve and creating new spheres of innovation for every industry.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

THE DAILY ME 1.See Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 153. For a prescient discussion of “cyberbalkinization,” see also Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 177–79, which draws in turn on an illuminating earlier paper, Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkans?” (working paper, MIT Sloan School, Cambridge, MA, 1996), http://web.mit.edu/marshall/www/papers/CyberBalkans.pdf (accessed August 23, 2016). 2.In a provocative 2011 book, Eli Pariser popularized a theory of “filter bubbles” in which he posited that due to the effects of algorithmic filtering, Internet users are likely to be provided with information that conforms to their existing interests and, in effect, is isolated from differing viewpoints.

Martin and Ali Yurukoglu, “Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization” (working paper no. 20798, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, December 2014), http://www.nber.org/papers/w20798.pdf (accessed September 2, 2016). 3.See Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin, “Red Media, Blue Media,” Washington Post, May 3, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/03/AR2006050300865.html (accessed September 2, 2016). 4.Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkans?” (working paper, MIT Sloan School, Cambridge, MA, 1996), http://web.mit.edu/marshall/www/papers/CyberBalkans.pdf (accessed September 2, 2016). 5.For a fascinating discussion, see Ronald Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 6.David Schkade, Cass R.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

We will dig deeper into the business models and growth contributions of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft in Chapter 13. Nonetheless, the measurement of the digital economy is an active area of research, and we are likely to obtain better estimates in the near future. For instance, Erik Brynjolfsson and his co-authors (2019) have recently argued that properly accounting for Facebook’s free services could add between 5 and 10 basis points (0.05 to 0.1 percent) to our measure of growth for the US economy. Weak Investment and Weak Productivity The pattern of investment and productivity growth is inconsistent with the hypothesis of rising superstar firms, which holds efficiency gains to be the root cause of increasing concentration.

Nonetheless, when we add them up, we get Figure 13.4: stars used to bring about seventy basis points of labor productivity growth each year (using the industry stars definition), but now it’s only forty basis points. Our results challenge the common wisdom about the stars of the new economy and shed light on the debate between Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014), who view digital technologies as “the most general purpose of all,” and Robert J. Gordon (2016), who is skeptical about the impact of recent innovations. Our results are perhaps less surprising for students of history. History students are well aware of biased thinking that today is different—to paraphrase Reinhart and Rogoff (2009)—and that our current stars are exceptional.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Labor Market: Implications for Employment and Earnings,” Center for American Progress (April 2010); David Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market,” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (2013): 1553–97; and Maarten Goos and Alan Manning, “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain,” Review of Economics and Statistics 89, no. 1 (2007): 119–33. 19.  For the 0.01 percent statistic, see Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” published online at https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/ (2016). For the “super-star bias,” see Erik Brynjolfsson, “AI and the Economy,” lecture at the Future of Life Institute, 1 July 2017. 20.  See Acemoglu and Autor, “Skills, Tasks and Technologies,” p. 1070, n. 25. 21.  The classic statement of the ALM hypothesis is David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane, “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 4 (2003): 129–333.

David Deming, “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 132, no. 4 (2017): 1593–1640.   2.  Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs: Key Findings,” Pew Research Center, 6 August 2014, available at http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ (accessed August 2018).   3.  See, for instance, Erik Brynjolfsson and Tom Mitchell, “What Can Machine Learning Do? Workforce Implications,” Science 358, no 6370 (2017).   4.  John Markoff, “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000,” New York Times, 25 June 2012.   5.  Jeff Yang, “Internet Cats Will Never Die,” CNN, 2 April 2015.   6.  Colin Caines, Florian Hoffman, and Gueorgui Kambourov, “Complex-Task Biased Technological Change and the Labor Market,” International Finance Division Discussion Papers 1192 (2017).   7.  


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Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

Economic theory does not, unfortunately, predict that each human will be better off as a result of automation. Generally, automation increases the share of income going to capital (the owners of the housepainting robots) and decreases the share going to labor (the ex-housepainters). The economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, in The Second Machine Age, argue that this has already been happening for several decades. Data for the United States are shown in figure 9. They indicate that between 1947 and 1973, wages and productivity increased together, but after 1973, wages stagnated even while productivity roughly doubled.

., “Artificial intelligence and life in 2030,” One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, report of the 2015 Study Panel, 2016. 49. The media-fueled argument between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg: Peter Holley, “Billionaire burn: Musk says Zuckerberg’s understanding of AI threat ‘is limited,’” The Washington Post, July 25, 2017. 50. On the value of search engines to individual users: Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, and Avinash Gannamaneni, “Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being,” working paper no. 24514, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018. 51. Penicillin was discovered several times and its curative powers were described in medical publications, but no one seems to have noticed.


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Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Steve Jobs, “Let’s go and invent…,” is from a 2007 conference (https://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript). Labor market developments, including wage inequality by education, are examined in more detail in Chapter 8; see the notes for that chapter for details on our sources and calculations. The Bandwagon of Progress. “What can we do…” is from a TED talk by Erik Brynjolfsson in April 2017 (www.techpolicy.com/Blog/April-2017/Erik-Brynjolfsson-Racing-with-the-Machine-Beats-R.aspx). Automotive industry facts are from McCraw (2009, 14, 17, 23). Auto industry employment in the 1920s is from CQ Researcher (1945). The evolution of tasks in the auto industry is discussed further in chapters 7 and 8; full sources are in the notes for those chapters.

Nobody is supposed to be completely left behind by technology, let alone be impoverished by it. According to the conventional wisdom, to rectify the rise in inequality and build even more solid foundations for shared prosperity, workers must find a way to acquire more of the skills they need to work alongside new technologies. As succinctly summarized by Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the foremost experts on technology, “What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to race with the machine. That is our grand challenge.” The theory behind the productivity bandwagon is straightforward: when businesses become more productive, they want to expand their output.


pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts diminishing sea ice, acidification of the oceans, and increasing frequency of droughts and extreme storm events.2 At the same time, news of technological breakthroughs in the context of high unemployment and stagnant wages has produced anxious warnings about the effects of automation on the future of work. In early 2014, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee published The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.3 They surveyed a future in which computer and robotics technology replaces human labor not just in traditional domains such as agriculture and manufacturing, but also in sectors ranging from medicine and law to transportation.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

They also offer the potential for new types of democratic processes, such as direct voting online, and the scope for alternate views to be put forward outside of the mainstream. The downside to Web communities is that they can cause people to become more cut off from the rest of society. In their paper “Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyber Balkans,” professors Marshal Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson said that “individuals empowered to screen out material that does not conform to their existing preferences may form virtual cliques, insulate themselves from opposing points of view, and reinforce their biases.… This voluntary Balkanisation and the loss of shared experiences and values may be harmful to the structure of democratic societies.”7 They warned that we should have no illusions that the Internet will create a greater sense of community.

Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007). 4. Paul Kedrosky, “The First Disaster of the Internet Age,” Newsweek, October 27, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/2008/10/17/the-first-disaster-of-the-internet-age.html. 5. Quoted in Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Daily Me,” New York Times, March 19, 2009. 6. Ibid. 7. Marshal Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyber Balkans,” Sloan School of Management Working Papers, MIT Sloan School, March 1997. 8. Nate Anderson, “Online Oligarchy: Old Guard Dominates ’Net News Coverage,” Ars Technica, March 17, 2008, http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/03/online-oligarchy-old-guard-dominates-net-news-coverage.ars (accessed on November 19, 2010); PBS, “Democracy on Deadline: Who Owns the Media?”


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Soon after the well-publicized trouncing, IBM announced that one of its first “use cases” for Watson would be medicine. Sean Hogan, vice president for IBM Healthcare, told me that “healthcare jumped out as an area whose complexity and nuances would be receptive to what Watson was representing.” Andy McAfee, coauthor with Erik Brynjolfsson of the terrific book The Second Machine Age, agrees with Khosla that computers will ultimately take over much of what physicians do, including diagnosis. “I can’t see how that doesn’t happen,” McAfee, a self-described “technology optimist,” told me when we met for lunch near his MIT office. McAfee and Brynjolfsson argue that the confluence of staggering growth in computing power, zetabytes of fully networked information available on the Web, and the “combinatorial power” of innovation mean that areas that seemed like dead ends, such as artificial intelligence in medicine, are now within reach.

While specific technologies—a new jet engine, say, or a solar panel—can improve productivity, since the Industrial Revolution the technologies associated with the greatest productivity bumps have been so-called general-purpose technologies—technologies that transformed multiple industries and laid the groundwork for many new applications. The best-known examples are the steam engine and electricity, and so it’s fair to say that such technologies don’t come around very often, perhaps every 50 to 100 years. Information technology falls into the same category—in fact, in The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call IT “the most general purpose of all.” Given the power and range of information technology, one would think that its implementation would rapidly and predictably lead to a sharp uptick in productivity. Yet, in the 1980s, economists began to notice something strange. Companies in industries ranging from manufacturing to accounting were fervently installing computers, but productivity appeared to be stagnant.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Back in 1995, astronomers in Chile: Public Information Office, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “Boomerang Nebula Boasts Coolest Spot in the Universe,” June 20, 1997. For the official NASA/JPL release, see: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/releases/97/coldspot.html. IBM’s Deep Blue: Luke Harding and Leonard Barden, “Deep Blue Win a Giant Step for Computerkind,” Guardian, May 12, 2011. Transistor power: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (W.W. Norton and Co., 2014), p. 49. Moore’s Law has been slowing down: Lieven Eeckhout, “Is Moore’s Law Slowing Down? What Next?, IEEE Micro 37, no. 4: 4–5. “Moore’s Law was not the first”: Kurzweil, “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Apple’s recent A12 Bionic: See: https://www.apple.com/iphone-xs/a12-bionic/.

consider the service economy: John Ward, “The Services Sector: How Best to Measure It?,” International Trade Organization, October 2010. forty-three different types of traffic signs: To track the progress in machine learning, Wikipedia has a useful chart here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_machine_learning. See also: Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine Platform Crowd (Norton, 2017), pp. 66–86. AI-piloted drone: For a demo, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsfkGlSajHQ. AI assistant named Duplex: See: https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html. Google’s Talk to Books: See: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/talk-to-books.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

In order to eliminate commercial distortions, they say, invite volunteers to populate contested search results pages. For example, user-generated content on Google Maps can lead those seeking help to clinics that are closest to them. In their book Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson frame this kind of interaction between a large internet company (the platform) and its users (the crowd) as a mostly productive synergy.48 Large platforms like Google can use machine learning for many tasks, but then find ways to draw on the “crowd” of volunteer internet users to fill in gaps where more or better data is needed.

Sanjukta Paul, “Antitrust as Allocator of Coordination Rights,” University of California at Los Angeles Law Review 67 (forthcoming 2020). 47. Cat Ferguson, “Searching for Help,” Verge, September 7, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-google-search-scam-florida-treatment-centers. 48. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future (New York: Norton 2017). 49. David Dayen, “Google Is So Big, It Is Now Shaping Policy to Combat the Opioid Epidemic: And It’s Screwing It Up,” Intercept, October 17, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/10/17/google-search-drug-use-opioid-epidemic/. 50.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

A number of dissenting economists have come to the conclusion that the culture industry can gain from so-called piracy. If the net effect is negative or positive depends on the circumstances, but on balance, Bakos, Brynjolfsson, and Lichtman assert that media companies profits when consumers share information goods. Yannies Bakos, Erik Brynjolfsson & Douglas Lichtman, Shared Information Goods, Journal of Law and Economics (April 1999). For a collection of unorthodox views on illicit copying, argued from within neoclassical economic theory, see ed. Wendy Gordon & Richard Watt, The Economics of Copyright—Developments in Research and Analysis (Northampton, Mass.: Elgar, 2003). 15.

“Collective invention.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (March 1983). Aoki, Ketih. “Neocolonialism, Anticommons Property, and Biopiracy in the (Not-So-Brave) New World Order of International Intellectual Property Protection.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 11 (1998). Bakos, Yannis, and Erik Brynjolfsson, and Douglas Lichtman. ”Shared Information Goods”, Journal of Law and Economics (April 1999). Barbrook, Richard. “The High-Tech Gift Economy.” First Monday, vol.3, no.12 (December 1998). Barry, David. “The Contestation of Code—A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free/Libre and Open Source Movements.”


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

“To those who sweat for their daily bread, leisure is a longed-for sweet – until they get it.” This time it’s different? Some people argue that soon, people automated out of a job may not find new employment, thanks to the rapid advances in machine learning, and the availability of increasingly powerful and increasingly portable computers. MIT professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson have published two seminal books on the subject: Race Against the Machine, and The Second Machine Age. A report in September 2013 by the Oxford Martin School estimated that 45% of American jobs would disappear in the next 20 years, in two waves. (21) The first would attack relatively low-skilled jobs in transportation and administration.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Diamondis and Steven Kotler, there is no reason to worry: the digital revolution will solve capitalism’s crisis and soon re-create the system better than ever. “Within a generation,” they write, “we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them. Or desire them. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp.”18 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make a more nuanced case that depends upon policy changes. Boiled down, though, the argument goes that while digital technologies may contribute to the current crisis of capitalism, they will also lead soon enough to a glorious future for capitalism, a “third industrial revolution.”19 They are correct that we have the technological and material capacity to do far better, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than we are currently doing.20 However, the notion that such improvements can be accomplished under really existing capitalism is, to be polite, unconvincing.21 It is here that one of Karl Marx’s greatest and most lasting insights moves to the fore.

Compustat North America, Fundamentals Annual; Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), University of Pennsylvania (retrieved June 4, 2012). 17. Andrew J. Sherman, Harvesting Intangible Assets (New York: Amacom, 2012), xi. 18. Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (New York: The Free Press, 2012), 9. 19. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011), 76. 20. Jeremy Rifkin was on to this at the beginning of the digital era. See Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995).


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

In the 1970s, only the geek elite used email. Today everyone texts, tweets, and posts to Instagram. Yet none of this extra connectivity seems to be bridging the chasm between the political left and right. If anything, the gulf is widening. What is actually happening was predicted by MIT professors Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson as early as 1996 – two years before Google and eight years before Facebook. “Internet users,” they wrote, “can seek out interactions with like-minded individuals who have similar values” while minimizing interactions with those whose values differ.18 Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson called this phenomenon “cyberbalkanization”; psychologists call it “selective exposure.”19 Online, you can find self-reinforcing groups of white supremacists on the one hand, and free-loving hippies on the other.

International energy statistics, www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=5&aid=2&cid=CG5,&syid=2009&eyid=2013&unit=TBPD. ———. (2014b). Electricity monthly update with data for September 2014, Nov. 25, 2014, www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/. Van Alstyne, Marshall, and Erik Brynjolfsson. (2005). Global village or cyber-Balkans? Modeling and measuring the integration of electronic communities. Management Science 51:(6):851–868, http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.1050.0363. Veeraraghavan, Rajesh. (2013). Dealing with the digital panopticon: The use and subversion of ICT in an Indian Bureaucracy.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Recent work by Pol Antràs and others on trade, contracts, and industrial organization have also encouraged our thinking. In Europe, economists at the London School of Economics and the OECD have been valuable sources for our work, not the least on trade, wages, inequality, and productivity. There is plenty of interesting research on digital innovation and how it is reshaping some markets and economies. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and their colleagues at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Center for Digital Business deserve a particular mention. Likewise, Robert Gordon’s stellar work on productivity and American prosperity – in some ways the antithesis to Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s work – has given us an extraordinary number of insights.

However, the decoupling thesis, or variants thereof, has received serious support. Brookings’ William Galston, for instance, has argued that “the Great Decoupling of wages and benefits from productivity, the biggest economic story of the past 40 years, shows no sign of ending.”51 In The Second Machine Age, economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that median hourly wages only increased by 0.1 percent annually from 1973 to 2011 at the same time as productivity increased by 1.56 percent annually.52 In The Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford uses a similar observation to argue that productivity gains are not matched by workers’ gains in terms of jobs and pay.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

I have been involved in a number of antitrust suits, trying to preserve competition in the American economy, and the insights of Keith Leffler, Michael Cragg, David Hutchings, and Andrew Abere have been invaluable. My understanding of the role these market imperfections have in labor markets has been enhanced by Mark Stelzner and Alan Krueger. The discussions of new technologies have been particularly influenced by my coauthor Anton Korinek; on artificial intelligence, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Shane Legg of DeepMind, Mark Sagar of Soul Machines, and a dinner on AI at the Royal Society after my lecture there on the subject of work and AI. Yochai Benkler, Julia Angwin, and Zeynep Tüfekçi have contributed to my understanding of the special issues posed by disinformation. As I return to the issues of globalization, I need to thank Dani Rodrik as well as Danny Quah, Rohinton Medhora, and Mari Pangestu; and on the role of globalization in tax avoidance, Mark Pieth and the Independent Commission for Reform of International Corporate Taxation, chaired by José Antonio Ocampo, on which I serve.

See Katja Grace, John Salvatier, Allan Dafoe, Baobao Zhang, and Owain Evans, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2018), arXiv:1705.08807. 5.See Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 114 (2017): 254–80. Also see the book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race against the Machine (Lexington: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). 6.For one version of this story, see “Difference Engine: Luddite Legacy,” The Economist, Nov. 4, 2011. 7.See Stiglitz, The Great Divide, 393–403, based on earlier research by Domenico Delli Gatti, Mauro Gallegati, Bruce Greenwald, Alberto Russo, and me, “Mobility Constraints, Productivity Trends, and Extended Crises,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 83, no. 3 (2012): 375–93; and “Sectoral Imbalances and Long Run Crises,” in The Global Macro Economy and Finance, eds.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Even after a new technology is proven, its spread must often wait until prior investments have been recouped; although Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lightbulb by 1879, only 3 percent of U.S. homes had electric lighting twenty years later. The economic benefits arise not from innovation itself, but from the entrepreneurs who eventually discover ways to put innovations to practical use—and most critically, as economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt have pointed out, from the organizational changes through which businesses reshape themselves to take advantage of the new technology.12 This book contends that, just as decades elapsed between the taming of electricity in the 1870s and the widespread use of electrical power, so too did the embrace of containerization take time.

The seminal article along this line was Robert Solow, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 2 (1957): 65–94. On the problems of innovation, see Joel Mokyr, “Technological Inertia in Economic History,” Journal of Economic History 52 (1992): 325–338; Nathan Rosenberg, “On Technological Expectations,” Economic Journal 86, no. 343 (1976): 528; and Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt, “Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation, and Business Performance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (2000): 24. Electricity was first used in manufacturing in 1883; for discussion of its relatively slow acceptance in manufacturing, see Warren D.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

—EMMA HILL, EDITOR, The Lancet1 “Health care will be less frustrating when the power shifts from sellers to buyers, and when the patients are more in charge.” —DAVID CUTLER, PROFESSOR OF APPLIED ECONOMICS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY2 “It is no exaggeration to say that billions of people will soon have a printing press, reference library, school, and computer all at their fingertips.” —ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON AND ANDREW MCAFEE, The Second Machine Age3 “Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric media . . . electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man.” —MARSHALL MCLUHAN, 19664 Way back in 1996, the Seinfeld TV show told the story of the “difficult” patient.5 Elaine Benes, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, developed a skin rash, but doctors kept refusing to see her.

Chapter 13 Predicting and Preempting Disease “After spending time working with leading technologists and watching one bastion of human uniqueness after another fall before the inexorable onslaught of innovation, it’s becoming harder and harder to have confidence that any given task will be indefinitely resistant to automation.” —ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON AND ANDREW MCAFEE, The Second Machine Age1 “Over the next few years you are going to see predictive tech and intelligent assistants begin to appear everywhere. Not only will they be in most apps you use—they will also be in your car, in your living room, and in your office. They will also be inside the enterprise—helping doctors better treat patients.”


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

But you only have to go back to the 1960s to discover that there really was a Golden Age of Parliamentary debate. 4. ‘Understanding National Accounts’, François Lequiller and Derek Blades, 2016, Paris (www.oecd.org/std/na/38451313.pdf). 5. www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/Pages/iadb/notesiadb/capexp.aspx 6. The productivity paradox of information technology’, Erik Brynjolfsson, Communications of the ACM 36 (12), 1993, pp66–77. 7. ‘We’d better watch out’, Robert Solow, New York Times Book Review, 12 July, 1987, p.36. 8 scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?start=20&q=information+technology+as+an+enabler&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1 9. ‘Sources of Economic Growth, Trade and Investment Analytical Papers No 6 of 18,BIS/DFID, 2011, London. 10. www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/32468/11–723-sources-of-economic-growth.pdf 11. 10 November 2014. 12. www.itpro.co.uk/mobile/23478/o2-ceo-how-the-digital-revolution-is-driving-the-uk-economy#ixzz3K5a452gr 13.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom explores the many issues and implications related to the development of superintelligent machines. The Works, The Heights, and The Way to Go by Kate Ascher examine how cities, skyscrapers, and our transportation networks, respectively, actually work. Beautifully rendered and fascinating books. The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee examines the rapid technological change we are experiencing and can come to expect, and how it will affect our economy, as well as how to handle this change. The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr is about the perils of automation and the related technological complexity around us.


pages: 204 words: 53,261

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

BUSINESS AND FINANCE 1. http://www.simon.rochester.edu/fac/misra/mkt_salesforce.pdf. 2. Barry Gruenberg, “The Happy Worker: An Analysis of Educational and Occupational Differences in Determinants of Job Satisfaction,” American Journal of Sociology 86 (1980), pp. 247–71, esp. pp. 267–68, quoted in Kohn, Punishment by Rewards, p. 131. 3. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York, 2014). 4. Dan Cable and Freck Vermeulen, “Why CEO Pay Should Be 100% Fixed,” Harvard Business Review (February 23, 2016). 5. Madison Marriage and Aliya Ram, “Two Top Asset Managers Drop Staff Bonuses,” Financial Times, August 22, 2016. 6.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

For a global picture, Branko Milanovic’s Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) is unrivallled. The effects of technology on our economies – beyond the obvious effects on our lives – are very unclear. Among the most insightful work is Erik Brynjolfsson’s at MIT. Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s Race Against the Machine (Digital Frontier Press, 2012) can be read in an afternoon, and is profoundly insightful, if rather overstated. A more measured account is given by the OECD’s policy brief, “Putting faces to the jobs at risk of automation” (https://www.oecd.org/employment/Automation-policy-brief-2018.pdf).


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Among these are Robert Gordon of Northwestern University and Tyler Cowen of George Mason University.34 An important reason why the pace of innovation might be slowing is that many opportunities have already been exploited: the population of the high-income countries is already highly educated and highly urbanized; the economy has already exploited the most readily available natural resources; people have already enjoyed the fruit of many life- and economy-transforming innovations, such as running water and sanitation, inoculation, electricity, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, civil aviation, telephony, the computer and the internet. While nobody knows what is still to come, it would have to be impressive indeed to match this record of past achievements. Yet, it should be stressed, this relatively pessimistic view is far from universally shared. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argue, instead, not only that the measured decline in productivity growth in recent years is a product of a failure to measure output correctly, but that an age of accelerating technological progress is ahead of us, as intelligent machines and ‘big data’ transform our economy and our lives.35 At this stage, the only sensible thing to say is that we do not know what promise of a more productive future new technologies hold, though it seems likely that if it is as dynamic as some expect, it will also tend to generate even bigger increases in inequality of earnings and incomes between digital haves and have-nots.

Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18315, August 2012, www.nber.org; TylerCowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (London: Dutton/Penguin, 2011). 35. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2014), and Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). 36.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

ONE FOR THE LUDDITES An increasing number of economists (and of those who comment on economics) worry that new technologies, such as AI, robots, and automation more generally, will destroy more jobs than they create, making many workers obsolete and causing the share of GDP that goes to pay wages to dwindle. In fact, these days growth optimists and labor pessimists are often the same people; they both imagine future growth will be primarily driven by the replacement of human workers by robots. In their book The Second Machine Age, our MIT colleagues Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee offer a bleak view of the impact of digitization on the future of employment in the United States.3 Digitization, they suspect, will make workers with “ordinary” skills increasingly redundant. As tasks from car painting to spreadsheet manipulation are done by computers or robots, highly educated workers who are adaptable and can program and install the robots will become more and more valuable, but other workers who can be replaced will find themselves without jobs unless they accept extremely low salaries.

Banerjee, Selvan Kumar, Rohini Pande, and Felix Su, “Do Voters Make Informed Choices? Experimental Evidence from Urban India,” working paper, 2010. CHAPTER 7. PLAYER PIANO 1 Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952). 2 Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965). 3 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). 4 David H. Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 3 (2015): 3–30. 5 Ellen Fort, “Robots Are Making $6 Burgers in San Francisco,” Eater San Francisco, June, 21, 2018. 6 Michael Chui, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi, “How Many of Your Daily Tasks Could Be Automated?


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Cars may have many more gadgets and comforts than they did in the 1970s, but congestion means that people do not travel any faster; the average speed of traffic in central London in 2015 was 7.4mph, on a par with a horse-drawn carriage in the 18th century.20 Aeroplane travel is cheaper than it used to be, but less comfortable (legroom is restricted), and the experiment with supersonic flight was abandoned. And there have been no new household gadgets in the last 40 years to rival the fridge, the vacuum or the microwave for convenience, not to mention the boost to human comfort and hygiene brought by indoor plumbing. A more optimistic view, taken by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, is that the full benefits of the internet and other technologies such as machine learning, have yet to come through.21 Such is the speed of modern communication that 90% of all digital data was created in the last 24 months. Technology is reducing coordination costs through search engines, cheap communication networks and free information.

Gordon, “The demise of US economic growth: restatement, rebuttal, and reflections”, NBER working paper 19895 19. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, op. cit. 20. Amie Gordon and Tom Rawstorne, “Traffic is slower than a horse drawn carriage”, Daily Mail, October 16th 2016 21. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future 22. “DeepMind AI reduces Google data centre cooling bill by 40%”, https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-40/ 23. Nathan Rosenberg, Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History 24.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

London and New York: Verso, 2022. Mathias, Peter. The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914. Second ed. London: Methuen, 1983. Mayor, Adrienne. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. McAfee, Andrew, and Erik Brynjolfsson. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley, Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Mills, Stephanie, ed. Turning Away from Technology: A New Vision for the Twenty-First Century.

He would use the proceeds “How a New Hampshire Family Spent Andrew Yang’s ‘Freedom Dividend,’” Reuters, February 10, 2020. 6. With money pouring into AI There’s no better example of this kind of prediction than the book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014), by MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. 7. “fourth industrial revolution” Njuguna Ndung’u and Landry Signé, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Digitization Will Transform Africa into a Global Powerhouse,” Brookings Institution, January 8, 2020. 8. “I’m hanging out with the tech wizards” Joe Rogan Experience, YouTube video, 46:37. 9.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

The median US household income in 2014 was $50,600. If we had maintained pre-1970 productivity growth, it would have been $97,300.63 We are already well into a slowdown that, in Gordon’s view, is likely to slow further. This is where his thesis becomes controversial. According to the optimists, such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the future is accelerating and will generally bring happy results. Their book, The Second Machine Age, argues that intensifying automation will free up labour for more interesting pursuits – and leisure. Theirs is a vision of abundance. I recently heard a well-known Silicon Valley investor dismiss the doubters as ignoramuses.


pages: 199 words: 56,243

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

Your People Make You a Leader. 1.Fariborz Damanpour, “Organizational Innovation: A Meta-Analysis of Effects of Determinants and Moderators,” Academy of Management Journal 34, no. 3 (September 1991): 555–90; Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro, “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 2 (September 2005): 447–504. 2.Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron S. Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten, and John Van Reenen, “What Drives Differences in Management,” Centre for Economic Performance Research discussion paper, No. DP11995 (April 2017). 3.Ethan Mollick, “People and Process, Suits and Innovators: The Role of Individuals in Firm Performance,” Strategic Management Journal 33, no. 9 (January 2012): 1001–15. 4.Linda A.


pages: 523 words: 61,179

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

” — GRADY BOOCH, Chief Scientist for Software Engineering, IBM Research; IBM Fellow “Human + Machine shines new light on our burning need to reinvent nearly everything about the way we work. Daugherty and Wilson have hands-on experience leading these changes, giving this book an exceptional level of credibility and insight. Have your whole team read it before your competitors do!” — ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON, Director, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy; coauthor, The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd “A must-read for business managers who know AI should be a big part of their job but find the topic intimidating and confusing.” — MISSY CUMMINGS, professor, Pratt School of Engineering; Director, Humans and Autonomy Laboratory, Duke University “We are in an era of digital Darwinism, where technologies are evolving faster than businesses can adapt.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“If there’s going to be a competitive workforce,” he continued, “we need to be at the leading edge of who is going to create that.” The question is not whether there will be enough work to go around, but the best means by which to fairly distribute the proceeds of the productivity made possible by the WTF? technologies of what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee call “the second machine age.” Reducing working hours for the same amount of pay is one of the most fundamental ways that the benefits of rising productivity have traditionally been distributed more widely. In 1870, the average American (male) worked 62 hours per week; by 1960, that number was down to just over 40 hours, where it has roughly hovered since.

Jay Schaefer, Mike Loukides, and Laurent Haug, your close reading and comments strengthened both my ideas and my writing. Sunil Paul, Logan Green, Kim Rachmeler, Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, and Dave Guarino, you filled in critical details and context for key moments in this history. Satya Nadella, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Immelt, Peter Schwartz, Peter Bloom, Andy McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson, David Autor, Larry Katz, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sebastian Thrun, Yann LeCun, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Mike George, Rana Foroohar, Robin Chase, David Rolf, Andy Stern, Natalie Foster, Betsy Masiello, Jonathan Hall, Lior Ron, Paul Buchheit, Sam Altman, Esther Kaplan, Carrie Gleason, Zeynep Ton, Mikey Dickerson, Wael Ghonim, Tim Hwang, Henry Farrell, Amy Sellars, Mike McCloskey, Hank Green, Brandon Stanton, Jack Conte, Limor Fried, Phil Torrone, Seth Sternberg, Palak Shah, Keller Rinaudo, Stephane Kasriel, Bryan Johnson, Patrick Collison, Roy Bahat, Paddy Cosgrave, Steven Levy, Lauren Smiley, Bess Hochstein, Nat Torkington, Clay Shirky, Lawrence Wilkinson, Jessi Hempel, Mark Burgess, Carl Page, Maggie Shiels, Adam Davidson, and Winnie King, you also gave me the gift of your time and insight during the research and writing that led up to this book.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 2. For instance, they may execute a “short squeeze” by bidding up a stock that investors have sold short, forcing them to close out their positions at ever-higher prices to contain their losses. 3. Marshall Brain, Manna (BYG, 2012). 4. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014). 1. TEACHING COMPUTERS TO FISH 1. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and C. E. Shannon, A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, 1955, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Rochester_(computer_scientist), last modified March 15, 2014. 3.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

She said this on Canadian TV. Watch the clip here: https://youtu.be/EPRTUZsiDYw?t=45m30s 4 Race Against the Machine 1. Categories of horse as reported by the Agricultural Census, A Vision of Britain through Time. http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10001043/cube/AGCEN_HORSES_1900 2. Quoted in: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (2014), p. 175. 3. Quoted in: Leeds Mercury (March 13, 1830). 4. Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, “Trends,” The Milken Institute Review (Fall 2011). http://www.milkeninstitute.org/publications/review/2011_7/08-16MR51.pdf 5. Gordon Moore, “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,” Electronics Magazine (April 19, 1965). http://web.eng.fiu.edu/npala/eee6397ex/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf 6.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Google’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence system may have bested the world’s greatest Go player, but I’m not worried that it’s going to replace our greatest musicians, filmmakers, and authors, even though an NYU artificial intelligence laboratory has programmed a robot named Benjamin to be a screenwriter. And even if you believe that robots will be able to fill most jobs, MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson have pointed out that “understanding and addressing the societal challenges brought on by rapid technological progress remain tasks that no machine can do for us.” When I ask myself what it means to be human, I think that having empathy and the ability to tell stories rank high, and I am not worried that those skills will be replaced by AI.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

What is to happen to them? Already, the ‘left behind’ symptoms, and reactions to them, can be seen in increasingly precarious employment, stagnant or even falling wages, and populist protests against both automation and one of its chief agents, globalisation. Even if these distempers are only temporary effects Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. 15 2 The Future of Work 21 of the displacement of labour, optimists themselves concede that the transition period may last decades. Thus, the idea that a supply shock like automation will automatically set in motion acceptable compensatory demand or complementary supply responses seems to me to be pure delusion.


pages: 287 words: 69,655

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

Redelmeier and Daniel Kahneman, “Patients’ memories of painful medical treatments: Real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures,” Pain 66(1) (1996): 3–8. Chapter 9: The Misery-Inducing Traps of Modern Life search engines are worth $17,530 every year to the average American: Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, and Felix Eggers, “Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being,” PNAS 116(15) (2019): 7250–55. 30 percent of Americans said they were “very happy”: GSS data is available here: https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends/Gender%20&%20Marriage?measure=happy.


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

The second type of answers are more macro in that they focus less on the individuals and more on the type of work they represent. Though both approaches to this core question are important, the macro answers will prove most relevant to our discussion, as they better illuminate what our current economy rewards. To explore this macro perspective we turn to a pair of MIT economists, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who in their influential 2011 book, Race Against the Machine, provide a compelling case that among various forces at play, it’s the rise of digital technology in particular that’s transforming our labor markets in unexpected ways. “We are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee explain early in their book.


pages: 265 words: 74,807

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

“only one software upgrade away”: “Terminate the Terminators,” Scientific American 303, no. 1 (July 2010): 30. In the domain of work: Frank Levy, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2012). Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, Robot Futures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

“I think the real value is many thousands of dollars per person,” says Gavyn Davies. “That’s a humongous mismeasurement of the value that the iPhone has brought to most human beings.” Most experts agree that, because of these technological upheavals, national accounts underestimate economic growth. But estimates differ widely—not to say wildly—as to how much. Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in 2012 that the information sector accounted for the same official share of GDP in the US—about 4 percent—as it had done a quarter of a century earlier. This is implausible, to put it politely. Many people have taken a stab at calculating what we are missing in the official figures.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Even with these growth areas in mind, however, the overall picture of job losses due to automation makes standing still seem wildly optimistic. The Future of Work Not everyone agrees that progress will lead to peak human in the Third Disruption as the steam engine and fossil fuels led to peak horse in the Second. Indeed, two of the leading voices in the field of work and technological change, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, believe value will instead increasingly derive from the generation of new ideas. So while anything repetitive may well be automated or significantly augmented by machines, the uniquely human skills of creativity and emotional connection will underpin the jobs of tomorrow. This may well prove the case in some areas but surely not for a world of nearly 10 billion people.


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Indeed, it is quite conceivable to imagine a future in which law firms stop hiring junior and trainee lawyers altogether, and pass much of this work over to artificial intelligence systems instead. In keeping with this, a number of experts predict that there will be between 10 and 40 percent fewer lawyers a decade from now as there are today.10 As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee suggest in their pamphlet “Race Against the Machine,” this is not so much the result of a Great Recession or a Great Stagnation, so much as it is a Great Restructuring.11 The new barometer for which jobs are safe from The Formula has less to do with the social class of those traditionally holding them than it does to do with a trade-off between cost and efficiency.


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

., “Artificial Intelligence in Radiology,” Nature Reviews Cancer 18 (August 2018): 500–510, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6268174; Brian S. Peters et al., “Review of Emerging Surgical Robotic Technology,” Surgical Endoscopy 32, no. 4 (2018): 1636–1655, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00464-018-6079-2. Likewise, the literature on automation, robotics, and the future of work is vast; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014) and Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2015) provide accessible introductions to the subject.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

Some recent reports suggest that, nevertheless, there will be no shortage of jobs, at least not by 2030 – the extra wealth created by the robots will generate enough demand to employ everyone.28 This might be true if a) the extra wealth were to be spread amongst the entire population so that they could all contribute to increased demand, and b) the extra demand cannot be met by automated supply. Neither of these assumptions sounds robust, especially when we start looking out as far as 2050. As Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of The Second Machine Age, has pointed out: There’s no economic law that says, ‘You will always create enough jobs or the balance will always be even’, it’s possible for a technology to dramatically favour one group and to hurt another group, and the net of that might be that you have fewer jobs.29 It is more plausible that tens or even hundreds of millions of people will be unable to find work – and unless we change the system, they will be workless in a very hostile environment.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Job losses would be concentrated at the bottom end of the labour market: ‘[C]omputerisation will mainly substitute for low-skill and low- wage jobs . . . most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of administrative and support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk.’6 We have seen how the spread of the gig economy has affected a wide range of industries—but it’s clear that most platform-based work, from Uber drivers and Deliveroo cyclists to Turkers entering data and Taskers coming to clean your flat, is concentrated right in Frey and Osborne’s risk * * * The End of Work? 137 zone. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) agree that technological progress will have a starkly polarizing impact on the labour market: There’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education, because these people can use technology to create and capture value.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Chapter 4 – Think Holistic: Joining the Dots 10 per cent of US high schools produce nearly half the dropouts: “Turning Around the Dropout Factories: Increasing the High School Graduation Rate,” a 2012 report from the US Department of Education. For every dollar spent on new technology: Based on research by Erik Brynjolfsson, a productivity expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Chapter 5 – Think Long: Tackling Tomorrow Today Recidivism rates in Norway, etc: William Lee Adams, “Sentenced to Serving the Good Life in Norway,” Time, 12 July 2010; Bouke Wartna and Laura Nijssen, “National Reconviction Rates: Making International Comparisons,” Criminology in Europe, Volume 5, Number 3 (December 2006), p. 14.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

When a peer-reviewed survey of scientists . . . Daniele Fanelli, ‘How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data’, PLOS One, 29 May 2009. 55. Data was hailed as . . . ‘The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data’, the Economist, 6 May 2017; Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, ‘Big Data: The Management Revolution’, Harvard Business Review, October 2012. 56. In an excitable piece for Wired . . . Chris Anderson, ‘The End of Theory: the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete’, Wired, 23 June 2008. 57. The bonus of big data is . . . Carlo Ratti and Dirk Helbing, ‘The Hidden Danger of Big Data’, in Dirk Helbing, ed., Towards Digital Enlightenment: Essays on the Dark and Light Sides of the Digital Revolution, Springer: New York, 2019, p. 22. 58.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

US music industry revenue = $11.1 billion in 2019, see: Dan Rys, “US Recorded Music Revenue Reaches $11.1 Billion in 2019, 79% from Streaming: RIAA,” Billboard, February 25, 2020, https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8551881/riaa-music-industry-2019-revenue-streaming-vinyl-digital-physical. 100 100,000 brick-and-mortar stores: Suzanne Kapner and Sarah Nassauer, “Coronavirus Finishes the Retail Reckoning That Amazon Started,” Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2020. 101 data as the new oil: Carl Benedikt Frey, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 304. 101 smartphones now connect the majority: “Percentage of Mobile Device Website Traffic Worldwide from 1st Quarter 2015 to 1st Quarter 2020,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices. 101 “only 20 million Indians”: Ravi Agrawal, India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. 102 Over 550 million: McKinsey Global Institute, “Digital India,” 2019, https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/McKinsey%20Digital/Our%20Insights/Digital%20India%20Technology%20to%20transform%20a%20connected%20nation/MGI-Digital-India-Report-April-2019.ashx. 102 155th in the world: Mukesh Ambani, in conversation with India Today, “India is now world’s top mobile data consuming nation: Mukesh Ambani,” October 25, 2018, https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/india-top-mobile-data-consuming-nation-mukesh-ambani-1375253–2018–10–25. 102 more mobile data: Ibid. 102 hundreds of millions more Indians: McKinsey Global Institute, “Digital India,” 6. 102 staggering $37 billion: Mobis Philipose, “Why Reliance Jio’s Big and Bold 2021 Vision Doesn’t Make Sense,” LiveMint, March 7, 2017. 102 triggered mob killings: Geeta Anand and Suhasini Raj, “Rumors on WhatsApp Ignite 2 Mob Attacks in India, Killing 7,” New York Times, May 25, 2017. 103 about a third of Americans: “Of those employed four weeks earlier, 34.1% report they were commuting and are now working from home”: Erik Brynjolfsson et al., “COVID-19 and Remote Work: An Early Look at US Data,” MIT Sloan School of Management, https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents/?PublicationDocumentID=6322. 104 “25% of our workforce”: Sonal Khetarpal, “Post-COVID, 75% of 4.5 Lakh TCS Employees to Permanently Work from Home by ’25; from 20%,” Business Today India, April 30, 2020. 104 issued a correction: Saunak Chowdhury, “TCS Refutes Claims of 75% Employees Working from Home Post Lock-Down,” Indian Wire, April 28, 2020. 104 450,000 employees: Tata Consultancy Services, “About Us,” https://www.tcs.com/about-us. 106 up one billion: Jeff Becker and Arielle Trzcinski, “US Virtual Care Visits to Soar to More Than 1 Billion,” Forrester Analytics, April 10, 2020, https://go.forrester.com/press-newsroom/us-virtual-care-visits-to-soar-to-more-than-1-billion/. 106 “greatest contribution to mankind”: Lizzy Gurdus, “Tim Cook: Apple’s Greatest Contribution Will Be ‘About Health,’ ” CNBC Mad Money, January 8, 2019. 107 97% accuracy: “Using Artificial Intelligence to Classify Lung Cancer Types, Predict Mutations,” National Cancer Institute, October 10, 2018, https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2018/artificial-intelligence-lung-cancer-classification. 107 up to 11% fewer false positives: D.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

For more information about this and its expressions, see Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness, HarperCollins, 2003. 20. No, actually, the most common question is probably: ‘Have you read all these?’ Now I’ll answer once and for all, so you never have to ask again: no. 21. Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers & Avinash Gannamaneni, ‘Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being’, NBER Working Paper no.24514, 2018. 22. Soave 2021, p.30. 23. Matthew Gentzkov & Jesse M. Shapiro, ‘Ideological segregation online and offline’, Chicago Booth & National Bureau of Economic Research, 28 March 2011. 24.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

By 2025, we estimate that the GDP of Tianjin will have risen to around $625 billion—approximately that of all of Sweden.12 The second disruptive force is the acceleration in the scope, scale, and economic impact of technology. Technology—from the printing press to the steam engine and the Internet—has always been a great force in overturning the status quo. The difference today is the sheer ubiquity of technology in our lives and the speed of change. In their bestseller The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dubbed the current era the “second half of the chessboard.” Brynjolfsson and McAfee give a modern twist to an old story about the power of exponential growth. Pleased with the invention of chess, a Chinese emperor offered the inventor his choice of prizes.


Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

Michael Belfiore, “Three Teams out of the Running at Auto-Bot Race,” Danger Room, November 3, 2007, from Wired.com, archived from the original on November 6, 2007. 5. Daniel K, “What Is Machine Learning?” Stack Overflow, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2620343/what-is-machine-learning 6. “Kasparov Wins,” TIME Magazine, Monday, February 19, 1996. 7. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2014). 8. During the 1980s and 1990s, several pioneering researchers devised self-driving car prototypes that could drive short stretches without a human.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

In his thought-provoking analysis, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford remarks: ‘The threat to overall employment is that as creative destruction unfolds the destruction will fall primarily on labor-intensive businesses in traditional areas like retail and goods preparation while the creation will generate new businesses and industries that simply don’t hire many people.’10 In the words of MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, ‘Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power … what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power’.11 The second half of the chessboard In 1965, Intel’s Geoffrey E. Moore conjectured that the processing power of semi-conductors would double roughly every two years and, to date, this has been an extraordinarily accurate prediction.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Also there was Facebook’s Yann LeCun, an innovator in deep-learning math and a protégé of Google’s Geoffrey Hinton. A tenured contingent consisted of the technologist Stuart Russell, the philosopher David Chalmers, the catastrophe theorist Nick Bostrom, the nanotech prophet Eric Drexler, the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, the economist Erik Brynjolfsson, and the “Singularitarian” Vernor Vinge, along with scores of other celebrity scientists.1 They gathered at Asilomar preparing to alert the world to the dire threat posed by . . . well, by themselves—Silicon Valley. Their computer technology, advanced AI, and machine learning—acclaimed in hundreds of press releases as the Valley’s principal activity and hope for the future, with names such as TensorFlow, DeepMind, Machine Learning, Google Brain, and the Singularity—had gained such power and momentum that it was now deemed nothing less than a menace to mankind.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The only US technology company to even crack the country’s top twenty employers is Hewlett Packard (HP), and its workforce has shrunk drastically in the past few years. HP has laid off more than fifty thousand employees since 2013, the equivalent of everyone who works for Google. “There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress,” wrote economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their groundbreaking 2012 book Race Against the Machine, which highlighted the growing gap between technological progress and job creation. “The threat of technological unemployment is real.” Brynjolfsson and McAfee are not technophobes gripped by a fear of progress. They point to previous disruptions in labor during the technological leaps of the industrial and mechanized ages, and show how these eventually led to greater middle-class wealth and job creation, as productivity increased.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Advertising experiments, therefore, should not be viewed as a one-off exercise that either yields “the answer” or doesn’t, but rather as part of an ongoing learning process that is built into all advertising.21 A small but growing community of researchers is now arguing that the same mentality should be applied not just to advertising but to all manner of business and policy planning, both online and off. In a recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review, for example, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Schrage argue that new technologies for tracking inventory, sales, and other business parameters—whether the layout of links on a search page, the arrangement of products on a store shelf, or the details of a special direct mail offer—are bringing about a new era of controlled experiments in business.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Krueger, An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States (National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 22843, 2016); Gray & Suri, untitled book project. 50. Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles, & Erik Hurst, Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men (NBER Working Paper, 2017). Conclusion. Going to the Root 1. The most prominent recent exponents of the techno-optimist within economics have been Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their 2014 book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton & Company). More broadly, the most prominent techno-optimist is Ray Kurzweil, in a series of books. 2. The most prominent techno-pessimistic perspective is offered by Robert J.


pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

Macron spent a lot of time hanging out with tech types at the time. When I interviewed him in the autumn of 2015, I asked him what he had read recently on the subject. Most French ministers would have quoted a piece of French research, or more commonly a French government report. Macron cited The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. He had a good grasp of the pace and nature of technological change, as well as its implications for jobs and society as machines hollowed out the salaried working middle. French policymakers have long tended to favour producers over consumers, and to protect incumbents from newcomers to the market.


pages: 337 words: 103,522

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think by Marcus Du Sautoy

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Automated Insights, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, John Conway, Kickstarter, Loebner Prize, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, move 37, music of the spheres, Mustafa Suleyman, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons

Katherine, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, University of Chicago Press, 2017 Hofstadter, Douglas, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Penguin Books, 1979 , Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, Basic Books 1995 , I am a Strange Loop, Basic Books, 2007 Kasparov, Garry, Deep Thinking: Where Artificial Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, John Murray, 2017 McAfee, Andrew and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, Norton, 2017 McCormack, Jon and Mark d’Inverno (eds.), Computers and Creativity, Springer, 2012 Monbiot, George, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis, Verso, 2017 Montfort, Nick, World Clock, Bad Quarto, 2013 Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, Verso, 2005 Paul, Elliot Samuel and Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, OUP, 2014 Shalev-Shwartz, Shai and Shai Ben-David, Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms, CUP, 2014 Steels, Luc, The Talking Heads Experiment: Origins of Words and Meanings, Language Science Press, 2015 Steiner, Christopher, Automate This: How Algorithms Took Over the Markets, Our Jobs, and the World, Penguin Books, 2012 Tatlow, Ruth, Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet, CUP, 1991 , Bach’s Numbers: Compositional Proportions and Significance, CUP, 2015 Tegmark, Max, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Allen Lane, 2017 Wilson, Edward O., The Origins of Creativity, Allen Lane, 2017 Yorke, John, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey into Story, Penguin Books, 2013 Papers For papers with references to arXiv visit the open access archive of papers at https://arxiv.org/.


pages: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

Malone. Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004):686–688, October 29, 2010. [244] World Health Organization. Influenza fact sheet number 211, March 2003. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/2003/fs211/en/. [245] Lynn Wu and Erik Brynjolfsson. The future of prediction: How Google searches foreshadow housing prices and sales. Presented at the 2009 Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE 2009), 2009. http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~bakos/wise/papers/wise2009-3b3_paper.pdf. [246] Shirley Wu. Envisioning the scientific community as One Big Lab.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

A warehouse worker who previously lifted and stacked objects could become a robot operator, monitoring the flow of work, maintaining and operating drones, and fixing things when the machines make a mistake. And new creative vocations will arise. “There are a ton of things humans can do better than machines,” says MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson. “The new jobs will be more on the creative side. Humans can do more connecting with people, and more thinking. I don’t think there is any shortage of work in our economy that can only be done by humans, and I think that will hold true for decades. There will be massive disruption, but there’s no shortage of work for humans.”


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

., Orley Ashenfelter and David Card (Amsterdam: Elsevier and North-Holland, 2011), 1697–1767; Nicholas Bloom et al., “The Impact of Competition on Management Quality: Evidence from Public Hospitals,” The Review of Economic Studies 82, no. 2 (2015): 457–489; Nicholas Bloom et al. “Does Management Matter? Evidence from India,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 1 (2013): 1–51; Nicholas Bloom, with Erik Brynjolfsson, Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten, and John Van Reenen, “What Drives Differences in Management Practices,” American Economic Review (May 2019). 37. Jim Harter, “Employee Engagement on the Rise in the U.S.,” Gallup.com, Aug. 19, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx. 38.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Organizations record the aspects of our actions important to their function, so one extraordinarily elusive, daunting task has already been completed in the production of raw materials for PA: abstracting the infinite complexity of everyday life and thereby defining which of its endless details are salient. A new window on the world has opened. Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), compares this mass instrumentation of human behavior to another historic breakthrough in scientific observation. “The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before—at the cellular level,” said the New York Times, explaining Brynjolfsson’s perspective.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Opinion / Sunday Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/douthat-a-world-without-work.html. 20. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, 56. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 58. 23. Ibid., 66. 24. Ibid., 69. 25. Ibid., 58. 26. Autor and Dorn, “How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class.” 27. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine (Lexington, Massachusetts: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Autor and Dorn, “How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class.” 31. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Race Against the Machine. 32. Moisés Naím, “America’s Coming Manufacturing Revolution,” The Atlantic, April 21, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/americas-coming-manufacturing-revolution/360931/. 33.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Alan Cohen, “The Great Race; No Startup Has Cashed In on the DVD’s Rapid Growth More Than Netflix. Now Blockbuster and Wal-Mart Want In. Can It Outrun Its Big Rivals?,” Fortune Small Business, December 2002–January 2003. “Media Center,” Netflix, available at link #61 (last visited April 1, 2008). 17. See Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu Jeffrey Hu, and Duncan Simester, “Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail: The Effect of Search Costs on the Concentration of Product Sales,” MIT Center for Digital Business Working Paper (2007); Paul L. Caron, “The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship,” Yale Law Journal 116 Pocket Part 38 (2006); Anita Elberse and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, “Superstars and Underdogs: An Examination of the Long Tail Phenomenon in Video Sales,” Harvard Business School No. 07-015 Working Paper Series; Indiana Resource Sharing Task Force, “Wagging the Long Tail: Sharing More of Less; Recommendations for Enhancing Resource Sharing in Indiana,” White Paper (2007); Anindya Ghose and Bin Gu, “Search Costs, Demand Structure and Long Tail in Electronic Markets: Theory and Evidence,” NET Institute Working Paper No. 06-19 (2006); Teruyasu Murakami, “The Long Tail and the Lofty Head of Video Content: The Possibilities of ‘Convergent Broadcasting,’ ” Nomura Research Institute, NRI Papers No. 113 (2007). 18.


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

I’m still not sure I’ve succeeded. Directly competing against a computer at the highest level of a human discipline is a unique experience. It’s not a video game against a computer AI or a metaphorical competition in the job market, the “race against” or “race with” the machines explained so capably by MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their books. John Henry competed with a steel-driving steam engine before a crowd of witnesses, his muscle and bone versus the implacable iron beast. Jesse Owens’s races against cars and motorcycles also boasted that same tragicomic asymmetry; it was exploitation and entertainment, not serious competition.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Army, 1993), chapter 1, and Tom Clancy, Armoured Cav (Berkeley Trade, 1994). 75 Examined large US firms from the mid-1980s throughout the 1990s: Raghuram Rajan & Julie Wulf (2003), ‘The flattening of the firm’, NBER Working Paper 9633. 76 To get the most out of that flexibility: Daron Acemoglu, Philippe Aghion, Claire Lelarge, John van Reenen & Fabrizio Zilibotti, ‘Technology, information and the decentralization of the firm’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2007, and Erik Brynjolfsson & Lorin M. Hitt, ‘Beyond computation: information technology, organizational transformation and business performance’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall 2000). 76 Didn’t have the authority to print his own propaganda: John Nagl, lecture at King’s College London, 2 February 2010. 76 He couldn’t tap into the massive USAID budget: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, pp. 146–7. 76 Sean MacFarland’s men broadcast news from loudspeakers: Ricks, The Gamble, p. 70. 77 A careful statistical analysis later found: Eli Berman, Jacob N.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

She would surely not be interested in paying under the odds to secure the services of number two or three, let alone those far down the legal pecking order. This is nothing new. The great economist Alfred Marshall (who taught Keynes) wrote: “A rich client whose reputation or fortune or both are at stake will scarcely count any price too high to secure the services of the best man he can get.” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee cite the example of the athlete O. J. Simpson who paid the lawyer Alan Dershowitz millions to defend him in court. Admittedly, Dershowitz’s services were not digitized and sold to millions of people the way that Simpson’s were. Yet, they say, “Dershowitz is a superstar by proxy: he benefits from the ability of his superstar clients whose labor has been more directly leveraged by digitization and networks.”8 This talk about superstar athletes and authors may make it seem as though the winner-takes-all structure applies only in a very few isolated markets.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

I also benefited tremendously from reading the work of former colleagues Steven Levy and Brad Stone, as well as other experts, including Jaron Lanier, Frank Foer, Cathy O’Neil, Eric Posner, Hal Varian, Carl Shapiro, Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake, Tim Wu, Saule Omarova, Robert C. Hockett, Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson, Arun Sundararajan, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Kenneth Cukier, Thomas Ramge, Niall Ferguson, and Ken Auletta. At Google, I’d like to particularly thank Corey duBrowa, who endeavored to make it easier for me to ask tough questions, Kent Walker for taking his time to share thoughts on the record, and Karan Bhatia for his insights.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Total Recall, by Gordon Moore and Jim Gemmell (Dutton, 2009), explores the implications of digitally recording everything we do. The Naked Future, by Patrick Tucker (Current, 2014), surveys the use and abuse of data for prediction in our world. Craig Mundie argues for a balanced approach to data collection and use in “Privacy pragmatism” (Foreign Affairs, 2014). The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (Norton, 2014), discusses how progress in AI will shape the future of work and the economy. “World War R,” by Chris Baraniuk (New Scientist, 2014) reports on the debate surrounding the use of robots in battle. “Transcending complacency on superintelligent machines,” by Stephen Hawking et al.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

It’s abundantly clear that there’s much more work to be done. JOBS I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve seen entitled “Will AI [or Robots] Take Your Job?” For all these negative prognostications, there seems to be an equal number going in the opposite direction. A go-to source for me is Erik Brynjolfsson, who directs MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, and who has said, “Millions of jobs will be eliminated, millions of new jobs will be created and needed, and far more jobs will be transformed.”65 In terms of numbers, Cognizant Technology Solutions projects twenty-one new job categories, 19 million jobs lost, and 21 million new ones created in the next fifteen years.66 In the same vein, Jerry Kaplan, a Stanford adjunct faculty member who teaches AI, argues that “artificial intelligence will change the way that we live and work, improving our standard of living while shuffling jobs from one category to another in the familiar capitalist cycle of creation and destruction.”67 A 160-page report by the McKinsey Global Institute, agreeing with the overall trade-off, provided an in-depth global perspective, highlighting that the specific jobs gained and lost will vary markedly throughout different regions of the world.68 It’s clear that there will be a shift in and disruption of jobs, and the response to these changes is not as simple as training coal miners to become data miners.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

“post-materialist” economy: Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), passim. “language really spoken by men”: William Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802 edition. “Data,” said Lawrence Summers: Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Human Work in the Robotic Future,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2016, 139–50. “The personal computer”: Eric Zemmour, Le suicide français (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014), 218–19. (Author’s translation.) “evil . . . computerization enables”: Kevin Kelly, “Interview with the Luddite” (interview with Kirkpatrick Sale), Wired, June 1, 1995.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Ciulla The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans, Beth Shulman Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Jessica Bruder Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs Across Countries and Companies, Francoise Carre and Chris Tilly “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages, Annelise Orleck On Wanda Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir The Panopticon Writings, Jeremy Bentham Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare Karoshi, National Defense Counsel for Victims of Karoshi On tech, automation, and the future of work The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, Nicholas Carr Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, Christopher Steiner Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans, Simon Head Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Martin Ford The Robots Are Coming!


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Van Eenennaam, Muir, and Hallermann, Unaccountable Regulatory Delay, 3. 48. Sabrina Tavernise, “F.D.A. Nominee Clears One Hurdle, but Others Remain,” New York Times, January 12, 2016. Chapter 11 1. Frank W. Geels, Technological Transitions and System Innovations: A Co-evolutionary and Socio-technical Analysis (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2005). 2. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014), 257. 3. Hasan Bakhshi, Carl Benedikt Frey, and Michael Osborne, Creativity vs. Robots: The Creative Economy and the Future of Employment (London: Nesta, 2015), 6. 4.


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The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

not one of these tech dynamos Jerry Davis, “Re-imagining the Corporation,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Denver, CO, August 2012. what one observer called the “yawning disparity” Thanks for this insight to sociologist Paul Starr, as expressed in his review of The Second Machine Age, by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. See Paul Starr, “New Technology Doesn’t Make Us All Richer,” New Republic, July 6, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/​article/​118327/​second-machine-age-reviewed-paul-starr. At the Global Entrepreneurial Summit at Stanford University See “Remarks by the President at Global Entrepreneurship Summit,” White House press release, June 25, 2016, https://obamaw­hitehouse.archives.gov/​the-press-office/​2016/​06/​25/​remarks-president-global-entrepre­neurship-summit-and-convers­ation-mark.


pages: 401 words: 119,488

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

In our study of mind wandering among pilots [Thoughts in Flight: Automation Use and Pilots’ Task-Related and Task-Unrelated Thought], we found that the pilot flying was thinking ‘task-unrelated thoughts’ about 30% of the time. The other pilot, the monitoring pilot, was mind wandering about 50% of the time. Why wouldn’t they? If you don’t give me something important or pressing to think about, I’ll come up with something myself.” people build mental models Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Marshall Van Alstyne, “Information, Technology, and Information Worker Productivity,” Information Systems Research 23, no. 3 (2012): 849–67; Sinan Aral and Marshall Van Alstyne, “The Diversity-Bandwidth Trade-Off,” American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 1 (2011): 90–171; Nathaniel Bulkley and Marshall W.


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The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Charles Duhigg, “What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know about You?” New York Times Magazine, May 17, 2009. 51. Alex Pentland, “To Signal Is Human: Real-Time Data Mining Unmasks the Power of Imitation, Kith and Charisma in Our Face-to-Face Social Networks,” American Scientist 98 (2010). 52. Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, and M. Van Alstyne, “Productivity Effects of Information Diffusion in Networks,” Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Information Systems, Montreal, 2007; Sinan Aral and M. Van Alstyne, “Networks, Information and Social Capital,” paper presented at the International Conference on Network Science, New York, 2007. 53.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

—Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School “If you work in business or government, you need to understand the blockchain revolution. No one has written a more thoroughly researched or engaging book on this topic than Tapscott and Tapscott.” —Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT; coauthor of The Second Machine Age “An indispensable and up-to-the-minute account of how the technology underlying bitcoin could—and should—unleash the true potential of a digital economy for distributed prosperity.” —Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus “Technological change that used to develop over a generation now hits us in a relative blink of the eye, and no one tells this story better than the Tapscotts.”


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The claim is not that there is equal access to equally valuable data. Amazon.com is in a better position to market than tinybookseller.com. Likewise, it may well be that scale here makes all the difference. There have been suggestions that these architectures may reduce competition. See Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Bundling and Competition on the Internet,” Marketing Science, January 2000, available at http://ecommerce.mit.edu/erik/bci-final.pdf (finding that “economies of aggregation” for information goods could adversely affect competition). At this stage, however, I don't think we know enough to say.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

In 1992 productivity soared to nearly 3 percent, the best performance of any year in more than two decades. 6 MIT's Sloan School of Management published productivity data collected over a five-year period from 1987 to 1991 for more than 380 giant firms that together generated nearly $2 trillion in output per 92 THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION year. The gains in productivity were impressive, suggesting that the vast amount of money invested in information technology for more than a decade had begun to payoff. The authors of the study, Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt, found that between 1987 and 1991, return on investment (ROI) for computer capital averaged 54 percent in manufacturing and 68 percent for manufacturing and service combined. Brynjolfsson said that computers not only "added a great deal to productivity," but also contributed markedly to downsizing and the decline in the size of firms. 7 Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach who, along with others on Wall Street, had raised the issue of a productivity paradox, dropped his earlier reservations, proclaiming that "The U.S. economy is now entering its first productivity-driven recovery since the 1960s, courtesy of efficiency gains being realized through the use of information technology."


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Suzanne Kapner, “Black Friday Shopping—with Thinner Crowds,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/black-friday-shoppingwith -thinner-crowds-1448639398. Ibid. Ibid. As the newspaper also noted, 36 percent of consumers planned to shop online during the 2015 holiday season, up from 19 percent who said so in 2014; only 18 percent planned to shop in physical stores, down from 35 percent a year ago. Ibid. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Big Data: The Management Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, October 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/10 /big-data-the-management-revolution/ar/. Behavioral advertising is the “collection of data from a par ticu lar computer or device regarding Web viewing behaviors over time and across non-affi liated Web sites for the purpose of using such data to predict user preferences or interests to deliver advertising to that computer or device based on the preferences or interests inferred from such Web viewing behav iors”; Digital Advertising Alliance, Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising Implementation Guide: Frequently Asked Questions (October 2010), http://www.aboutads.info/resource/download/OBA%20Self-Reg%20 Implementation%20Guide%20-%20Frequently%20Asked%20Questions.pdf.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Daniel Susskind, fellow at the University of Oxford and author of A World Without Work ‘We’re surrounded by communication technologies and social media, yet loneliness is taking a huge toll on our economy, our health and our democracy. With a rare combination of rigorous research and powerful insights, Noreena Hertz masterfully explains the many facets of our Lonely Century and how we can do better, as individuals and as a society. Highly Recommended!’ Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at Stanford University and co-author of The Second Machine Age THE LONELY CENTURY Coming Together in a World that’s Pulling Apart Noreena Hertz www.sceptrebooks.co.uk First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Sceptre An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company Copyright © Noreena Hertz 2020 The right of Noreena Hertz to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

For the first view, see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (November–December 2010), 79–97; Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Post-Work Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Aaron Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work—1,” New Left Review 119 (September–October 2019), 5–38; Aaron Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work—2,” New Left Review 120 (November–December 2019), 117–146. For more mainstream approaches, see Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014); Richard Baldwin, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). For the second view, see Arne L.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.” The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, Race Against the Machine. In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

Technology, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/30/libratus-poker-artificial-intelligence-professional-human-players-competition. 242 “imperfect information” game: Will Knight, “Why Poker Is a Big Deal for Artificial Intelligence,” MIT Technology Review, January 23, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603385/why-poker-is-a-big-deal-for-artificial-intelligence/. 242 world’s top poker players had handily beaten: Cameron Tung, “Humans Out-Play an AI at Texas Hold ’Em—For Now,” WIRED, May 21, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/05/humans-play-ai-texas-hold-em-now/. 242 upgraded AI “crushed”: Cade Metz, “A Mystery AI Just Crushed the Best Human Players at Poker,” WIRED, January 31, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/01/mystery-ai-just-crushed-best-human-players-poker/. 242 “as soon as something works”: Micah Clark, interview, May 4, 2016. 242 “as soon as a computer can do it”: Stuart Armstrong, interview, November 18, 2016. This point was also made by authors of a Stanford study of AI. Peter Stone, Rodney Brooks, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Oren Etzioni, Greg Hager, Julia Hirschberg, Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Ece Kamar, Sarit Kraus, Kevin Leyton-Brown, David Parkes, William Press, AnnaLee Saxenian, Julie Shah, Milind Tambe, and Astro Teller. “Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030.” One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: Report of the 2015–2016 Study Panel, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, September 2016, 13. http://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report. 243 “responsible use”: AAAI.org, http://www.aaai.org/home.html. 243 “most of the discussion about superintelligence”: Tom Dietterich, interview, April 27, 2016. 243 “runs counter to our current understandings”: Thomas G.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

detect cancer in CT scans: Cade Metz, “Using AI to Detect Cancer, Not Just Cats,” Wired, May 11, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.wired.com/2017/05/using-ai-detect-cancer-not-just-cats. 74 minutes a day using it: Anu Hariharan, “The Hidden Forces Behind Toutiao: China’s Content King,” Y Combinator (blog), October 12, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-hidden-forces-behind-toutiao-chinas-content-king. “That’s my question”: Thompson, “What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?” “it’s going to work”: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “The Business of Artificial Intelligence,” Harvard Business Review (July 2017), accessed August 19, 2018, https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/07/the-business-of-artificial-intelligence. “ocean of math”: Jason Tanz, “Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs,” Wired, May 17, 2016, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.wired.com/2016/05/the-end-of-code/.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Or, she could base her selection on the analysis of data regarding how consumers react to different ads. She could also use a combination of these approaches. DDD is not an all-or-nothing practice, and different firms engage in DDD to greater or lesser degrees. The benefits of data-driven decision-making have been demonstrated conclusively. Economist Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues from MIT and Penn’s Wharton School conducted a study of how DDD affects firm performance (Brynjolfsson, Hitt, & Kim, 2011). They developed a measure of DDD that rates firms as to how strongly they use data to make decisions across the company. They show that statistically, the more data-driven a firm is, the more productive it is—even controlling for a wide range of possible confounding factors.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Might the experiences of 2020 transform Americans’ understanding of what government is for, as the Great Depression and New Deal did? Won’t social distancing and fear of the next novel virus accelerate the automation and general digitalization of work? In any event, what we know is that going forward, “the choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the MIT economists focused on digital technology and work. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.” We will presumably have an economy that keeps growing overall—that could start growing faster, maybe much faster—with people doing less and less of the necessary work.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

., “Building High-Level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning,” in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning (Edinburgh, 2012). 249 pictures of cats: John Markoff, “How Many Computers to Identity a Cat? 16,000,” New York Times, June 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html. 249 “We never told it”: Ibid. 250 where to put the traffic lights: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “The Business of Artificial Intelligence,” Harvard Business Review, July 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-business-of-artificial-intelligence. 250 more than a million: Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, “Building Scalable Systems to Understand Content,” Facebook Code, February 2, 2017, https://code.facebook.com/posts/1259786714075766/building-scalable-systems-to-understand-content/. 250 wearing a black shirt: Ibid. 250 80 percent: “An Update on Our Commitment to Fight Violent Extremist Content Online,” Official Blog, YouTube, October 17, 2017, https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/10/an-update-on-our-commitment-to-fight.html. 250 “attack scale”: Andy Greenberg, “Inside Google’s Internet Justice League and Its AI-Powered War on Trolls,” Wired, September 19, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/09/inside-googles-internet-justice-league-ai-powered-war-trolls/. 251 about 90 percent: Ibid. 251 thoughts of suicide: Vanessa Callison-Burch, Jennifer Guadagno, and Antigone Davis, “Building a Safer Community with New Suicide Prevention Tools,” Facebook Newsroom, March 1, 2017, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/03/building-a-safer-community-with-new-suicide-prevention-tools/%20https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/03/building-a-safer-community-with-new-suicide-prevention-tools/. 251 database of facts: Jonathan Stray, “The Age of the Cyborg,” Columbia Journalism Review, Fall/Winter 2016, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/cyborg_virtual_reality_reuters_tracer.php. 251 managing the “trade-offs”: Kurt Wagner, “Facebook’s AI Boss: Facebook Could Fix Its Filter Bubble If It Wanted To,” Recode, December 1, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/12/1/13800270/facebook-filter-bubble-fix-technology-yann-lecun. 251 Their more advanced version: For a good overview, see “Cleverbot Data for Machine Learning,” Existor, accessed March 20, 2018, https://www.existor.com/products/cleverbot-data-for-machine-learning/. 252 machine-driven communications tools: Matt Chessen, “Understanding the Psychology Behind Computational Propaganda,” in Can Public Diplomacy Survive the Internet?


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

This income inequality is something that is particularly apparent in the US, but also to a smaller scale in Western Europe. The Gini index—a measure of income inequality—of France or Scandinavia is around 25 or 30. In the US, it’s 45, and that’s the same level as third-world countries. In the US, Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at MIT, wrote a couple of books with his colleague from MIT, Andrew McAfee, studying the impact of technology on the economy. They say that the median income of a household in America has been flat since the 1980s where we had Reaganomics and the lowering of taxes for higher incomes, whereas productivity has gone up more or less continuously.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Osborne, “The Future of Employment,” Oxford Martin, Sept. 17, 2013, http://​www.​oxfordmartin.​ox.​ac.​uk/. 35 Those working in the transportation field: For an excellent discussion on the future of robots, automation, and work, see Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, Dec. 24, 2012; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 36 News outlets such as: Francie Diep, “Associated Press Will Use Robots to Write Articles,” Popular Science, July 1, 2014. 37 Many believe that it is the growth: Paul Krugman, “Robots and Robber Barons,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 2012. 38 In mid-2014, a young woman: Lindsey Bever, “Seattle Woman Spots Drone Outside Her 26th-Floor Apartment Window, Feels ‘Violated,’ ” Washington Post, June 25, 2014. 39 “Air is a public”: Rebecca J.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948) and its popularizing contemporary, Edmund Callis Berkeley’s Giant Brains, or, Machines That Think (1949), remain fascinating and revealing reads. Secondary works that helped inform this part of the story include Daniel Crevier, AI (1993); John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (2015); and Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines (2016). The impact of automation and robotics on work is a deservedly hot topic. For an optimistic take, see Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (2016); for a more sobering one, see Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots (2015). Properly placing gig-economy phenomena in the context of a longer history of corporate restructuring and contingent work (in Silicon Valley and elsewhere) is Louis Hyman, Temp (2018).


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States,” Politics and Society 38, no. 2 (2010): 152–204; Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). 11. See Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 12. See Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014). 13. Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society (New York: Free Press, 1995). 14. See Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, pp. 460–68. 15.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Frey and Osborne, “The Future of Employment”; Martin Krzywdzinski, “Automation, Skill Requirements and Labour-Use Strategies: High-Wage and Low-Wage Approaches to High-Tech Manufacturing in the Automotive Industry,” New Technology, Work and Employment 32, no. 3 (2017): 247–67, https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12100; Frey, “Doing Capitalism”; William Lazonick, “Labor in the Twenty-First Century: The Top 0.1% and the Disappearing Middle-Class” (working paper, Institute for New Economic Thinking, February 2015), https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/labor-in-the-twenty-first-century-the-top-0-1-and-the-disappearing-middle-class; Dirk Antonczyk, Thomas DeLeire, and Bernd Fitzenberger, “Polarization and Rising Wage Inequality: Comparing the U.S. and Germany” (IZA Discussion Paper, Institute for the Study of Labor, March 2010), https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp4842.html; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, “What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz’s ‘The Race Between Education and Technology,’” Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 2 (2012): 426–63; Sang Yoon Lee and Yongseok Shin, “Horizontal and Vertical Polarization: Task-Specific Technological Change in a Multi-Sector Economy” (SSRN Scholarly Paper, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, March 1, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2941261. 15.


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Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

[Yet] it achieves what usually only love can do: the divination of the innermost wishes of the other, even before he himself becomes aware of them. . . . Modern competition is described as the fight of all against all, but at the same time it is the fight of all for all.13 8 Or from the Right and Middle And there are doubts from the right, too. Some students of the economy, such as Robert Gordon, Lawrence Summers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McFee, Edmund Phelps, Edward E. Gordon, Jeffrey Sachs, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Tyler Cowen, have argued recently that countries in the position of the United States, on the frontier of betterment, are facing a slowdown, with a skill shortage, and that technological unemployment will be the result.1 Maybe.


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The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

THE INVENTIONS THAT ARE NOW FORECASTABLE Despite the slow growth of TFP recorded by the data of the decade since 2004, commentators view the future of technology with great excitement. Nouriel Roubini writes, “[T]here is a new perception of the role of technology. Innovators and tech CEOs both seem positively giddy with optimism.”44 The well-known pair of techno-optimists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee assert that “we’re at an inflection point” between a past of slow technological change and a future of rapid change.45 They appear to believe that Big Blue’s chess victory and Watson’s victory on the TV game show Jeopardy presage an age in which computers outsmart humans in every aspect of human work effort.