Second Machine Age

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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

ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON ANDREW MCAFEE To Martha Pavlakis, the love of my life. To my parents, David McAfee and Nancy Haller, who prepared me for the second machine age by giving me every advantage a person could have. Chapter 1 THE BIG STORIES Chapter 2 THE SKILLS OF THE NEW MACHINES: TECHNOLOGY RACES AHEAD Chapter 3 MOORE’S LAW AND THE SECOND HALF OF THE CHESSBOARD Chapter 4 THE DIGITIZATION OF JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING Chapter 5 INNOVATION: DECLINING OR RECOMBINING? Chapter 6 ARTIFICIAL AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IN THE SECOND MACHINE AGE Chapter 7 COMPUTING BOUNTY Chapter 8 BEYOND GDP Chapter 9 THE SPREAD Chapter 10 THE BIGGEST WINNERS: STARS AND SUPERSTARS Chapter 11 IMPLICATIONS OF THE BOUNTY AND THE SPREAD Chapter 12 LEARNING TO RACE WITH MACHINES: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR INDIVIDUALS Chapter 13 POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS Chapter 14 LONG-TERM RECOMMENDATIONS Chapter 15 TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE (Which Is Very Different from “Technology Is the Future”) Acknowledgments Notes Illustration Sources Index “Technology is a gift of God.

Child labor no longer exists in the UK, and London air contains less smoke and sulfur dioxide now than at any time since at least the late 1500s.13 The challenges of the digital revolution can also be met, but first we have to be clear on what they are. It’s important to discuss the likely negative consequences of the second machine age and start a dialogue about how to mitigate them—we are confident that they’re not insurmountable. But they won’t fix themselves, either. We’ll offer our thoughts on this important topic in the chapters to come. So this is a book about the second machine age unfolding right now—an inflection point in the history of our economies and societies because of digitization. It’s an inflection point in the right direction—bounty instead of scarcity, freedom instead of constraint—but one that will bring with it some difficult challenges and choices.

One of the things that sets the second machine age apart is how quickly that second half of the chessboard can arrive. We’re not claiming that no other technology has ever improved exponentially. In fact, after the one-time burst of improvement in the steam engine Watt’s innovations created, additional tinkering led to exponential improvement over the ensuing two hundred years. But the exponents were relatively small, so it only went through about three or four doublings in efficiency during that period.9 It would take a millennium to reach the second half of the chessboard at that rate. In the second machine age, the doublings happen much faster and exponential growth is much more salient.


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

But as the number of both building blocks and innovators increases, we should have confidence that more breakthroughs such as fracking and smartphones are ahead. Innovation is highly decentralized and largely uncoordinated, occurring as the result of interactions among complex and interlocking social, technological, and economic systems. So it’s going to keep surprising us. As the Second Machine Age progresses, dematerialization accelerates. Erik and I coined the phrase Second Machine Age to draw a contrast with the Industrial Era, which as we’ve seen transformed the planet by allowing us to overcome the limitations of muscle power. Our current time of great progress with all things related to computing is allowing us to overcome the limitations of our mental power and is transformative in a different way: it’s allowing us to reverse the Industrial Era’s bad habit of taking more and more from the earth every year.

Seebohm, 24 Royal Crown Cola, 101 Russia, 185 Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), 66 Salemi, Jason, 216 Salesforce, 256–57 Samasource, 255–56 sanitation, 22–23, 194 Saudi Arabia, 104 Save the Elephants, 154 Schmidt, Christian, 148 Schnakenberg, Keith, 175 Schumpeter, Joseph, 122 Scientific American, 59–60 Scotland, 38 Scramble for Africa, 39 sea otters, 43, 96, 152 Second Enlightenment, 123, 141, 238–39, 265 Second Machine Age, 112–13, 114–15, 122–23, 141, 162, 168, 177, 200, 206, 213, 231 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson), 112 self-employment, 138–39 self-healing cities, 21–23 self-interest, 127 Sen, Amartya, 68–69, 94 service industry, 88, 200–201 Shapiro, David, 190 Shell Oil, 103, 104–05 Shellenberger, Michael, 251 Sherman, Brad, 107 Sheskin, Mark, 210 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (las Casas), 39–40 Sidgwick, Henry, 142n silver, 120 Simon, Julian, 69–70, 71–72, 75, 151, 179, 244–45 Singapore, 148 Singh, Manmohan, 171–72 Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg), 179, 181 slash-and-burn agriculture, 148 slavery, 35, 36, 37–38, 181 Sloman, Steven, 226 smartphones, 102, 111, 113, 168–69, 205, 235, 236 Smil, Vaclav, 31, 101 Smith, Adam, 125–39, 128–29 Smith, Noah, 191 smog, 42, 55, 186 Snow, John, 22–23 social capital, 212–13, 216–17, 228–29, 247, 254, 255, 270 social democracy, 133–34 social development, 24–25, 26 social development index, 60n social safety nets, 131–32 socialism, 132–38, 192 sodium nitrate, 17 solar power, 111, 240, 250, 269 Song, Jian, 93 Sørlle, Petter, 47 Soros, George, 132 South Korea, 117–18, 174 Soviet Union, 133, 163–64, 170–71 “Spaceship Earth”, 64–65 Staggers Act (1980), 109 Starmans, Christina, 210 steam engine, 16, 17, 27, 30, 36, 44, 48–49, 205, 206, 237 steamships, 17–18, 26 steel, 80 Steller, Georg Wilhelm, 273 Steller’s sea cow, 273 Stenner, Karen, 217 Sterba, Jim, 43–44 Stigler, George, 126 Strangers in Their Own Land (Hochschild), 221 Suicide (Durkheim), 215–16, 219 sulfur dioxide, 54–55, 95, 186, 249 Sullivan, Andrew, 219 Summers, Larry, 254 sustainability, 64 taxation, 5, 130, 250 tech progress, 2–3, 4, 36, 67, 99–123, 113, 141, 151, 158–59, 167–68, 169–70 defining of, 114–15 Tesla, Nikola, 27 Texas, Hill Country of, 29, 205 Thatcher, Margaret, 132, 138 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 129 Thomas, Chris, 182–83 3-D printing, 239 tin, 72 tin cans, 101 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 89–90, 212–13 Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), 66 tragedy of the commons, 183 transportation, 241–42 Trump, Donald, 158, 201 trust, 212, 213, 217 Truth About Soviet Whaling, The (Berzin), 164 Ulam, Stanislaw, 19n Ultimate Resource, The (Simon), 69, 179 unfairness, 210, 220–24 Union Oil, 54 United Airlines, 257 United Kingdom, 76, 85 United Nations, 40, 58, 199 United States, 117–18 agriculture in, 81–82, 100 coal consumption in, 102–03 cropland acreage in, 201–02 dematerialization in, 76–85 industrial production in, 88–89 mortality rates in, 213–14 slavery in, 37–38 suicide rate in, 214–16 water pollution in, 189–90 urbanization, 91–92, 199–200 Utopia or Oblivion (Fuller), 70 vaccination, 227 Van Reenen, John, 203, 204, 207 Varian, Hal, 236 Veblen goods, 152–53 Veblen, Thorstein, 152 Venezuela, 118, 134–38, 172 voluntary exchange, 117 wages, 20–21 Waggoner, Paul, 76 Wagner, Stephan, 148 Wald, George, 61 water, drinking, 194 water pollution, 189–90 Watt, James, 15–16, 20, 121, 206, 237 Watt, Kenneth, 58 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 127, 131 Weeks-McLean Law Act (1913), 96 Welzel, Christian, 176, 177 Wernick, Iddo, 76 whales, 44, 46–47, 163–65 wheat, 31–32 Wheelwright, William, 17–18 Whole Earth Catalog, 68 Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson), 159 Wilson, James, 19n wind power, 111, 240, 250 Winship, Scott, 215 Wolff, Edward, 206 Woodbury, N.J., 65 wooly mammoth, 180 World Bank, 118, 168, 169, 192 World Values Survey, 176 Yao Ming, 154, 161 Yellowstone National Park, 46, 153 YouTube, 236 Zoorob, Michael, 216 First published in the United States by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2019 First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK, Ltd, 2019 A CBS COMPANY Copyright © 2019 by Andrew McAfee The right of Andrew McAfee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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. All these elements had been around for a while before 2007.


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

We documented fast technological progress and discussed some of its economic consequences in our previous book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. Since its publication, one of the most common questions we’ve been asked about it is, When did this age start? It’s a great question, and a surprisingly difficult one to answer. We’ve had digital computers for well over half a century, after all, yet just about all of the advances we described in our earlier book were quite recent. So when did this important new, second machine age start? We’ve arrived at a two-phase answer to this question. Phase one of the second machine age describes a time when digital technologies demonstrably had an impact on the business world by taking over large amounts of routine work—tasks like processing payroll, welding car body parts together, and sending invoices to customers.

By the mid-1990s, that was no longer true; productivity started to grow much faster, and a large amount of research (some of it conducted by Erik‡‡ and his colleagues) revealed that computers and other digital technologies were a main reason why. So, we can date the start of phase one of the second machine age to the middle of the 1990s. Phase two, which we believe we’re in now, has a start date that’s harder to pin down. It’s the time when science fiction technologies—the stuff of movies, books, and the controlled environments of elite research labs—started to appear in the real world. In 2010, Google unexpectedly announced that a fleet of completely autonomous cars had been driving on US roads without mishap.

As we’ll see, so did many other breakthroughs. They are not flukes or random blips in technological progress. Instead, they are harbingers of a more fundamental transformation in the economy—a transformation that’s rooted in both significant technological advances and sound economic principles. Phase two of the second machine age differs markedly from phase one. First, it’s a time when technologies are demonstrating that they can do work that we’ve never thought of as preprogrammed or “routine.” They’re winning at Go, diagnosing disease accurately, interacting naturally with people, and engaging in creative work like composing music and designing useful objects.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Like Watt’s steam engine, which heralded the start of the ‘first machine age’ of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, modern computers are currently ushering in the ‘second machine age’12 through the digital transformation of our economy and societies. They do so because they are general-purpose machines that can run any program. Babbage’s intellectual leap from the Difference Engine to the Analytical Engine was the moment when the seeds of the second machine age were conceived. It was also a moment that the ghost of Descartes must have delighted in, for dualism had found its way into computing. As algorithms became programs, mathematics was also transformed.

Using a Digitisation Index that ranks countries on a scale from zero to one hundred, the consultants Booz & Company found that an increase of 10 per cent in a country’s digitisation score fuels a 0.75 per cent growth in its GDP per capita. That same 10 per cent boost in digitisation leads to a 1.02 per cent drop in a state’s unemployment rate. Governments and private investors are elbowing for a place on the bandwagon of the ‘second machine age’. Meanwhile corporate behemoths such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook yield extraordinary economic power. Some would say their power goes beyond the economic: with unhindered access to our personal data, including information about our tastes, habits, vices, consumer spend and friends, these companies can potentially control not only what we buy, but also what we do and how we think.

We are nowadays the denizens of a digital noosphere: creators, consumers and manipulators of vast amounts of digital data. The deluge of big data that comes from the digitisation of almost everything, and the value for businesses and governments that these data encapsulate, are taking the world economy into a new era increasingly called ‘the second machine age’.1 The ‘first age’ occurred when the invention of the steam engine multiplied humanity’s capacity for manual labour. In the ‘second age’ the computer multiplies our capacity for mental labour. As computers increasingly become more ‘intelligent’, they are bound to transcend their current number-crunching duties and take over jobs traditionally associated with human, white-collar workers.


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

As McAfee and Brynjolfsson explain, “We mean simply that the key building blocks are already in place for digital technologies to be as important and transformational to society as the steam engine. In short, we’re at an inflection point—a point where the curve starts to bend a lot—because of computers. We are entering a second machine age.”16 Before writing The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson and McAfee wrote a shorter book with the same theme, Race Against the Machine. As their thinking evolved from the first book to the second, the authors became decidedly more optimistic about this second machine age. “We’re heading into an era,” they contend, “that won’t just be different; it will be better, because we’ll be able to increase both the variety and the volume of our consumption.”

A November 2015 McKinsey and Company study indicates that “as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.”14 Looking deeper into the future of work, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age argue that although computers have been transforming work, economics, and everyday life for several decades, we have finally reached a pivotal moment—a moment when we are grappling with the “full force” of digital technologies. The Second Machine Age builds on a book by the economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane about the human–computer tradeoff in the labor market.15 Levy and Murnane examine, in detail, what tasks computers perform better than humans, and what tasks humans perform better than computers.

TaskRabbit and Thumbtack provides plumbers, event planners, and electricians. The platforms Pager and Heal get you a doctor on demand. Universal Avenue offers a sales force on demand, and HourlyNerd gets you a consultant with an MBA. And what if offshoring, as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee suggest, is only a way station on the road to automation? The Second Machine Age Like offshoring, automation is by no means new. The quest to automate simple human tasks has occupied scientists and engineers for centuries. By the late 19th century, machines were being used to automate the tabulation of data gathered in the US national census. By the 1920s, automated switchboards controlled many of the incoming and outgoing calls at Bell Telephone.


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

., “Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 3Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. 4Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” OxfordMartin.ox.ac.uk, 2013. 5Kevin Drum, “Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?,” Mother Jones, May/June 2013. 6Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, pp. 7–8. 7Frey and Osborne, “The Future of Employment.” 8Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, New York: Basic Books, 2015. 9Katie Drummond, “Clothes Will Sew Themselves in Darpa’s Sweat-Free Sweatshops,” Wired.com, June 6, 2012. 10Leanna Garfield, “These Warehouse Robots Can Boost Productivity by 800%,” TechInsider.io, February 26, 2016. 11Ilan Brat, “Robots Step into New Planting, Harvesting Roles,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2015. 12Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. 13Soraya Chemaly, “What Do Artificial Wombs Mean for Women?”

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.

The persistently weak post-recession labor market has produced a generalized background anxiety about job loss. Automation and computerization are beginning to reach into professional and creative industries that long seemed immune, threatening the jobs of the very journalists who cover these issues. And the pace of change at least seems, to many, to be faster than ever. The “second machine age” is a concept promoted by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. In their book of the same name, they argue that just as the first machine age—the Industrial Revolution—replaced human muscle with machine power, computerization is allowing us to greatly magnify, or even replace, “the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments.”6 In that book and its predecessor, Race Against the Machine, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that computers and robots are rapidly permeating every part of the economy, displacing labor from high- and low-skill functions alike.


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

31.Gordon, “The Demise of US Economic Growth,” figs 9 and 10. 32.Haltiwanger, Hathaway, and Miranda, “Declining Business Dynamism in the US High-Technology Sector,” 9. 33.Hatzius and Dawsey, “Doing the Sums on Productivity Paradox v2.0.” 34.Fernald and Wang, “Why Has the Cyclicality of Productivity Changed?” 35.Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 105. 36.Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 105. 37.Fernald, “Productivity and Potential Output.” 38.Fernald and Wang, “The Recent Rise and Fall of Rapid Productivity Growth.” 39.Frey and Osborne, “Technology at Work,” 62. 40.Summers, “Making Sense of the Productivity Slowdown,” 5. 41.Cardarelli and Lusinyan, “US Total Factor Productivity Slowdown.” 42.Syversen, “Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations.” 43.Syversen, “Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations.” 44.Copeland, “Seasonality, Consumer Heterogeneity and Price Indexes.” 45.The data reference is from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis’s chained price index for IT software. 46.Nakamura and Soloveichik.

In reality the cyclical effects on total factor productivity have substantially weakened over time to become acyclical, and labor productivity has been countercyclical – going up in recessions.34 Technology optimists like Brynjolfsson and McAfee would disagree. In their otherwise important book The Second Machine Age, they claim that “part of the recent slowdown simply reflects the Great Recession and its aftermath.”35 They argue that US productivity growth “in the decade following the year 2000 exceeded even the high growth rates of the roaring 1990s, which in turn was higher than 1970s or 1980s growth rates had been.”36 These propositions do not stand up to scrutiny.

While there is a postcrisis trend of unusually high profit margins in some countries, the long-term trend for the US, the UK, France, Italy, Belgium, and other advanced economies is stable, prone to mean reversion, and not exactly ammunition for the Marxian view of capital using and abusing labor.50 Even in Germany, where profit margins accelerated remarkably fast in the decade leading up to 2005, there has lately been a corrective return to the mean. 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: 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

Stuffed to the gills with 200 million pages of information, including a complete copy of Wikipedia, Watson gave more correct responses than Jennings and Rutter put together. “‘Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson,” Jennings observed, “but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”22 The new generations of robots are proxies not only for our muscle power, but for our mental capacity, too. Welcome, my friends, to the Second Machine Age, as this brave new world of chips and algorithms is already being called. The first began with the Scottish inventor James Watt, who during a stroll in 1765 came up with an idea for improving the efficiency of the steam engine. It being a Sunday, the pious Watt had to wait another day before putting his idea into action, but by 1776, he’d built a machine able to pump 60 feet of water out of a mine in just 60 minutes.23 At a time when nearly everyone, everywhere was still poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly – the line of technological development began to curve.

According to Wilde, the ancient Greeks had known an uncomfortable truth: Slavery is a prerequisite for civilization. “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” However, there’s something else that is equally vital to the future of our world, and that’s a mechanism for redistribution. We have to devise a system to ensure that everybody benefits from this Second Machine Age, a system that compensates the losers as well as the winners. For 200 years that system was the labor market, which ceaselessly churned out new jobs and, in so doing, distributed the fruits of progress. But for how much longer? What if the Luddites’ fears were premature, but ultimately prophetic?

“No, no, I will have nothing to do with it,” he declared, “lest the revolution might come into the country.”36 His resistance meant that far into the 19th century, Austrian trains continued to be drawn by horses. Anyone who wants to continue plucking the fruits of progress will have to come up with a more radical solution. Just as we adapted to the First Machine Age through a revolution in education and welfare, so the Second Machine Age calls for drastic measures. Measures like a shorter workweek and universal basic income. The Future of Capitalism For us today, it is still difficult to imagine a future society in which paid labor is not the be-all and end-all of our existence. But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is only evidence of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

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

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.

These are tasks that computers are perfectly suited to accomplish once a programmer has created the appropriate software, leading to a drastic reduction in the numbers of routine manual and cognitive jobs over the past four decades.22 The result has been a polarisation of the labour market, since many middle-wage, mid-skilled jobs are routine, and therefore subject to automation.23 Across both North America and Western Europe, the labour market is now characterised by a predominance of workers in low-skilled, low-wage manual and service jobs (for example, fast-food, retail, transport, hospitality and warehouse workers), along with a smaller number of workers in high-skilled, high-wage, non-routine cognitive jobs.24 The most recent wave of automation is poised to change this distribution of the labour market drastically, as it comes to encompass every aspect of the economy: data collection (radio-frequency identification, big data); new kinds of production (the flexible production of robots,25 additive manufacturing,26 automated fast food); services (AI customer assistance, care for the elderly); decision-making (computational models, software agents); financial allocation (algorithmic trading); and especially distribution (the logistics revolution, self-driving cars,27 drone container ships and automated warehouses).28 In every single function of the economy – from production to distribution to management to retail – we see large-scale tendencies towards automation.29 This latest wave of automation is predicated upon algorithmic enhancements (particularly in machine learning and deep learning), rapid developments in robotics and exponential growth in computing power (the source of big data) that are coalescing into a ‘second machine age’ that is transforming the range of tasks that machines can fulfil.30 It is creating an era that is historically unique in a number of ways. New pattern-recognition technologies are rendering both routine and non-routine tasks subject to automation: complex communication technologies are making computers better than humans at certain skilled-knowledge tasks, and advances in robotics are rapidly making technology better at a wide variety of manual-labour tasks.31 For instance, self-driving cars involve the automation of non-routine manual tasks, and non-routine cognitive tasks such as writing news stories or researching legal precedents are now being accomplished by robots.32 The scope of these developments means that everyone from stock analysts to construction workers to chefs to journalists is vulnerable to being replaced by machines.33 Workers who move symbols on a screen are as at risk as those moving goods around a warehouse.

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. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?


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

Emanuel, MD, PhD Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and Chair, Departments of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania “In Bob Wachter, I recognize a fellow mindful optimist: someone who understands the immense power of digital technologies, yet also realizes just how hard it is to incorporate them into complicated, high-stakes environments full of people who don’t like being told what to do by a computer. Read this important book to see what changes are ahead in healthcare, and why they’re so necessary.” —Andrew McAfee cofounder of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy; coauthor of The Second Machine Age “One of the best books I’ve ever read. Wachter’s warm humor and deep insights kept me turning the pages without interruption. To make our healthcare system work, we need new models of care and new ways of managing our technology. The Digital Doctor brings us much closer to making this happen, which is why I finished the book far more optimistic than I was when I began it.

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.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

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

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. The first part (chapters 1 to 6 inclusive) describes the characteristics of what they call the second machine age. They warn readers that their recitation of recent and forthcoming developments may seem like science fiction, and their prose is sometimes slightly breathless: even tenured professors can get excited about the speed of technological change and the wonders it produces.

“Spread” seems to be a synonym for inequality, although the authors are strangely reluctant to use that word.[xxxv] It is “ever-bigger differences among people in economic success”. This part of the book could have been written by a member of the Occupy movement[xxxvi]. “Spread is a troubling development for many reasons, and one that will accelerate in the second machine age unless we intervene.” Brynjolfsson and McAfee pose the question whether bounty will overcome the spread. In other words, will we create an economy of radical abundance, in which inequality is relatively unimportant because even though a minority is extraordinarily wealthy, everyone else is comfortably off?

Jerry Kaplan Serial entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan co-founded GO Corporation, which was a precursor to smartphones and tablets, and was sold to AT&T. He also co-founded OnSale, an internet auction site which pre-dated Ebay, and was sold for $400m. He teaches at his alma mater, Stanford University, and writes books, including one called “Humans Need Not Apply”. Its message is similar to “The Second Machine Age”: AI has reached a tipping point and is becoming powerfully effective. This will disrupt most walks of life (the computer, he observes, is blind to the colour of your collar), and unless we manage the transition well, the resulting economic instability and growing inequality could be damaging.


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

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?

id=11779469 8 McAfee and Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd. 9 Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (4th Estate, 2010). 10 https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/a_virtuous_mix_allows_innovation_to_thrive 11 https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/a_virtuous_mix_allows_innovation_to_thrive 12 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2015.0272 13 Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus. 14 See Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. 15 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. 16 http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/ 17 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.30.4.83 18 https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/resources/entrepreneurship-policy-digest/the-economic-case-for-welcoming-immigrant-entrepreneurs 19 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/17-011_da2c1cf4-a999-4159-ab95-457c783e3fff.pdf 20 https://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/resources/2015/entrepreneurship%20policy%20digest/september%202015/the_economic_case_for_welcoming_immigrant_entrepreneurs_updated_september_2015.pdf 21 McAfee and Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd. 22 See also Erik Dane ‘Reconsidering the Trade-off Between Expertise and Flexibility’, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 579–603. 23 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902616300052 24 https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp9651047.pdf 25 https://www.squawkpoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Identification-of-scientists-making-long%E2%80%90term-high%E2%80%90impact-contributions-with-notes-on-their-methods-of-working.pdf 26 https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/1035/arts-foster-scientific-success.pdf 27 https://www.forbes.com/sites/catherinewines/2018/09/07/why-immigrants-are-natural-entrepreneurs/ 28 https://blog.aboutamazon.co.uk/company-news/2018-letter-to-shareholders 29 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/introducing-a-new-competition-to-crowdsource-a-more-inclusive-economy/ 30 Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist. 31 See Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation (Allen Lane, 2010). 32 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Belknap Press, 1998). 33 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies. 34 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192 35 Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From. 36 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.0452 37 Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success. 38 Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success. 39 Joseph Henrich and Michael Muthukrishna argue that differences in individual IQ are an emergent property of the collective brain.

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: 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

Sifferlin, “The Doctor Will Skype You Now,” TIME, January 13, 2014, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,2161682,00.html. 41. K. Bourzac, “The Computer Will See You Now,” Nature 502 (2013): 592–594. 42. “The Robots Are Coming. How Many of Us Will Prosper from the Second Machine Age?,” Raw Story, January 4, 2014, http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/04/the-robots-are-coming-how-many-of-us-will-prosper-from-the-second-machine-age/. 43. J. Marte, “The Doctor Visit of the Future May Be a Phone Call,” Market Watch, March 3, 2014, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-doctor-will-facetime-you-now-2014-03-03/print?guid=D2E3D006-A2D6-11E3-BC16-00212803FAD6. 44.

—GREG WASSON, CEO OF WALGREENS “Eric Topol understands better than anybody else the growing battle between technology-and information-empowered patients on one side, and the incumbent medical establishment on the other. He also understands who should win it. Read this book and you’ll join him in fighting the good fight.” —ANDREW MCAFEE, AUTHOR OF The Second Machine Age “In this extraordinary book, Topol has, in effect, provided us with a prescription for the future of medicine. He outlines the challenges of the current practice of medicine, and gives us a powerful vision of what can be changed—and how. Topol writes about the future more effectively than any physician or scientist that I know.

With more information at their fingertips, patients can truly be in the driving seat.”96 As we reviewed in Chapter 7, we will get away from keyboards in the office, also known as “death by a thousand clicks,” and replace them with computer processing of natural language into notes.98–100 This sort of data, combined with a machine-learning powered app to turn spoken words into notes, will truly revolutionize the doctor’s visit of the future—assuming, of course, that we need the routine visits at all. Doctors Disintermediated? We’ve already seen some examples of how physicians react to the threat of being marginalized, along with their general reluctance to adapt to new technology. Now we get into the “Second Machine Age”101 question as to whether the new digital landscape will reboot the need for doctors and health professionals. Kevin Kelly, a cofounder of Wired, has asserted: “The role tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.”102 An emergency medicine physician likened the current practice of medicine to a Radio Shack store in his piece “Doctor Dinosaur: Physicians may not be exempt from extinction.”103 In late 2013, Korean doctors threatened to go on an all-out strike if the government went ahead with new telemedicine laws that would support clinical diagnoses to be made remotely.


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.

Amazon replaces thousands of brick-and-mortar stores, as well as all the industries that supported them—from window dressers to shelving manufacturers to the eateries where the shoppers lunched. Airbnb destroys far more jobs, income, and health insurance plans than it creates. Instead of rethinking the innovations of the industrial age, we extended them into that “second machine age” envisioned by the MIT economists. Rather than transcending industrialism’s antihuman values, we digitized them. Some of these examples will be elucidated in the coming chapters, but what should already be clear is that the financial and marketing innovations we associate with the digital age are less disruptions than extensions of established business practices—new ways of exercising the same old corporatism.

Instead of simply amplifying the most dehumanizing and extractive qualities of industrialism, it pushes ahead to something different—while also retrieving the truly free-market principles long obsolesced by corporatism. RENAISSANCE NOW? The digital industrialists have it wrong. There will be no second machine age. Like any truly new medium, digital technology will amplify and retrieve different values than the technologies that came before it did. Individuals and businesses will succeed in different ways and by different means than they have been. This is good news: what was repressed by the industrial corporation can be retrieved and renewed by the distributed enterprise—while the excesses of the industrial era can themselves be repressed, or at least reduced, in a digital one.


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”. In Germany, there are discussions about “Industry 4.0”, a term coined at the Hannover Fair in 2011 to describe how this will revolutionize the organization of global value chains.

Some designers and architects are already mixing computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering and synthetic biology to pioneer systems that involve the interaction among micro-organisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit. In doing so, they are making (and even “growing”) objects that are continuously mutable and adaptable (hallmarks of the plant and animal kingdoms).4 In The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that computers are so dexterous that it is virtually impossible to predict what applications they may be used for in just a few years. Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and translation software.

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: 267 words: 72,552

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

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. advent of a “second machine age”: Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. “labor share” has declined considerably: Matthias Kehrig and Nicolas Vincent, “Growing Productivity Without Growing Wages: The Micro-Level Anatomy of the Aggregate Labor Share Decline,” CESifo Working Paper Series No. 6454, May 3, 2017, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2977787.

As manufacturing became more automated, the services sector grew. The question today is whether this will happen again. 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.


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?”


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Smartphones, which are “1 million times cheaper, 1000 times more powerful, and about 100,000 times smaller than one computer in MIT in 1965,” seem to exemplify this arrival.18 The explosive growth in connectivity at all scales over the past decade, in combination with advances in data collection and storage, computing power, and machine learning, have convinced many scholars that we’re on the precipice of something fundamentally different and new. Two MIT professors, Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, say we’ve reached the “second machine age.” Brynjolfsson and McAfee liken the impact of computers, big data, peer-to-peer networks, and other digital advances in our technological capabilities to the monumental societal impact of the steam engine and electricity: However, unlike the steam engine or electricity, second machine age technologies continue to improve at a remarkably rapid exponential pace, replicating their power with digital perfection and creating even more opportunities for combinatorial innovation. . . .

Bowles, “Clooneys to Attend a VIP Fundraiser for Clinton—and Sanders Fans Are Outraged.” 15. Weiss, The American Myth of Success, 9. 16. For a good critique of platforms, see Srnicek, Platform Capitalism. 17. Sundararajan, Sharing Economy, 124. 18. Moazed and Johnson, Modern Monopolies, 62. 19. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 106. 20. Anderson, “The End of Theory.” 21. Harris, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence.” 22. O’Gieblyn, “Ghost in the Cloud.” 23. Ullman, Life in Code, 295. 24. Losse, The Boy Kings, 201–2. 25. See John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation website, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 26.

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. Brooks, Rodney. “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Prediction.” MIT Technology Review, October 6, 2017. Bruder, Jessica. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. Brynjolfsson, Eric, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Burgess, Jean, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell. SAGE Handbook of Social Media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2017. Burns, Janet. “House Passes Bill That Could Have Teens Facing 15 Years for Trying to Sext.”


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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

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). The Services Transformation was launched, in 1973, by the development of computers-on-a-chip and all the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that followed. This technological impulse pushed the economy in a radically different direction, since it was radically different—Byrnjolsson and McAfee call it the Second Machine Age. ICT created better substitutes for people whose jobs involved manual tasks and better tools for people whose jobs involved mental tasks.

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.

What might seem strange about this widespread practice is that the digital products made of these free components are often insanely valuable. 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: 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

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. MOVING GOODS, MOVING PEOPLE The most important development in integrating global trade during the last century was not the World Trade Organization (WTO) or global trade agreements or lower tariffs.

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. Developing countries have not fully reaped the benefits of existing powerful technologies, not to mention those of the future.

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.


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

Gravener Henson was infatuated with this process; he kept detailed notes of the innumerable improvements made to cloth-producing technology over the decades by the workers who used it. Yet technology is often described as undergoing “explosive” periods of “rapid acceleration,” like the Industrial Revolution, or the so-called Second Machine Age of artificial intelligence and computerized automation said to be taking shape in the twenty-first century. The explosion comes not when technology itself advances to any particular point, but when it’s used to disrupt the way we work and live. Technological disruption is not an accidental or inevitable phenomenon, either, but an intentional one.

For a time, Yang was able to rally modern-day John Booths; the Yang Gang that swarmed social media in support of his presidency was outspoken to say the least. Yang is far from alone in forecasting a turbulent era in which automation and artificial intelligence sweep away working-class jobs in droves. With money pouring into AI, robotics, and software automation, throughout the 2010s, pundits and prognosticators forecasted the arrival of “second machine age,” or the “fourth industrial revolution,” or a “world without work”—an era when machinery and software become so advanced that humans simply will not be able to compete. Yang calls this the “war on normal people,” which is also the title of his 2018 book. These economists and automation theorists continue to highlight studies that show that some half of all American jobs are vulnerable to computerization.

Here’s a telling example: In 2019, the New York Times’ Kevin Roose filed a report from Davos detailing how the business leaders and tech CEOs at that year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) were very eager to implement automation. “They’ll never admit it in public,” Roose wrote, “but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.” In public, the elites preferred to discuss the abstract need to prepare for “the fourth industrial revolution” or “the second machine age.” In private, they were more direct. “People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of the automation firm Infosys, who worked with those very people; the leaders of major companies and organizations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

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.


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

And then there are technological changes on an entirely different scale. 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.

Yes, they displaced a relatively small number of skilled craftspeople (some of whom would become Luddites), but they empowered much larger numbers of low-skilled workers to take on repetitive, machine-enabled jobs that increased their productivity. Both the economic pie and overall standards of living grew. But what about the most recent GPT, information and communication technologies (ICT)? So far, its impact on labor markets and wealth inequality have been far more ambiguous. As Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out in The Second Machine Age, over the past thirty years, the United States has seen steady growth in worker productivity but stagnant growth in median income and employment. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call this “the great decoupling.” After decades when productivity, wages, and jobs rose in almost lockstep fashion, that once tightly woven thread has begun to fray.

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.


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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 first is the notion that machines and systems will work alongside tomorrow’s professionals as partners. The challenge here is to allocate tasks, as between human beings and machines, according to their relative strengths. And, working together, humans and machines will outperform unassisted human experts. This is the position taken by Bryonjolfsson and McAfee in The Second Machine Age—they say we need to race ‘with the machines’, rather than against them.14 The second relationship is harder to concede. It is based on frank recognition that some systems will soon be manifestly superior at discharging entire bodies of work that today are undertaken by people—machines, in other words, will replace human beings.

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.


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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

But, in reality, they are being served by an international staff, quietly laboring in the background. These jobs, dominated by freelance and contingent work arrangements rather than full-time or even hourly wage positions, have no established, legal status. Sometimes these jobs are given heft as harbingers of the “Second Machine Age” or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” or part of a larger digital or platform economy. Other times, they’re simply, glibly called gigs.9 No employment laws capture the on-demand gig economy’s odd mix of independence from any single employer and dependency on a web-based platform. As the taskmasters of the gig economy, on-demand platforms make their money by matching those buying and selling human labor online, generating a two-sided market of myriad businesses and anonymous crowds of workers.

Geneva, Switzerland: Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, 2017. Brynjolfsson, Erik, 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. ———. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements, May 2017.” Economic News Release, U.S. Department of Labor, June 7, 2018. Butler, Elizabeth Beardsley. “Women and the Trades: Pittsburgh, 1907–1908.”

We offer this as a speculative example that imagines what Ayesha’s work would have looked like had she followed through on working with CrowdFlower. 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).


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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

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.

“Man-Computer Symbiosis”: Licklider’s essay was published in the IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1 (March 1960): 4–11. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html. Yet there is another view: Murray Campbell’s descriptions and quotes come from an interview on Aug. 21, 2013. The book, published in 2014: The Second Machine Age (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014) fleshes out and refines an e-book Race Against the Machine by the same pair in 2011. “wonderful place for data scientists to experiment”: An interview on Feb. 1, 2013, with Claudia Perlich. “a storyteller”: Danny Hillis’s descriptions and quotes come from a talk he gave at IBM’s Watson lab on Oct. 2, 2013. 7: Data Gets Physical “This is autumn in the vineyard”: Nick Dokoozlian’s descriptions and quotes come from two interviews, on Oct. 15 and Nov. 19, 2013.

Gallo’s use of, 123–33 Predix, 136 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 44 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 208 Privacy Act (1974), 185 privacy concerns, 183–206 balancing privacy and data collection, 202–6 big data and personally identifying information, 187–92 cameras and, 183–86 data correlation and, 113 discrimination by statistical inference, 192–95 early computers and, 185–87 marketing and use of data, 195–97 social network data collection and, 197–202 productivity paradox, of computers, 72–75 Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change (Dresner), 76 psycholinguistics, used for studying tweets, 199 Pulleyblank, William, 45–46, 47–48, 49 quantitative-to-qualitative transformation, data and, 7–8 “reality mining,” 206 Reisman, David, 155 Richardson, Tara, 106–7 Riedl, Paul, 156 Rock Health, 16 Rogers, Matt, 144 romantic relationships, social network research and, 87–88 Rometty, Virginia Haydock and, 156 IBM’s big data strategy and, 9, 42–45, 46, 47, 53–56 Rosenn, Itamar, 89–90, 94 Rotenberg, Marc, 204–5 Rothschild, Jeff, 86, 91–92, 98 Rubinsteyn, Alex, 180 Ruh, William, 134, 135–36 Sabre (Semi-Automated Business Research Environment), 46 Sage Bionetworks, 101–2, 170–71 SAS Institute, 52 satellite imagery, precision agriculture and, 129–32 Schadt, Eric background, 172–73 at Mount Sinai, 171–72, 173–74, 175 Sage Bionetworks and, 102 Schrage, Michael, 197 Science, 108 scientific management (Taylorism), 207–8 Seay, Mike, 188–89 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 119–20 Shah, Rachana. See Fischer, Rachana Shah Singapore, traffic management in, 47–48 Singer, Natasha, 190 “six degrees of separation,” 87 Six Sigma system, 62 Sloan School of Management, at MIT, 71 “slow” thinking, 66–67 Smarr, Larry, 134, 214, 215 Smarter Planet campaign, of IBM, 48–53, 62, 128 smartphone cameras, privacy concerns and, 186 Smeall, Andrew, 26 Snow, C.


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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

‘India’s Slowing Growth Blamed on “Big Mistake” Of Demonetisation’. Guardian, 1 June 2017. York, Stephen. ‘Greenspan Says Crisis Left Him in “Shocked Disbelief”’. Independent, 24 October 2008. 2. The Three Disruptions Industry: The Second Disruption Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W.W. Norton, 2014. Hobsbawm Eric. The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848. Abacus, 2014. Capitalism’s Critics Gawenda, Alex and Ashok Kumar. ‘Made In Post-China™’. Counterpunch, 14 June 2013. Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx’s Capital.

‘NASA Just Fast-Tracked Its Mission to Explore a $10,000 Quadrillion Metal Asteroid’. Sciencealert.com, 25 May 2017. Goodall, Chris. The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All. Profile Books, 2016. Going Exponential: Ibn Khallikan to Kodak Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W.W. Norton, 2014. Chace, Calum. The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism. Three Cs Publishing, 2016. Moore, G.E. ‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits’. Proceedings of the IEEE, 1998.

Forbes, 20 January 2017. Croft, Jane. ‘More than 100,000 Legal Roles to Become Automated’. Financial Times, 15 March 2016. Snow, Jackie. ‘A New Algorithm Can Spot Pneumonia Better than a Radiologist’. MIT Technology Review, 16 November 2017. The Future of Work Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W.W. Norton, 2014. 5. Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy Energy and Disruption Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso Books, 2016. Arrival of the Anthropocene Lynch, Patrick.


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Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Mathematical Ciphers: From Caesar to RSA. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society. 45. Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 46. Chen, Yan, Grace Young, et al. (2013). “A Day without a Search Engine: An Experimental Study of Online and Offline Searches.” Experimental Economics 14(4): 512–536; Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 47. Metcalfe, Robert (1995, December 4).

Arthur, Brian (2010). The Nature of Technology. London: Penguin. 49. Mansfield, Harvey (1998). Machiavelli’s Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 50. Arthur, Brian (2010). The Nature of Technology. London: Penguin. 51. Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 52. EvaluatePharma (2015). “World Preview 2015, Outlook to 2020.” London: Evaluate Group. Retrieved from info.evaluategroup.com. 53. Lloyd, Ian (2015). “New Active Substances Launched During 2014.”

US Department of Homeland Security (2006). Report on H-1B Petitions: Fiscal Year 2004, Annual Report October 1, 2003—September 30, 2004. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Washington, D.C.: US Department of Homeland Security. 52. Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 53. Charette, Robert N. (2013, August 30). “The Stem Crisis Is a Myth.” IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved from spectrum.ieee.org; The Wall Street Journal (2007, March 19). “Does Silicon Valley Need More Visas for Foreigners.”


pages: 308 words: 85,880

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

And though none of this is exactly wrong, the problem is that education has become the default solution to everything. 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.”

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.

Petersburg Economic Forum, 96 Salesforce, 117, 205, 280–281 Samson, Renate, 159–164 Samwer, Marc, Oliver, and Alexander, 174–175 Sandel, Michael, 116 Sanders, Bernie, 141–142, 146–147 San Francisco, on worker and consumer choice issues, 254 “Satanic mills” concept, 16 Schama, Simon, 95 Schlink, F. J., 49–50 Schlosser, Eric, 50 Schmetz, Jean-Paul, 189 Schmidt, Eric, 139 Schneier, Bruce, 60 Schrems, Max, 155–156, 159 Schulz, Martin, 151–152 Schumacher, Tim, 172, 176–181 Schwab, Klaus, 24, 27 Seattle City Council, worker and consumer choice issues, 254 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson, McAfee), 269 Seidman, Dov, 14–16, 23, 107 self-conscious algorithms, 54–56 self-driving cars, 256–257 sexual assault, social responsibility and, 201–202, 220–222 Shah, Viral, 98–100 Shallows, The (Carr), 270 Sharma, Sharad, 149–150 Sikkut, Siim, 81 Silent Spring (Carson), 50 Silicon Germany (Keese), 174 Silo Effect, The (Tett), 274 Sina Weibo, 121 Singapore, 101–125 “Big Bang Data” exhibition (ArtScience Museum), 112–115, 124 China and, 120–125 on competition (antitrust), 141 connectedness of, 102–103 digital ID card system of, 106–108 economy of, 109–112 education in, 275–279 Estonia compared to, 92 government and human rights issues of, 104–106 inspiration for Utopia (More) and, 101–102 regulation issues, 141 Smart Nation initiative, 103–104, 106, 112–120 Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), 277–279 Singer, Natasha, 280–281 Siri (Apple), 25 Slock.it, 170–171 Smith, Tiffany, 220, 222 Snowden, Edward, 8–12, 59, 88, 96–97, 156 social graph, 157 social media.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

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. According to this retooling hypothesis, a period of slow growth reflects businesses and workers gearing up to make use of radically different new technologies.

“The Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence: Recent Findings from Historical National Accounting.” Centre for Economic Policy Research, discussion paper no. DP15207. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=15207. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age. New York: W. W. Norton. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson. 2021. “The Productivity J-Curve: How Intangibles Complement General Purpose Technologies.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 13 (1): 333–72. Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. 2020. Living with Beauty: Promoting Health, Well Being and Sustainable Growth.

See work from home (WFH) rent seeking, 117, 138, 141, 216, 244, 254–55 replication crisis, 129–30 reputation, 92–93 research and development (R&D), 48, 53, 55–58, 124–26, 160, 178, 193, 203 retooling hypothesis, 40, 45 reversion to the mean, 156 Ridley, Matt, 123, 136 Roads and Bridges (Eghbal), 139 Robert-Nicoud, Frédéric, 204 Roberts, John, 142, 245 Robinson, James, 85, 96, 266n1 Rock, Daniel, 243 Rogers, Mark, 133 Romer, Paul, 247 Rossi-Hansberg, Esteban, 217 Ruiz-Valenzuela, Jenifer, 232 “Ryan’s World” (YouTube program), 35–36 Sawhill, Isabel, 208 scalability, 52–53, 115 Schoenholtz, Jim, 151 Schulz, Nick, 10, 86 Schumacher, Ernst, 58 Schwartz, Peter, 25 Scott, James C., 58 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 39 segmentation, market, 223 Selden, George, 2 Sena, Vania, 133 Sever, Can, 155, 178 Shadbolt, Nigel, 146 shareholder value management, 158–62 Sheer, Lia, 160–61 Shiller, Robert, 36–37 Shleifer, Andrei, 156 Shockley, William, 204 short-termism, 159, 161–62 Sichel, Dan, 42, 45 signalling, human capital, 233–34 Simon, Hermann, 57 Skelton, David, 202 skeuomorphs, 106–7 Smith, James, 179 Smith, Noah, 236 Southwood, Ben, 138 special interests, capture by, 130 specificity, 104–6 spillovers, 52–53, 113, 121–36, 134f, 158–62, 269n48 Srivastava, Anup, 157 stagnation, 4, 23–26, 24f, 26f, 67–70, 68f state capacity, 16, 143–46, 240, 244, 245f, 247, 249–53 State We’re In, The (Hutton), 41 status, inequality of, 28 Stoker, Gerry, 29 street votes, 197–98 suitcase, wheelie, 123–24 Summers, Lawrence, 33, 163 sunkenness, 114, 115t, 116, 181 synergies, 53–54, 68–69, 114, 158–62, 269n48 Syverson, Chad, 243 Tabarrok, Alex, 133 Tabarrok curve, 133–34, 134f Taylor, Mark Zachary, 144, 256 Taylor, Tim, 268n24 tech-governance fit, 105 technical debt, 12 technocrats, 193–96 technological approach, 87 technological change, 99–104 technology, 39, 42–43, 68–69, 128–30 technopopulism, 257 Theranos, 80 Thicke, Robert, 131–32 Thiel, Peter, 35, 137, 141, 258 Timmis, Jonathan, 217 Tobin’s Q, 25–26, 26f, 264n13 total factor productivity (TFP), 43, 45, 67–68, 68f, 69–70, 264n31, 265n3 transactions costs, 95, 266n8 transport infrastructure, 188–89, 199–200 Tranter, Justin, 132, 270n19 Trump, Donald, 7, 202, 258 trust, 92–93, 99 uncertainty, 88, 265n49 unemployment/inflation trade-off, 166 unpredictability, 108–10 vaccines, 22, 43 value-based management, 158–62 value investing, 155–58 van Bavel, Bas, 111, 242 van Zandt, David, 101, 268n24, 268n31 VC.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

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

Despite the challenges of separating the impact of the recession from the implementation of new technologies, increasingly the connection between new automation technologies and rapid economic change has been used to imply that a collapse of the U.S. workforce—or at least a prolonged period of dislocation—might be in the offing. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue for the possibility in a much expanded book-length version of “Race Against the Machine,” entitled The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. Similar sentiments are offered by Jaron Lanier, a well-known computer scientist now at Microsoft Research, in the book Who Owns the Future? Both books draw a direct link between the rise of Instagram, the Internet photo-sharing service acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012, and the decline of Kodak, the iconic photographic firm that declared bankruptcy that year.

Maybe right now we need humans, but these guys [software automation designers] are making progress.”42 The assumption of many like Vardi is that a market economy will not protect a human labor force from the effects of automation technologies. Like many of the “Singularitarians,” he points to a portfolio of social engineering options for softening the impact. Brynjolfsson and McAfee in The Second Machine Age sketch out a broad set of policy options that have the flavor of a new New Deal, with examples like “teach the children well,” “support our scientists,” “upgrade infrastructure.” Others like Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen have argued for focusing on technologies that create rather than destroy jobs (a very clear IA versus AI position).

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.“Are ATMs Stealing Jobs?” Economist, June 15, 2011, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/technology-and-unemployment. 31.Ben Sumers, “Bank Teller Case Study” (unpublished, 2012). 32.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), 127. 33.Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? Kindle ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), Kindle location 222–230. 34.Tim O’Reilly, Google+, January 9, 2014, https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/F85gaWoBp3Z. 35.Matthieu Pélissié du Rausas, James Manyika, Eric Hazan, Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Rémi Said, “Internet Matters: The Net’s Sweeping Impact on Growth, Jobs, and Prosperity,” McKinsey Global Institute, May 2011, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/internet_matters. 36.


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

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.

Sandra Braman, Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009), 2. 20. James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 7–8. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 390 Notes 21. 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), 16. 22. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 36. 23. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (Connecticut: Martino Publishing, 2015), 3. 24.


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.

Journal of Economic History 73 (1): 142–76. doi:10.1017/S0022050713000053. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Loren Hitt, and Shinkyu Yang. 2002. “Intangible Assets: How the Interaction of Computers and Organizational Structure Affects Stock Market Valuations.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 33 (1): 137–98. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAffee. 2014. The Second Machine Age. W. W. Norton and Co. Chen, Ester, Ilanit Gavious, and Baruch Lev. 2015. “The Positive Externalities of IFRS R&D Rule: Enhanced Voluntary Disclosure.” http://people.stern.nyu.edu/blev/files/Positive-Externalities-of-IFRS_March_30_2015_k4gn98s2.pdf. Chesson, Adrian. 2001. “Estimation of Software in the UK National Accounts—Recent Developments.”

., 131 rules and norms, 211–14 Sadun, Rafaella, 53, 82 Salter, Ammon, 197 Sampson, Rachelle, 168 Samsung, 73, 112 Sanders, Bernie, 223 Santa Fe Institute, 80 scalability, 9–10, 58, 60, 87, 101–2; definition of, 246n2; importance of, 67–68; income inequality and, 133–34; and increased investment, 110; and intangibles, 65–67; secular stagnation and, 103–5 Schreyer, Paul, 40 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 16 Science: The Endless Frontier (Bush), 232 Second Machine Age, 30 secular stagnation, 91, 116; explanation for, 101–16; and intangibles investment, 102–3; profits and productivity differences and, 103–7; relationship of scalability and spillovers to, 109–16; symptoms of, 92–96 Shankar, Ravi, 61 Shi, Yuan, 168 Shih, Willy, 85 Shinoda, Yukio, 42 short-termism, 161, 168–69 Sichel, Dan, 4, 5, 39, 42, 43, 45 Siemens, 60–61, 204 single-factor productivity, 98–101 Six Sigma, 51 Skype, 217 Slack, 152, 217 smartphones, 72–73, 81 Smil, Vaclav, 146 Smith, Adam, 36, 188 social capital, 156, 236 soft infrastructure, 156 solar energy, 85 Solow, Robert, 39, 125 Song, Jae, 129, 131, 135 South Wales Institution of Engineers, 83 speculation, 249n1 spending, 46–47, 54; on assets, 20; rent-seeking, 113 Spenser, Percy, 80 spillovers, 9, 58, 61, 87, 102; contestedness and, 87; importance of, 77–79; and intangibles, 72–77, 109–16; Jacobs, 138; Marshall-Arrow-Romer, 62, 138; physical infrastructure and, 147–51; secular stagnation and, 103–4; slowing TFP growth and, 107–9; venture capital and, 178 Spotify, 18 Stack Overflow, 29 Stansted Airport, 1–2, 3–4 Starbucks, 34, 52, 65, 140, 183, 195, 197; scalability of, 67 start-up ecosystems, 222 Statute of Anne (1709), 76 stock markets, 167–68, 205–6; IPOs and, 171–72 stock of intangible assets, 56–57 Summers, Larry, 93 sunkenness, 8–9, 58, 60, 87, 246n5; as characteristic of intangibles, 68–70; importance of, 70–72; venture capital and, 175–76 sustained advantage, 250n2 Sutton, John, 67 symbolic analysis, 132–34 synergies, 10, 58, 61, 87–88, 213; and intangible assets, 80–83, 83–86; among investments, 110; maximizing the benefits of, 214–18; physical infrastructure and, 147–51; venture capital and, 176 System of National Accounts, 20, 43, 51 systems innovation, 198 tacit knowledge, 65 tangible investments, differences between intangible and, 7–10, 58 taxes, 139–40, 235; and financing, 166, 219 technology: and cost of intangible investment, 28; inequality as result of improvements in, 123–24, 126–27; and productivity of intangibles, 28–30; and spillovers, 151–52 Tesla Motors, 24, 111, 209 Thatcher, Margaret, 127 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 188 Thiel, Peter, 78, 175, 184–85, 187, 223 3M, 194 Toffler, Alvin, 4 Tonogi, Konomi, 42 total factor productivity (TFP), 96, 98, 102; poor performance of, 109–9, 114 Toyota, 29, 51 trade and inequality, 124 trademarks, 76 training and education, 51–52, 170, 228–30 Trajtenberg, Manuel, 106 Trump, Donald, 122, 141–42, 143 trust, 156 23andMe, 152 Twitter, 185, 187 Uber, 24, 28, 51; building of driver network by, 112–13; contestedness and, 115; legal travails of, 187; scalability of, 67, 101–2, 105; and synergies, 82; venture capital and, 174, 175 uncertainty, 87 Ure, Andrew, 126 Ur-Nammu, 75 US Federal Reserve, 4, 40, 41, 42, 165 US Food and Drug Administration, 154 Van Reenen, John, 82, 136, 173, 195 venture capital (VC) funding, 154–55, 161, 166, 174–75; problems with, 177–79; and intangibles, 175–77 Vlachos, Jonas, 131 Volcker, Paul, 165 von Mises, Ludwig, 38 von Wachter, Till, 129 Wallis, Gavin, 42, 223–24 Walmart, 81, 187 Warsh, David, 62 Wasmer, Etienne, 128 Watt, James, 78 wealth, 119–20, 121; housing and, 122, 128–29, 136–39; inequality of, 139–40; intangibles’ effects on, 129–40 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 36 Weightless World, The (Coyle), 4 Weitzman, Martin L., 195 Welch, Jack, 184 Whalley, Alexander, 224 “What Is the U.S.


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.

Bouton, Shannon, David Cis, Lenny Mendonca, Herbert Pohl, Jaana Remes, Henry Ritchie, and Jonathan Woetzel, How to make a city great, McKinsey & Company, September 2013. Bouvard, François, Robert Carsouw, Eric Labaye, Alastair Levy, Lenny Mendonca, Jaana Remes, Charles Roxburgh, and Samantha Test, Better for less: Improving public sector performance on a tight budget, McKinsey & Company, July 2011. Brynjolffson, Eric, and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brillliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). Bughin, Jacques, Michael Chui, and James Manyika, “Ten IT-enabled business trends for the decade ahead,” McKinsey on Business Technology 33, spring 2014. Bughin, Jacques, and James Manyika, “Measuring the full impact of digital capital,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2013.

in Japan, 53–54 Rocket Internet, 79 Russia, 81 (table) Saga, 70 San Francisco, California, 27, 29, 30 See also Silicon Valley Sarkozy, Nicolas, 197 Saudi Arabia, 56, 81 (table), 113 (table), 143 Savings rates, 137–138, 139 Scentsa, 52 Schröder, Gerhard, 181–182 Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), 155, 156, 158, 159 (table) The Second Machine Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 6 Seniors. See Aging population Sensors, 38, 47, 70 Sephora, 52 Services. See Goods and services; New goods and services Shanghai, China, 21 (fig.), 24, 71 Shapeways, 84 Sharing economy, 32, 48, 167–168, 171–172 See also Peer-to-peer services Shenzhen, China, 101 Silicon Valley, 58, 64, 77, 86, 175, 189 Singapore aging population in, 67, 68 connectedness rank of, 81 (table), 87 immigration policy tightening in, 185–186 infrastructure innovation by, 28 SWFs in, 143 talent relocation to, 177–178 Skills gap.


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

When even Professor Stephen Hawking worries that the rise of AI represents a fundamental threat to the future of humanity, it is perhaps not surprising that such widespread concerns exist. 9See for instance Ford, M., The Rise of the Robots (Basic Books, 2015); Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A., The Second Machine Age (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). 10Ford, The Rise of the Robots. 11Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. 12Autor, D. H., Levy, F. and Murnane, R. J., ‘The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (4) (2003): 1279–334. 13Beaudry, P., Green, D. A. and Sand, B.M., ‘The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks’, NBER Working Paper 18901 (2013). 14Frey, C.B. and Osbourne, M.A., ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization?’

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. As a consequence of this exponential growth, ‘Second Machine Age’ proponents argue that we are now in the ‘second half of the chessboard’. This is a reference to a fable concerning a king in India who, bored with all his existing pastimes, set a challenge to his kingdom to come up with a better form of entertainment. When presented with an early form of chess, the king was so delighted he offered the inventor anything he wanted.


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

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.

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. But they all required humans to make decisions about them.” Therefore, the inventions of that era actually made human control and labor “more valuable and important.” Labor and machines were, broadly speaking, complementary, he added. In the second machine age, though, noted Brynjolfsson, “we are beginning to automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that determine what to use that power for. In many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans.” So humans and software-driven machines may increasingly be substitutes, not complements.

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

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.

Paul Krugman, “The Conscience of a Liberal: Rethinking Japan,” New York Times, October 20, 2015, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/rethinking-japan. 57. 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.

Sabrina Tavernise, “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say,” New York Times, February 9, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html. 10. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012). 11. Ibid and Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 12. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. 13. David Autor, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market: Implications for Employment and Earnings,” The Center for American Progress and The Hamilton Project, 2010, http://www.brookings.edu/re search/papers/2010/04/jobs-autor. 14. “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground,” Pew Research Center, December 9, 2015, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/2015-12-09_middle-class_FINAL-report.pdf. 15.


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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

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. Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand have done research on the total demand for workers in the United States who are highly skilled.5 They say demand peaked around the year 2000 and has fallen since, even as universities churn out an ever-growing supply.

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.

., 238, 248 Rudin, Cynthia, 193 Rumsfeld, Donald, 214 Russell, Stuart, 227–28 Sachs, Jeffrey, 228 Sadler-Smith, Eugene, 117–18 Safecast, 247 Saffo, Paul, 24 Salovey, Peter, 113, 116 Samasource, 168 Sand, Benjamin, 6 SAP, 133 SAS, 104, 132, 140, 141, 194 Saxena, Manoj, 45 Schneider National, 132, 147–48, 189–90, 196 Short Haul Optimizer, 147, 190, 191 Scientific Music Generator (SMUG), 126 “School of One,” 141 Science: The Endless Frontier (Bush), 248 Scott, David, 67 Scott, Rebecca, 162 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 6, 74 self-driving vehicles, 4, 51–52, 213–14, 244, 246 Sharp, Phillip, 209 Shaughnessy, Dan, 117 Shiller, Robert, 7 Simon, Herbert, 163 Singapore, 250 Singularity Is Near, The (Kurzweil), 36 Skype Translator, 56 smartphones, 53, 235, 239 “social license to operate,” 233 Spanish National Research Council, 54–55 Spielberg, Steven, 125 spreadsheets, 69–70 Standing, Guy, 241 Starner, Thad, 65 Stats Inc., 97 Steinberg, Dan, 124–25 Stepping Aside, 77 artisanal jobs, 119–21 augmentation to free people up, 121–24 characteristics of a candidate, 129 for financial planners and brokers, 87 how to build skills for, 129–30 incursion of machines into human attributes, 124–27 in insurance underwriting, 81 jobs with nonprogrammable skills, 109–12 learning “noncognitive” skills, 115–18 multiple intelligences and, 112–14 for teachers, 85 value of human involvement, 127–28 what it means, 108 where a candidate is likely found, 130 Stepping Forward, 77, 176–200 adding new sources of data, 196–97 broadening application of tools, 194–95 broadening the base of methods, 194 characteristics of a candidate, 199–200 consultants, 187–89 creating usability and transparency by business users, 192–94 data scientists, 179–80 embedding automation functions, 196 entrepreneurs, 185–87 examples, successful people, 179–89 for financial planners and brokers, 88 focusing on behavioral finance and economics, 198–99 how to build skills for, 200 in insurance underwriting, 83–84 internal automation leaders, 189–91 jobs, technical and nontechnical, 177–91 marketers, 183–85 number of jobs, 191–92 product managers, 182–83 programmers and IT professionals, 178 reporting and showing results, 195–96 researchers, 181–82 for teachers, 85–86 what it is, 176 where a candidate is likely found, 200 working on the math, 197–98 Stepping In, 77, 131–52 automation technologies and, 134–35 bright future for, 149–51 characteristics of a candidate, 151–52 common attributes of, 145–49 examples, successful people, 132, 134–35, 137–48 for financial planners and brokers, 97 having an aptitude for, 142–45 how to build skills for, 152 in insurance underwriting, 81–82 predecessors of, 132–34 purple people, 131, 133–34, 135, 147, 151 for teachers, 85 value provided by, 138–42 what it is, 131–32 what candidates are and aren’t, 135–38 where a candidate is likely found, 152 working with vendors and, 140–41 Stepping Narrowly, 77, 153–75 achieving mastery and, 162–66 augmentation and, 166–69, 173–74 building on your narrowness, 161–62 characteristics of a candidate, 174 education for, 232 examples, successful people, 153–54, 159–60, 162, 163, 164, 170, 172–73 for financial planners and brokers, 87–88 finding a specialty, 158–61 “hedgehog” thinker and, 171 how to build skills for, 175 individual psychology and, 169–71 in insurance underwriting, 82 “long tail” and, 157, 162 machine-unfriendly economics and, 155–58, 162 in medicine, 157 niche business, 153–54, 171–73 for teachers, 85 where a candidate is likely found, 175 Stepping Up, 76–77, 89–107, 155 automation decisions and, 93–95 big-picture perspective, 98–100 building and ecosystem, 100–102 careful work design for automated business functions, 103–4 characteristics of a candidate, 106 creating a balance between computer-based and human skills, 105–6 examples, successful people, 89–91, 95–98 for financial planners and brokers, 86–87 in financial sector, 92–93 how to build skills for, 106–7 in insurance underwriting, 80 in marketing, 93 staying close, but moving on and, 102–3 for teachers, 84–85 what it is, 91–93 where a candidate is likely found, 107 Stewart, Martha, 111 Summers, Larry, 95, 227 Suncor, 205 Surrogates (film), 125 Sutton, Bob, 170–71 Sweetwood, Adele, 104 taste, augmentation and, 122 TaxCut, 22 tax preparation, 22, 67–68 Tegmark, Max, 243–44, 247 Telefónica’s O2, 49 Teradata, 43 Terminator films, 65 Tesla, 213, 246 Thiel, Peter, 243 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 236 Thinking for a Living (Davenport), 5 This, Herve, 164 Thompson, Derek, 242 Tibco, 194 Time magazine, AI cover and article, 36 TopCoder, 168 Torrence, Travis, 132, 147–48, 189, 190 Tourville, Lisa, 83–84, 137 TurboTax, 22, 67–68 “12 Risks That Threaten Human Civilization” (Armstrong), 249 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 76, 245 Udacity, 178 UltraTax, 22 UnitedHealthCare, 83 University of California, Berkeley, 51 University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, 115 “Unusual and Highly Specialized Practice Areas” (Bohrer), 159 UPS automated driver routing algorithm (ORION), 196 USAA, 87–88 U.S.


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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.

INDEX Abel, Olivier here Adenauer, Konrad here Agir pour l’Ecole here Alduy, Cécile here Allard, Mathilde here Aly, Guillaume here Amiens here description of here, here Henriville here, here, here La Providence Catholic school here, here, here, here launch of En Marche here, here, here 2017 presidential election campaign here Arnault, Bernard here Aschenbroich, Jacques here al-Assad, Bashar here, here Asselineau, François here Association for the Renewal of Political Life, The here Attali, Jacques here, here Attali Commission here, here, here, here, here Aubry, Martine here, here, here, here Auzière, André-Louis here, here, here Auzière, Brigitte here, here, here: see also Macron, Brigitte Auzière, Laurence here, here Auzière, Sébastien here Auzière, Tiphaine here, here, here Aymard, Léonard here Badinter, Robert here Balibar, Etienne here Bande de Filles (film) here banlieues here, here, here, here, here Avignon here Clichy-sous-Bois, Paris here Décines-Charpieu, Lyon here Lyon here, here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here Seine-Saint-Denis, Paris here Sevran, Paris here, here Trappes, Paris here unemployment here Vaulx-en-Velin, Lyon here Barbier, Christophe here Barre, Raymond here Barthes, Roland here, here, here Bastiat, Frédéric here Bastille Day military parade (2017) here, here, here, here, here Sarkozy and (2008) here terrorist attack (2016) here Baverez, Nicolas here, here Bayeux Tapestry here, here, here Bayrou, François here, here, here Berger, Laurent here Bertelsmann Stiftung here Berville, Hervé here, here Bessière, Sylvianne here Besson, Philippe here, here, here Bigorgne, Laurent here, here, here, here, here, here Binaisse, Eugène here BlaBlaCar here Blair, Tony here, here, here, here, here, here Blanquer, Jean-Michel here, here, here, here, here, here Blondel, Marc here Blum, Léon here Bolhuis, Véronique here Bolloré, Vincent here Bonnell, Bruno here, here, here, here, here Bordes, Antoine here Bourgi, Robert here Bousquet de Florian, Pierre de here Bouvet, Laurent here Brabeck, Peter here Brexit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Brice, Laurent here Briois, Steeve here Britain, see Brexit and Europe Brown, Gordon here, here Bruckner, Pascal here Bruni, Carla here Brynjolfsson, Erik: The Second Machine Age here Bugatti, Ettore here Bugatti production site, Molsheim here Buzyn, Agnès here Cahuzac, Jérôme here Cambadélis, Jean-Christophe here Cameron, David here Camos, Sylvain here Camp, Garrett here Campbell, Alastair here Canard Enchaîné, Le: Penelopegate here, here Canto-Sperber, Monique here car industry here Carrère, Emmanuel here, here, here Castries, Henri de here centrism here, see also Third Way politics CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail) here CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) here, here, here Chaban-Delmas, Jacques here, here Chamboredon, Jean-David here Charbonnier, Eric here Chevènement, Jean-Pierre here Chirac, Jacques here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and wealth tax here, here climate change here, here, here Clinton, Bill here, here, here Code du Travail here cohabitation here Cohen, Elie here Colbert, Jean-Baptiste here Collomb, Gérard here Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) here Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) here, here, here Constant, Benjamin here contrat première embauche (CPE) here Cour des Comptes here, here, here Crozier, Michel here Dalongeville, Gérard here Dardel, Frédéric here Dargnat, Christian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dartevelle, Renaud here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dauenhauer, Bernard here de Filippo, Eduardo: L’Art de la Comédie here de Gaulle, Charles here, here, here, here, here, here de Jean, Pierre, see Jean, Pierre de de Villepin, Dominique, see Villepin, Dominique de Delors, Jacques here Delpla, Jacques here, here Denormandie, Julien here, here, here Depardieu, Gérard here Depardon, Raymond here deuxième gauche here digital era artificial intelligence here digital economy here, here, here digital revolution here Dosse, François here Duhamel, Alain here Dworkin, Ronald here Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) here, here Ecole Normale Supérieure here, here economy here, here, here business here competition here digital revolution here industrial policy here labour market here labour reforms here, here politics of taxation here potential for growth here public sector here, here public spending here, here, here, here, here start-ups here, here, here, here see also industry EDP (excessive deficit procedure) here education baccalauréat here, here, here, here, here, here 42 (school) here higher education here lycées here, here, here reforms here, here see also grandes écoles Elysée Palace here, here, here salon doré here, here Emelien, Ismaël here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here En Marche (On the Move) here, here, here beginnings of here door-to-door canvassing here, here, here finances here Grande Marche (2016) here, here, here, here, here hacking of here launch of here, here, here political positioning of here, here structure of here, here, here victory of here ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration) here, here Etienne, Philippe here, here Europe here Athens speech here Brexit here, here, here, here Britain here, here, here, here Central and Eastern Europe here defence here, here EDP here eurozone here France and here, here, here Germany here, here reform of here, here Sorbonne speech here excessive deficit procedure (EDP) here Fabius, Laurent here Fadell, Tony here Fairey, Shepard here Ferracci, Marc here, here, here, here, here, here Ferry, Jules here, here Fête de la Rose, Frangy-en-Bresse here Fiévet, Jean-Marie here Fillon, François here, here Penelopegate here political views here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here, here Finance Ministry, Bercy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here financial crisis (2008) here, here Finkielkraut, Alain here FN, see National Front Force Ouvrière here foreign policy here Africa here climate change here Europe, see Europe Middle East here USA here Fort, Sylvain here, here, here Fottorino, Eric here Fouré, Brigitte here Fourquet, Jérôme here, here Frangy-en-Bresse: Fête de la Rose here Front National, see National Front Gaci, Azzedine here Gaddafi, Muammar here Gantzer, Gaspard here, here, here Garicano, Luis here Gatignon, Stéphane here Gauchet, Marcel here Gayet, Julie here Ghosn, Carlos here Giddens, Anthony here, here Giesbert, Franz-Olivier here, here Girier, Jean-Marie here Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry here, here, here, here, here globalization here, here, here, here Gnao, Ange-Mireille here Goldman, Jean-Jacques here Gomes, Christophe here Goulard, Sylvie here Gracques here, here grandes écoles Ecole Centrale here Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) here, here Ecole Normale Supérieure here, here Ecole Polytechnique here, here ESSEC here, here, here HEC here, here Mines ParisTech here, here Sciences Po here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gravier, Jean-François: Paris et le désert français here Grelier, Jean-Carles here Griveaux, Benjamin here, here, here, here, here, here Guerini, Stanislas here Guibert, Pauline here Guilluy, Christophe here Haine, La (film) here, here Hallyday, Johnny here, here Hamon, Benoît here, here, here Hariri, Saad here Hazareesingh, Sudhir here Heisbourg, François here, here, here, here Hénin-Beaumont, see National Front Henrot, François here Hermand, Henry here, here Hesse, Hermann: ‘Stufen’ here Hidalgo, Anne here Hollande, François here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here déchéance here election campaigns here, here, here, here foreign policy here, here, here legalisation of gay marriage here and Macron’s resignation here and private life here and taxation here, here, here and terrorism here, here and Un président ne devrait pas dire ça here Houellebecq, Michel here, here, here The Elementary Particles here Hugo, Victor here industry here car industry here luxury products here new businesses here state and here 35-hour working week here, here, here, here, here, here Inspection Générale des Finances here Institut Montaigne report (2004) here Jean, Guy de here Jean, Pierre de here, here Joffrin, Laurent here Jospin, Lionel here, here, here Jouyet, Jean-Pierre here, here, here, here, here, here Judis, John here Julliard, Jacques here July, Serge here Juncker, Jean-Claude here Juppé, Alain here, here, here, here, here, here conviction for political corruption here plan Juppé here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here Kalanick, Travis here Kara, Yacine here Kasbarian, Guillaume here Kassovitz, Mathieu here, here Kepel, Gilles here El-Khatmi, Amine here Kimelfeld, David here Kohler, Alexis here, here Kuchna, Patrice here Kundera, Milan: Jacques et son Maître here Kurtul, Mahir here Laffont, Jean-Jacques here laïcité here Laine, Mathieu here, here, here Lamy, Pascal here, here, here, here Landier, Augustin here Le Bras, Hervé here, here Le Feur, Sandrine here Le Maire, Bruno here, here Le Pen, Jean-Marie here, here, here, here, here, here Le Pen, Marine here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and FN here in Hénin-Beaumont here, here, here and political realignment here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Le Pen, Marion Maréchal see Maréchal-Le Pen, Marion Lecanuet, Jean here LeLarge, Claire here liberalism here, here, here Liegey, Guillaume here, here, here, here, here Lienemann, Marie-Noëlle here Littiere, Mickaël here London School of Economics here, here, here, here Louvre: Cour Napoléon here, here, here, here Love, Courtney here Lycée Henri IV, Paris here Lyon here banlieues here, here Maastricht Treaty here, here, here McAfee, Andrew: The Second Machine Age here Machiavelli, Niccolò here Macron, Brigitte here, here, here, here, here, here after-school theatre club here marriage here, here parental opposition to here Macron, Emmanuel after-school theatre club here and Britain here, here, here caricatures of here and déchéance here early life here economic adviser to Hollande here, here, here economy minister here, here, here, here education here, here, here, here, here election of here En Marche, see En Marche ‘en même temps’ here, here and Europe, see Europe essay in Esprit here family background here and foreign policy, see foreign policy gay rumours here and globalization here, here, here and grandmother, here, here, here, here, here, here iconography here inauguration ceremony here insulting comments here, here, here interviews with, as President here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Jupiterian presidency here, here, here karaoke here and labour reform here, here, here leadership/personal qualities here on literature here loi Macron here, here marriage here, here and Merkel here, here, here, here, here, here, here and music here and networking here, here novels, own here, here optimism of here parental opposition to Brigitte Auzière here, here, here, here and philosophy here, here, here and political realignment here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here public-speaking performance here relationship with Brigitte here, here, here, here Rothschild’s here and tech industry here and Third Way politics here and Trump here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and welfare state here Macron, Estelle here Macron, Françoise (née Noguès) here, here, here, here, here Macron, Jean-Michel here, here, here, here, here Macron, Laurent here Madelin, Alain here Mahjoubi, Mounir here Mailly, Jean-Claude here mal français here Malandain, Guy here Malraux, André here Mandelson, Peter here Manette, see Noguès, Germaine Maréchal-Le Pen, Marion here Marguet, Antoine here, here, here, here Martinez, Philippe here May, Theresa here, here Mazzella, Frédéric here, here, here melancholy here Mélenchon, Jean-Luc here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Merchet, Jean-Dominique here Mercier, Hugo here Merkel, Angela here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mihi, Samir here Minc, Alain here, here, here Mines ParisTech here, here Miquel, Emmanuel here, here, here Mitterrand, François here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here mobile telephony here, here Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin): Le Misanthrope here Monnet, Jean here Montebourg, Arnaud here, here, here, here Moreau, Florence here Moscovici, Pierre here Moustaki, Georges: ‘Le Métèque’ here Muller, Arthur here Musée des Confluences here Nanterre, University of here, here Napoleon Bonaparte here, here, here, here, here National Centre for Counter-Terrorism here National Front (FN) here, here, here, here, here, here, here in Hénin-Beaumont here see also Le Pen, Marine NATO here, here, here Ndiaye, Sibeth here, here Niel, Xavier here, here, here, here, here Noguès, Germaine (Manette) here, here, here, here, here Noguès, Jean here Nora, Pierre here nuclear industry here, here O, Cédric here Obama, Barack here, here, here ‘Hope’ portrait here Obey (Shepard Fairey) street art here Oudéa, Frédéric here Paque, Sophie here, here Paris-Descartes, University of here Paulson, Lex here, here Pébereau, Michel here Penelopegate here Pénicaud, Muriel here, here, here Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) here Pervis, Patrick here Peyrefitte, Alain here Philippe, Edouard here, here, here Piette, Jacques here Piketty, Thomas here, here Piochon, Christophe here PIRLS international study of reading (2016) here Pisani-Ferry, Jean here political realignment here Pompidou, Georges here, here Pons, Vincent here Poujade, Pierre here poverty here, here anti-poverty policy here, here, here in banlieues here presidential election campaign (2017) here, here Amiens here Prochasson, Christophe here public spending here, here, here, here, here Putin, Vladimir here, here, here radicalization here Rawls, John here reforms here, here under Chirac here, here under Sarkozy here under Hollande here education here, here and Europe here and eurozone here, here, here, here, here, here, here and labour market here, here, here, here regional France here FN in here Hénin-Beaumont here Lyon here, here, here policies to reunite here regional cities here Republicans, The here, here, here, here Reza, Yasmina here Ricoeur, Paul here, here, here Robert, Father Philippe here, here, here Robertson, George here Rocard, Michel here, here, here, here Rothschild & Cie here Rothschild, David de here, here Rouart, Jean-Marie here Royal, Ségolène here, here, here Rutte, Mark here Sablon, Sandy here Sadirac, Nicolas here, here, here Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de here, here Saint Gobain mirror factory here, here Saint-Simon, Henri de here Salafism here Salhi, Yassin here Sandberg, Sheryl here Santerre, Jean here, here Sarkozy, Cécilia here Sarkozy, Nicolas here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here foreign policy here, here, here private life here, here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here, here and reforms here Sartre, Jean-Paul here Say, Jean-Baptiste here Schröder, Gerhard here Schuman, Robert here Sciamma, Céline here Sciences Po, Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here Séjourné, Stéphane here Sen, Amartya here, here Shety, Loic here Simoncini, Marc here Socialist Party here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Spitz, Bernard here, here, here start-ups, see digital era and taxation and tech Stefanini, Patrick here Strauss-Kahn, Dominique here strikes, see unions and reforms Studer, Bruno here, here, here Sunday trading here, here see also loi Macron Szydlo, Beata here Taquet, Adrien here, here, here, here, here Tardieu, Jean: La Comédie du Langage here taxation here, here, here, here Chirac and here, here Hollande and here, here, here, here Macron and here, here, here, here, here politics of here Sarkozy and here, here and tech here, here, here, here, here wealth tax here, here, here, here, here, here taxis in Paris here, here Uber here, here, here, here Taylor, Maurice here Teixeira, Ruy here terrorist attacks here, here, here counter-terrorism law here Thatcher, Margaret here, here Third Way politics here Thomson, David here, here, here Tirole, Jean here Tocqueville, Alexis de here Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) here, here, here Trierweiler, Valérie here, here Trogneux, Jean here Trogneux chocolate business here, here Trump, Donald here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here TSE (Toulouse School of Economics) here, here, here Uber here, here, here protests against here unemployment here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Amiens here banlieues here Calais here Chirac and here, here FN and here, here Hénin-Beaumont here Hollande and here Macron and here, here, here, here Uber and here Vaulx-en-Velin here unions, see CFDT, CGT, reforms Unsubmissive France (La France Insoumise) here, here, here Vallée, Shahin here Valls, Manuel here, here, here, here, here, here and terrorism here, here, here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here Van Reenen, John here Veil, Simone here Veneau, Jérôme here Vercors (Jean Bruller): Le silence de la mer here Versailles, Palace of: May 2017 meeting with Putin here, here Villepin, Dominique de here, here, here Villeroy de Galhau, François here Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet): Candide here Vuillemot, Jérôme here Weber, Max here Weinberg, Serge here, here welfare state here Wilders, Geert here Xi Jinping here, here Zeugin, Sophie here, here A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR Sophie Pedder has been the Paris Bureau Chief of The Economist since 2003.

INDEX Abel, Olivier here Adenauer, Konrad here Agir pour l’Ecole here Alduy, Cécile here Allard, Mathilde here Aly, Guillaume here Amiens here description of here, here Henriville here, here, here La Providence Catholic school here, here, here, here launch of En Marche here, here, here 2017 presidential election campaign here Arnault, Bernard here Aschenbroich, Jacques here al-Assad, Bashar here, here Asselineau, François here Association for the Renewal of Political Life, The here Attali, Jacques here, here Attali Commission here, here, here, here, here Aubry, Martine here, here, here, here Auzière, André-Louis here, here, here Auzière, Brigitte here, here, here: see also Macron, Brigitte Auzière, Laurence here, here Auzière, Sébastien here Auzière, Tiphaine here, here, here Aymard, Léonard here Badinter, Robert here Balibar, Etienne here Bande de Filles (film) here banlieues here, here, here, here, here Avignon here Clichy-sous-Bois, Paris here Décines-Charpieu, Lyon here Lyon here, here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here Seine-Saint-Denis, Paris here Sevran, Paris here, here Trappes, Paris here unemployment here Vaulx-en-Velin, Lyon here Barbier, Christophe here Barre, Raymond here Barthes, Roland here, here, here Bastiat, Frédéric here Bastille Day military parade (2017) here, here, here, here, here Sarkozy and (2008) here terrorist attack (2016) here Baverez, Nicolas here, here Bayeux Tapestry here, here, here Bayrou, François here, here, here Berger, Laurent here Bertelsmann Stiftung here Berville, Hervé here, here Bessière, Sylvianne here Besson, Philippe here, here, here Bigorgne, Laurent here, here, here, here, here, here Binaisse, Eugène here BlaBlaCar here Blair, Tony here, here, here, here, here, here Blanquer, Jean-Michel here, here, here, here, here, here Blondel, Marc here Blum, Léon here Bolhuis, Véronique here Bolloré, Vincent here Bonnell, Bruno here, here, here, here, here Bordes, Antoine here Bourgi, Robert here Bousquet de Florian, Pierre de here Bouvet, Laurent here Brabeck, Peter here Brexit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Brice, Laurent here Briois, Steeve here Britain, see Brexit and Europe Brown, Gordon here, here Bruckner, Pascal here Bruni, Carla here Brynjolfsson, Erik: The Second Machine Age here Bugatti, Ettore here Bugatti production site, Molsheim here Buzyn, Agnès here Cahuzac, Jérôme here Cambadélis, Jean-Christophe here Cameron, David here Camos, Sylvain here Camp, Garrett here Campbell, Alastair here Canard Enchaîné, Le: Penelopegate here, here Canto-Sperber, Monique here car industry here Carrère, Emmanuel here, here, here Castries, Henri de here centrism here, see also Third Way politics CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail) here CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) here, here, here Chaban-Delmas, Jacques here, here Chamboredon, Jean-David here Charbonnier, Eric here Chevènement, Jean-Pierre here Chirac, Jacques here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and wealth tax here, here climate change here, here, here Clinton, Bill here, here, here Code du Travail here cohabitation here Cohen, Elie here Colbert, Jean-Baptiste here Collomb, Gérard here Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) here Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) here, here, here Constant, Benjamin here contrat première embauche (CPE) here Cour des Comptes here, here, here Crozier, Michel here Dalongeville, Gérard here Dardel, Frédéric here Dargnat, Christian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dartevelle, Renaud here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dauenhauer, Bernard here de Filippo, Eduardo: L’Art de la Comédie here de Gaulle, Charles here, here, here, here, here, here de Jean, Pierre, see Jean, Pierre de de Villepin, Dominique, see Villepin, Dominique de Delors, Jacques here Delpla, Jacques here, here Denormandie, Julien here, here, here Depardieu, Gérard here Depardon, Raymond here deuxième gauche here digital era artificial intelligence here digital economy here, here, here digital revolution here Dosse, François here Duhamel, Alain here Dworkin, Ronald here Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) here, here Ecole Normale Supérieure here, here economy here, here, here business here competition here digital revolution here industrial policy here labour market here labour reforms here, here politics of taxation here potential for growth here public sector here, here public spending here, here, here, here, here start-ups here, here, here, here see also industry EDP (excessive deficit procedure) here education baccalauréat here, here, here, here, here, here 42 (school) here higher education here lycées here, here, here reforms here, here see also grandes écoles Elysée Palace here, here, here salon doré here, here Emelien, Ismaël here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here En Marche (On the Move) here, here, here beginnings of here door-to-door canvassing here, here, here finances here Grande Marche (2016) here, here, here, here, here hacking of here launch of here, here, here political positioning of here, here structure of here, here, here victory of here ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration) here, here Etienne, Philippe here, here Europe here Athens speech here Brexit here, here, here, here Britain here, here, here, here Central and Eastern Europe here defence here, here EDP here eurozone here France and here, here, here Germany here, here reform of here, here Sorbonne speech here excessive deficit procedure (EDP) here Fabius, Laurent here Fadell, Tony here Fairey, Shepard here Ferracci, Marc here, here, here, here, here, here Ferry, Jules here, here Fête de la Rose, Frangy-en-Bresse here Fiévet, Jean-Marie here Fillon, François here, here Penelopegate here political views here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here, here Finance Ministry, Bercy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here financial crisis (2008) here, here Finkielkraut, Alain here FN, see National Front Force Ouvrière here foreign policy here Africa here climate change here Europe, see Europe Middle East here USA here Fort, Sylvain here, here, here Fottorino, Eric here Fouré, Brigitte here Fourquet, Jérôme here, here Frangy-en-Bresse: Fête de la Rose here Front National, see National Front Gaci, Azzedine here Gaddafi, Muammar here Gantzer, Gaspard here, here, here Garicano, Luis here Gatignon, Stéphane here Gauchet, Marcel here Gayet, Julie here Ghosn, Carlos here Giddens, Anthony here, here Giesbert, Franz-Olivier here, here Girier, Jean-Marie here Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry here, here, here, here, here globalization here, here, here, here Gnao, Ange-Mireille here Goldman, Jean-Jacques here Gomes, Christophe here Goulard, Sylvie here Gracques here, here grandes écoles Ecole Centrale here Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) here, here Ecole Normale Supérieure here, here Ecole Polytechnique here, here ESSEC here, here, here HEC here, here Mines ParisTech here, here Sciences Po here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gravier, Jean-François: Paris et le désert français here Grelier, Jean-Carles here Griveaux, Benjamin here, here, here, here, here, here Guerini, Stanislas here Guibert, Pauline here Guilluy, Christophe here Haine, La (film) here, here Hallyday, Johnny here, here Hamon, Benoît here, here, here Hariri, Saad here Hazareesingh, Sudhir here Heisbourg, François here, here, here, here Hénin-Beaumont, see National Front Henrot, François here Hermand, Henry here, here Hesse, Hermann: ‘Stufen’ here Hidalgo, Anne here Hollande, François here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here déchéance here election campaigns here, here, here, here foreign policy here, here, here legalisation of gay marriage here and Macron’s resignation here and private life here and taxation here, here, here and terrorism here, here and Un président ne devrait pas dire ça here Houellebecq, Michel here, here, here The Elementary Particles here Hugo, Victor here industry here car industry here luxury products here new businesses here state and here 35-hour working week here, here, here, here, here, here Inspection Générale des Finances here Institut Montaigne report (2004) here Jean, Guy de here Jean, Pierre de here, here Joffrin, Laurent here Jospin, Lionel here, here, here Jouyet, Jean-Pierre here, here, here, here, here, here Judis, John here Julliard, Jacques here July, Serge here Juncker, Jean-Claude here Juppé, Alain here, here, here, here, here, here conviction for political corruption here plan Juppé here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here Kalanick, Travis here Kara, Yacine here Kasbarian, Guillaume here Kassovitz, Mathieu here, here Kepel, Gilles here El-Khatmi, Amine here Kimelfeld, David here Kohler, Alexis here, here Kuchna, Patrice here Kundera, Milan: Jacques et son Maître here Kurtul, Mahir here Laffont, Jean-Jacques here laïcité here Laine, Mathieu here, here, here Lamy, Pascal here, here, here, here Landier, Augustin here Le Bras, Hervé here, here Le Feur, Sandrine here Le Maire, Bruno here, here Le Pen, Jean-Marie here, here, here, here, here, here Le Pen, Marine here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and FN here in Hénin-Beaumont here, here, here and political realignment here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Le Pen, Marion Maréchal see Maréchal-Le Pen, Marion Lecanuet, Jean here LeLarge, Claire here liberalism here, here, here Liegey, Guillaume here, here, here, here, here Lienemann, Marie-Noëlle here Littiere, Mickaël here London School of Economics here, here, here, here Louvre: Cour Napoléon here, here, here, here Love, Courtney here Lycée Henri IV, Paris here Lyon here banlieues here, here Maastricht Treaty here, here, here McAfee, Andrew: The Second Machine Age here Machiavelli, Niccolò here Macron, Brigitte here, here, here, here, here, here after-school theatre club here marriage here, here parental opposition to here Macron, Emmanuel after-school theatre club here and Britain here, here, here caricatures of here and déchéance here early life here economic adviser to Hollande here, here, here economy minister here, here, here, here education here, here, here, here, here election of here En Marche, see En Marche ‘en même temps’ here, here and Europe, see Europe essay in Esprit here family background here and foreign policy, see foreign policy gay rumours here and globalization here, here, here and grandmother, here, here, here, here, here, here iconography here inauguration ceremony here insulting comments here, here, here interviews with, as President here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Jupiterian presidency here, here, here karaoke here and labour reform here, here, here leadership/personal qualities here on literature here loi Macron here, here marriage here, here and Merkel here, here, here, here, here, here, here and music here and networking here, here novels, own here, here optimism of here parental opposition to Brigitte Auzière here, here, here, here and philosophy here, here, here and political realignment here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here public-speaking performance here relationship with Brigitte here, here, here, here Rothschild’s here and tech industry here and Third Way politics here and Trump here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and welfare state here Macron, Estelle here Macron, Françoise (née Noguès) here, here, here, here, here Macron, Jean-Michel here, here, here, here, here Macron, Laurent here Madelin, Alain here Mahjoubi, Mounir here Mailly, Jean-Claude here mal français here Malandain, Guy here Malraux, André here Mandelson, Peter here Manette, see Noguès, Germaine Maréchal-Le Pen, Marion here Marguet, Antoine here, here, here, here Martinez, Philippe here May, Theresa here, here Mazzella, Frédéric here, here, here melancholy here Mélenchon, Jean-Luc here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Merchet, Jean-Dominique here Mercier, Hugo here Merkel, Angela here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mihi, Samir here Minc, Alain here, here, here Mines ParisTech here, here Miquel, Emmanuel here, here, here Mitterrand, François here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here mobile telephony here, here Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin): Le Misanthrope here Monnet, Jean here Montebourg, Arnaud here, here, here, here Moreau, Florence here Moscovici, Pierre here Moustaki, Georges: ‘Le Métèque’ here Muller, Arthur here Musée des Confluences here Nanterre, University of here, here Napoleon Bonaparte here, here, here, here, here National Centre for Counter-Terrorism here National Front (FN) here, here, here, here, here, here, here in Hénin-Beaumont here see also Le Pen, Marine NATO here, here, here Ndiaye, Sibeth here, here Niel, Xavier here, here, here, here, here Noguès, Germaine (Manette) here, here, here, here, here Noguès, Jean here Nora, Pierre here nuclear industry here, here O, Cédric here Obama, Barack here, here, here ‘Hope’ portrait here Obey (Shepard Fairey) street art here Oudéa, Frédéric here Paque, Sophie here, here Paris-Descartes, University of here Paulson, Lex here, here Pébereau, Michel here Penelopegate here Pénicaud, Muriel here, here, here Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) here Pervis, Patrick here Peyrefitte, Alain here Philippe, Edouard here, here, here Piette, Jacques here Piketty, Thomas here, here Piochon, Christophe here PIRLS international study of reading (2016) here Pisani-Ferry, Jean here political realignment here Pompidou, Georges here, here Pons, Vincent here Poujade, Pierre here poverty here, here anti-poverty policy here, here, here in banlieues here presidential election campaign (2017) here, here Amiens here Prochasson, Christophe here public spending here, here, here, here, here Putin, Vladimir here, here, here radicalization here Rawls, John here reforms here, here under Chirac here, here under Sarkozy here under Hollande here education here, here and Europe here and eurozone here, here, here, here, here, here, here and labour market here, here, here, here regional France here FN in here Hénin-Beaumont here Lyon here, here, here policies to reunite here regional cities here Republicans, The here, here, here, here Reza, Yasmina here Ricoeur, Paul here, here, here Robert, Father Philippe here, here, here Robertson, George here Rocard, Michel here, here, here, here Rothschild & Cie here Rothschild, David de here, here Rouart, Jean-Marie here Royal, Ségolène here, here, here Rutte, Mark here Sablon, Sandy here Sadirac, Nicolas here, here, here Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de here, here Saint Gobain mirror factory here, here Saint-Simon, Henri de here Salafism here Salhi, Yassin here Sandberg, Sheryl here Santerre, Jean here, here Sarkozy, Cécilia here Sarkozy, Nicolas here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here foreign policy here, here, here private life here, here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here, here and reforms here Sartre, Jean-Paul here Say, Jean-Baptiste here Schröder, Gerhard here Schuman, Robert here Sciamma, Céline here Sciences Po, Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here Séjourné, Stéphane here Sen, Amartya here, here Shety, Loic here Simoncini, Marc here Socialist Party here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Spitz, Bernard here, here, here start-ups, see digital era and taxation and tech Stefanini, Patrick here Strauss-Kahn, Dominique here strikes, see unions and reforms Studer, Bruno here, here, here Sunday trading here, here see also loi Macron Szydlo, Beata here Taquet, Adrien here, here, here, here, here Tardieu, Jean: La Comédie du Langage here taxation here, here, here, here Chirac and here, here Hollande and here, here, here, here Macron and here, here, here, here, here politics of here Sarkozy and here, here and tech here, here, here, here, here wealth tax here, here, here, here, here, here taxis in Paris here, here Uber here, here, here, here Taylor, Maurice here Teixeira, Ruy here terrorist attacks here, here, here counter-terrorism law here Thatcher, Margaret here, here Third Way politics here Thomson, David here, here, here Tirole, Jean here Tocqueville, Alexis de here Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) here, here, here Trierweiler, Valérie here, here Trogneux, Jean here Trogneux chocolate business here, here Trump, Donald here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here TSE (Toulouse School of Economics) here, here, here Uber here, here, here protests against here unemployment here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Amiens here banlieues here Calais here Chirac and here, here FN and here, here Hénin-Beaumont here Hollande and here Macron and here, here, here, here Uber and here Vaulx-en-Velin here unions, see CFDT, CGT, reforms Unsubmissive France (La France Insoumise) here, here, here Vallée, Shahin here Valls, Manuel here, here, here, here, here, here and terrorism here, here, here 2017 presidential election campaign here, here, here Van Reenen, John here Veil, Simone here Veneau, Jérôme here Vercors (Jean Bruller): Le silence de la mer here Versailles, Palace of: May 2017 meeting with Putin here, here Villepin, Dominique de here, here, here Villeroy de Galhau, François here Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet): Candide here Vuillemot, Jérôme here Weber, Max here Weinberg, Serge here, here welfare state here Wilders, Geert here Xi Jinping here, here Zeugin, Sophie here, here A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR Sophie Pedder has been the Paris Bureau Chief of The Economist since 2003.


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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. Sand, “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18901, March 2013. 35.

See Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria election to Congress, 211 as Millennial, 211, 219 policy positions/views, 211, 222 taxes and, 195, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 130, 214 Ohio Public Employee Retirement Systems (OPERS), 175 Once and Future Worker, The (Cass), 58 Operation Twist, 134 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 61 O’Rourke, Beto, 214 Patel, Suraj, 219 Paul, Ron, 222 Paulson, Hank, 129, 131 peace dividend, 151 Pell Grant program, 97, 99, 100 pension/plans Boomers and, 121, 159, 221 Detroit city government example, 175 European countries, 183, 196, 198, 199, 200 Germany/Millennials and, 199, 200 Japan and, 203, 205, 208n mid-twentieth century, 49 Millennials (US) and, 79–80, 81, 81n, 82 Ohio example, 175 problems with state/local government plans, 150, 158–159, 175 trend in private work, 158 Perot, Ross, 217 politics and Millennials 2018 midterm elections, 213 first nationally-elected officials, 211–212 fixing problems and, 213–214 House Member age statistics, 212 interns and, 213 party support/political views and, 214–216, 217–219, 222–223 political influence and, 213 state offices, 212 stereotypes, 214 trade policy, 217–218 voting and, 213 wants, 220–223, 232–236 working economy, 220–221 Powell, Jerome, 231–232 productivity by the 1970s, 48 investment and, 16, 49 measuring, 48n “qualified mortgage” (QM) standard, 139–140 quantitative easing description, 133 Federal Reserve and, 18–19, 60 housing/global financial crisis, 133, 135, 136, 137 Reagan, Ronald economic policies, 24, 52–54 fixed investment, 53 supply-side economics and, 52, 54–55, 58 support for, 20 taxes and, 52 recession postwar period, 62 See also financial crisis/Great Recession regulation (financial) changes/consequences, 56–57 during Reagan administration, 52, 54 regulations and Trump, 229–230, 234 religion and Millennials, 216–217 Resolution Foundation think tank, 178 retirement finances 401 (k) plans, 80 Millennials as “retirement plans” for parents, 145 Millennials/savings and, 79, 80–81 See also pension/plans; Social Security Revolutionary War/state debts, 147, 147n Romney, Mitt as candidate, 215, 225 manufacturing background, 232n youth vote, 215 Rubin, Robert, 54–55 “Rubinomics” program, 54–55, 124 Ryan, Paul, 231 S&P 500, 10 Sanders, Bernie description/political party and, 219, 222 Millennial support, 195, 214, 219 taxes, 173, 195, 197 savings/Millennials college-educated Millennials and, 78–79 debt and, 81n, 82 defined-contribution plans, 80 description/overview, 77–83 emergency-lending facility use and, 78 job market and, 79 obsession and, 79 parents vs., 77 pension plans and, 79–80 retirement finances and, 79, 80–81 Social Security benefits and, 82–83 statistics on, 78–79, 80–83, 83n Wall Street payback and, 83 worries about, 81–82 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 50n Say’s Law, 50n Schock, Aaron, 211–212 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 41 self-employment trends (since 2000), 71 See also gig economy September 11 terror attacks/consequences, 57, 152 Shapiro, Ben, 215, 224–225 “sheepskin effect,” 90 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 Smith, Brad, 71–72 SNAP (Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program), 164 social capital, 22 social programs/benefits consequences/Mulligan and, 165–166 financial crisis and, 163–165 Social Security beginnings, 149 financial problems/Millennials and, 153–161 housing and, 114n insurance comparisons, 154, 157–158 Millennial expectations, 82–83 Millennial resources and, 142 taxes and, 150n, 196 See also entitlements for elderly solar panels installation, 28 Spain and financial crisis, 180 steel industry (1970s to 1990s), 50–51 stock market crash (1929), 10 financial crisis, 10 Strauss, William, 6–7 “structural deficits,” 150–151, 151n Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 164 supply-side economics, 52, 54–55, 58 TANF, 164 TARP (Troubled-Asset Relief Program), 59, 130, 130n taxes on capital/consequences, 53 Clinton and, 55, 152 cuts with Great Recession, 163 inflation as, 207 myth on, 195 national consumption tax and, 173–174 politicians in Germany/US and, 197 Reagan and, 52 Republicans and, 174 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 tax wedge, 183 Trump and, 227–228 Tea Party movement, 130, 231 technology labor and (mid-twentieth century), 49 role in economic problems, 234–235 See also computer/information technology Thatcher, Margaret, 189 “total-factor productivity,” 48n total number of hours worked in 1970s, 47 as measure of labor market, 47 trade policy and Millennials, 217–218 training investing less, 17, 69, 88 investing more, 228 Millennials wanting, 29, 72 See also internships/Millennials Troubled-Asset Relief Program (TARP), 59, 130, 130n Trump, Donald Affordable Care Act and, 68 description, 19 entitlements and, 231 immigration and, 225–226 interest rates/Federal Reserve and, 19, 231–232 Japan/foreign competition and, 202, 217–218, 225 Millennials and, 214, 215, 217, 224, 225–232 real estate background and, 232n regulations and, 229–230, 234 taxes, 227–228, 234 traits/character, 224 unemployment rate and, 226 Uber, 70, 70n unemployment Britain/Millennials and, 189 NEETs, 181 unemployment-assistance programs (US) creation, 149 financial crisis and, 164 unemployment rate (US) in 1950s and 1960s, 47 in 1970s, 47 in 1980s, 54 changes post-2008 decade, 30, 33 description, 30 global financial crisis/recovery and, 11, 12, 13 Millennials and, 42 Trump and, 226 See also labor-force participation rate union power other countries and, 186 in US, 49, 49n United Kingdom minimum wage, 184 Urban Institute, 139 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 28, 30, 37, 47 Vance, J.


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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, friendshoring, 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

utm_source=copy_link&utm_medium=share_widget&utm_campaign=3134920. 37. 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.

“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?


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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

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?, Oxford: University of Oxford, 2013, http://futureoflife.org/data/PDF/michael_osborne.pdf (accessed 21 October 2016). 11.


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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Individualized instruction can be provided over the Web to children in the developing world by volunteers (the “Granny Cloud”) and to learners anywhere by artificially intelligent tutors. The innovations in the pipeline are not just a list of cool ideas. They fall out of an overarching historical development that has been called the New Renaissance and the Second Machine Age.20 Whereas the First Machine Age that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution was driven by energy, the second is driven by the other anti-entropic resource, information. Its revolutionary promise comes from the supercharged use of information to guide every other technology, and from exponential improvement in the technologies of information themselves, like computer power and genomics.

A third is the economic empowerment of billions of people through smartphones, online education, and microfinancing. Among the world’s bottom billion are a million people with a genius-level IQ. Just think what the world would look like if their brainpower were put to full use! Will the Second Machine Age kick economies out of their stagnation? It’s not certain, because economic growth depends not just on the available technology but on how well a nation’s financial and human capital are deployed to use it. Even if the technologies are put to full use, their benefits may not be registered in standard economic measures.

In fact the pamphlet, first published in 1909, argued that war was unprofitable, not that it was obsolete. 17. Diamandis & Kotler 2012, p. 11. 18. Fossil power, guilt-free: Service 2017. 19. Jane Langdale, “Radical Ag: C4 Rice and Beyond,” Seminars About Long-Term Thinking, Long Now Foundation, March 14, 2016. 20. Second Machine Age: Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2016. See also Diamandis & Kotler 2012. 21. Mokyr 2014, p. 88; see also Feldstein 2017; T. Aeppel, “Silicon Valley Doesn’t Believe U.S. Productivity Is Down,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2016; K. Kelly, “The Post-Productive Economy,” The Technium, Jan. 1, 2013. 22.


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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.” Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law from Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973) We are closer now to 2030 than we are to the start of the new millennium (2000).

It’s not just about industries being disrupted, or technology that we’re inventing, it’s about how your life will change radically on a day-to-day basis compared to that of the preceding generations. At its heart, this shift is about radical changes in the way the world is connected and works together. Simply classifying the next age as the second machine age would be too much of an economist’s view of the world—the probability that machine-or AI-based automation leads to economic impact from a productivity or jobs’ perspective is valid, but is only part of the picture. Since the coming of the industrial or machine age, society has been continuously impacted by new technologies, be it the steam engine or the selfie stick.

This will change everything, especially their numbers (insects outnumber humans by 200 million to one, and most people don’t notice or fear them) and their nature (they will match and exceed us in intelligence). Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) call what’s coming “the second machine age”, but I find the “robot singularity” as potentially far more significant, historically speaking, than that. Building a Robot in Your Garage? Evolutionary biologists posit that one of the single most significant events in the history of life on earth occurred shortly after unicellular (single celled) life discovered or evolved multicellularity.


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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!

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.

Richard Conniff, “What the Luddites Really Fought Against,” Smithsonian, March 2011, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/?no-ist. 2. David H. Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 3–30. 3. 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). 4. David H. Autor, “Skills, Education, and the Rise of Earnings Inequality Among the ‘Other 99 Percent,’” Science 344, no. 6,186 (2014): 843–51. 5. For an excellent discussion of the economic reasons for these changes, see Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?”

Why Artificial Intelligence Will Help Human Workers, Not Hurt Them,” Newsweek.com, January 18, 2018, http://www.newsweek.com/2018/01/26/artificial-intelligence-create-human-jobs-783730.html; David Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?” TEDx Cambridge, November 28, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCxcnUrokJo&feature=youtu.be. 12. Thomas W. Malone and Robert J. Laubacher, “The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy,” Harvard Business Review 76, no. 5 (September–October 1998): 144–52. 13. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, chapter 11. 14. Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, “Investors Buying Shares in College Students: Is This the Wave of the Future? Purdue University Thinks So,” Washington Post, November 27, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/27/investors-buying-shares-in-college-students-is-this-the-wave-of-the-future-purdue-university-thinks-so. 15.


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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

Bootle, R. (2017) Making a Success of Brexit and Reforming the EU, London: Nicholas Brealey. Bostrom, N. (2014) Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bregman, R. (2017) Utopia for Realists, London: Bloomsbury. Brockman, J. (2015) What to Think about Machines That Think, New York: HarperCollins. Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. (2016) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Caplan, B. (2018) The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Carr, N. (2010) The Shallows, New York: W. W.

So the “Baumol” interpretation of the current technological slowdown really amounts to a subset of the school of economists who espouse “technological pessimism,” that is to say, those who believe that, in the wider sweep of history, recent and current technological developments don’t amount to very much. 28 Gordon, R. J. (2016) The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth, USA: Princeton University Press. 29 Solow, R. (1987) We’d Better Watch Out New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987. 30 Quoted in Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. (2016) The Second Machine Age, Work, Progress, And Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 112. 31 Feldstein, M. (2015) The US Underestimates Growth, USA: Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2015. Mind you, not all economists agree. A study by Byrne, D., Oliner, S., and Sichel, D. concludes the exact opposite.

These data come from World Inequality Database, https:/​/​wid.​world/​data/​ and Office for National Statistics, Effects of taxes and benefits on household income: historical datasets, https:/​/​www.​ons.​gov.​uk/​peoplepopulationandcommunity/​personalandhouseholdfinances/​incomeandwealth/​datasets/​theeffectsoftaxesandbenefitsonhouseholdincomehistoricaldatasets 6 Quoted by Schwab, K. (2018) Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Penguin Radom House: London, p. 23. 7 Kelly, K. (2012) Better than Human: Why Robots Will – and Must – Take Our Jobs, Wired, December 24, 2012, p. 155. 8 Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. (2016) The Second Machine Age, Work, Progress, And Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 157. 9 Ibid., p. 179. 10 Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 11 See “Thomas Piketty’s Capital, Summarised in Four Paragraphs,” The Economist, May 2014, Lawrence Summers, “The Inequality Puzzle, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, No. 33 (Summer 2014; Mervyn King, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty,” review, The Daily Telegraph, May 10, 2014. 12 See M.


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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

Indeed, even if the next three decades mirror the past three, that is not all that comforting since automation recently has pushed up joblessness among groups in the labor market and put downward pressure on the wages of those with no more than a high school degree. In their best-selling book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make a similar observation: “Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead.… 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.

Shannon, 1950, “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” Philosophical Magazine 41 (314): 256–75. 3. C. Koch, 2016, “How the Computer Beat the Go Master,” Scientific American 27 (4): 20. 4. F. Levy and R. J. Murnane, 2004, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 5. E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, 2014, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton), chapter 3, Kindle. 6. Koch, 2016, “How the Computer Beat the Go Master,” 20. 7. M. Fortunato et al. 2017, “Noisy Networks for Exploration,” preprint, submitted, https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.10295. 8.

Restrepo, 2018b, “The Race between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment,” American Economic Review 108 (6): 1488–542. 109. T. Berger and C. B. Frey, 2017a, “Industrial Renewal in the 21st Century: Evidence from US Cities,” Regional Studies 51 (3): 404–13. 110. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014, The Second Machine Age, 11. 111. A. Goolsbee, 2018, “Public Policy in an AI Economy” (Working Paper 24653, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA). Chapter 13 1. See D. S. Landes, 1969, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 4. 2.


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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

‘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. In other words, while GDP continues to grow over time, its associated resource use – such as freshwater use, fertiliser use, and greenhouse gas emissions – can fall at the same time.

Friedman, B. (2006) The Moral Consequence of Economic Growth. New York: Vintage Books, p. 4. 28. Moyo, D. (2015) ‘Economic growth has stalled. Let’s fix it’. TED Global, Geneva. https://www.ted.com/talks/dambisa_moyo_economic_growth_has_stalled_let_s_fix_it?language=en 29. Brynjolfsson, E. and MacAfee, A. (2014) The Second Machine Age. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 30. Carbon Brief (2016) ‘The 35 countries cutting the link between economic growth and emissions’, 5 April 2016, available at: https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-35-countries-cutting-the-link-between-economic-growth-and-emissions. GDP data from the World Bank are given in constant local currency and consumption-based emissions data are from the Global Carbon Project’s CDIAC database. 31.

., 6 micro-businesses, 9, 173, 178 microeconomics, 132–4 microgrids, 187–8 Micronesia, 153 Microsoft, 231 middle class, 6, 46, 58 middle-income countries, 90, 164, 168, 173, 180, 226, 254 migration, 82, 89–90, 166, 195, 199, 236, 266, 286 Milanovic, Branko, 171 Mill, John Stuart, 33–4, 73, 97, 250, 251, 283, 284, 288 Millo, Yuval, 101 minimum wage, 82, 88, 176 Minsky, Hyman, 87, 146 Mises, Ludwig von, 66 mission zero, 217 mobile banking, 199–200 mobile phones, 222 Model T revolution, 277–8 Moldova, 199 Mombasa, Kenya, 185–6 Mona Lisa (da Vinci), 94 money creation, 87, 164, 177, 182–8, 205 MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), 64–5, 75, 142, 262 Monoculture (Michaels), 6 Monopoly, 149 Mont Pelerin Society, 67, 93 Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, The (Friedman), 258 moral vacancy, 41 Morgan, Mary, 99 Morogoro, Tanzania, 121 Moyo, Dambisa, 258 Muirhead, Sam, 230, 231 MultiCapital Scorecard, 241 Murphy, David, 264 Murphy, Richard, 185 musical tastes, 110 Myriad Genetics, 196 N national basic income, 177 Native Americans, 115, 116, 282 natural capital, 7, 116, 269 Natural Economic Order, The (Gessel), 274 Nedbank, 216 negative externalities, 213 negative interest rates, 275–6 neoclassical economics, 134, 135 neoliberalism, 7, 62–3, 67–70, 81, 83, 84, 88, 93, 143, 170, 176 Nepal, 181, 199 Nestlé, 217 Netherlands, 211, 235, 224, 226, 238, 277 networks, 110–11, 117, 118, 123, 124–6, 174–6 neuroscience, 12–13 New Deal, 37 New Economics Foundation, 278, 283 New Year’s Day, 124 New York, United States, 9, 41, 55 Newlight Technologies, 224, 226, 293 Newton, Isaac, 13, 15–17, 32–3, 95, 97, 129, 131, 135–7, 142, 145, 162 Nicaragua, 196 Nigeria, 164 nitrogen, 49, 52, 212–13, 216, 218, 221, 226, 298 ‘no pain, no gain’, 163, 167, 173, 204, 209 Nobel Prize, 6–7, 43, 83, 101, 167 Norway, 281 nudging, 112, 113, 114, 123–6 O Obama, Barack, 41, 92 Oberlin, Ohio, 239, 240–41 Occupy movement, 40, 91 ocean acidification, 45, 46, 52, 155, 242, 298 Ohio, United States, 190, 239 Okun, Arthur, 37 onwards and upwards, 53 Open Building Institute, 196 Open Source Circular Economy (OSCE), 229–32 open systems, 74 open-source design, 158, 196–8, 265 open-source licensing, 204 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 38, 210, 255–6, 258 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 14 Ormerod, Paul, 110, 111 Orr, David, 239 Ostrom, Elinor, 83, 84, 158, 160, 181–2 Ostry, Jonathan, 173 OSVehicle, 231 overseas development assistance (ODA), 198–200 ownership of wealth, 177–82 Oxfam, 9, 44 Oxford University, 1, 36 ozone layer, 9, 50, 115 P Pachamama, 54, 55 Pakistan, 124 Pareto, Vilfredo, 165–6, 175 Paris, France, 290 Park 20|20, Netherlands, 224, 226 Parker Brothers, 149 Patagonia, 56 patents, 195–6, 197, 204 patient capital, 235 Paypal, 192 Pearce, Joshua, 197, 203–4 peer-to-peer networks, 187, 192, 198, 203, 292 People’s QE, 184–5 Perseus, 244 Persia, 13 Peru, 2, 105–6 Phillips, Adam, 283 Phillips, William ‘Bill’, 64–6, 75, 142, 262 phosphorus, 49, 52, 212–13, 218, 298 Physiocrats, 73 Pickett, Kate, 171 pictures, 12–25 Piketty, Thomas, 169 Playfair, William, 16 Poincaré, Henri, 109, 127–8 Polanyi, Karl, 82, 272 political economy, 33–4, 42 political funding, 91–2, 171–2 political voice, 43, 45, 51–2, 77, 117 pollution, 29, 45, 52, 85, 143, 155, 206–17, 226, 238, 242, 254, 298 population, 5, 46, 57, 155, 199, 250, 252, 254 Portugal, 211 post-growth society, 250 poverty, 5, 9, 37, 41, 50, 88, 118, 148, 151 emotional, 283 and inequality, 164–5, 168–9, 178 and overseas development assistance (ODA), 198–200 and taxation, 277 power, 91–92 pre-analytic vision, 21–2 prescription medicines, 123 price-takers, 132 prices, 81, 118–23, 131, 160 Principles of Economics (Mankiw), 34 Principles of Economics (Marshall), 17, 98 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 288 ProComposto, 226 Propaganda (Bernays), 107 public relations, 107, 281 public spending v. investment, 276 public–private patents, 195 Putnam, Robert, 76–7 Q quantitative easing (QE), 184–5 Quebec, 281 Quesnay, François, 16, 73 R Rabot, Ghent, 236 Rancière, Romain, 172 rating and review systems, 105 rational economic man, 94–103, 109, 111, 112, 126, 282 Reagan, Ronald, 67 reciprocity, 103–6, 117, 118, 123 reflexivity of markets, 144 reinforcing feedback loops, 138–41, 148, 250, 271 relative decoupling, 259 renewable energy biomass energy, 118, 221 and circular economy, 221, 224, 226, 235, 238–9, 274 and commons, 83, 85, 185, 187–8, 192, 203, 264 geothermal energy, 221 and green growth, 257, 260, 263, 264, 267 hydropower, 118, 260, 263 pricing, 118 solar energy, see solar energy wave energy, 221 wind energy, 75, 118, 196, 202–3, 221, 233, 239, 260, 263 rentier sector, 180, 183, 184 reregulation, 82, 87, 269 resource flows, 175 resource-intensive lifestyles, 46 Rethinking Economics, 289 Reynebeau, Guy, 237 Ricardo, David, 67, 68, 73, 89, 250 Richardson, Katherine, 53 Rifkin, Jeremy, 83, 264–5 Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The (Kennedy), 279 risk, 112, 113–14 Robbins, Lionel, 34 Robinson, James, 86 Robinson, Joan, 142 robots, 191–5, 237, 258, 278 Rockefeller Foundation, 135 Rockford, Illinois, 179–80 Rockström, Johan, 48, 55 Roddick, Anita, 232–4 Rogoff, Kenneth, 271, 280 Roman Catholic Church, 15, 19 Rombo, Tanzania, 190 Rome, Ancient, 13, 48, 154 Romney, Mitt, 92 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 37 rooted membership, 190 Rostow, Walt, 248–50, 254, 257, 267–70, 284 Ruddick, Will, 185 rule of thumb, 113–14 Ruskin, John, 42, 223 Russia, 200 rust belt, 90, 239 S S curve, 251–6 Sainsbury’s, 56 Samuelson, Paul, 17–21, 24–5, 38, 62–7, 70, 74, 84, 91, 92, 93, 262, 290–91 Sandel, Michael, 41, 120–21 Sanergy, 226 sanitation, 5, 51, 59 Santa Fe, California, 213 Santinagar, West Bengal, 178 São Paolo, Brazil, 281 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 43 Saumweder, Philipp, 226 Scharmer, Otto, 115 Scholes, Myron, 100–101 Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich, 42, 142 Schumpeter, Joseph, 21 Schwartz, Shalom, 107–9 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 163, 167, 204 ‘Science and Complexity’ (Weaver), 136 Scotland, 57 Seaman, David, 187 Seattle, Washington, 217 second machine age, 258 Second World War (1939–45), 18, 37, 70, 170 secular stagnation, 256 self-interest, 28, 68, 96–7, 99–100, 102–3 Selfish Society, The (Gerhardt), 283 Sen, Amartya, 43 Shakespeare, William, 61–3, 67, 93 shale gas, 264, 269 Shang Dynasty, 48 shareholders, 82, 88, 189, 191, 227, 234, 273, 292 sharing economy, 264 Sheraton Hotel, Boston, 3 Siegen, Germany, 290 Silicon Valley, 231 Simon, Julian, 70 Sinclair, Upton, 255 Sismondi, Jean, 42 slavery, 33, 77, 161 Slovenia, 177 Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 42 smart phones, 85 Smith, Adam, 33, 57, 67, 68, 73, 78–9, 81, 96–7, 103–4, 128, 133, 160, 181, 250 social capital, 76–7, 122, 125, 172 social contract, 120, 125 social foundation, 10, 11, 44, 45, 49, 51, 58, 77, 174, 200, 254, 295–6 social media, 83, 281 Social Progress Index, 280 social pyramid, 166 society, 76–7 solar energy, 59, 75, 111, 118, 187–8, 190 circular economy, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226–7, 239 commons, 203 zero-energy buildings, 217 zero-marginal-cost revolution, 84 Solow, Robert, 135, 150, 262–3 Soros, George, 144 South Africa, 56, 177, 214, 216 South Korea, 90, 168 South Sea Bubble (1720), 145 Soviet Union (1922–91), 37, 67, 161, 279 Spain, 211, 238, 256 Spirit Level, The (Wilkinson & Pickett), 171 Sraffa, Piero, 148 St Gallen, Switzerland, 186 Stages of Economic Growth, The (Rostow), 248–50, 254 stakeholder finance, 190 Standish, Russell, 147 state, 28, 33, 69–70, 78, 82, 160, 176, 180, 182–4, 188 and commons, 85, 93, 197, 237 and market, 84–6, 200, 281 partner state, 197, 237–9 and robots, 195 stationary state, 250 Steffen, Will, 46, 48 Sterman, John, 66, 143, 152–4 Steuart, James, 33 Stiglitz, Joseph, 43, 111, 196 stocks and flows, 138–41, 143, 144, 152 sub-prime mortgages, 141 Success to the Successful, 148, 149, 151, 166 Sugarscape, 150–51 Summers, Larry, 256 Sumner, Andy, 165 Sundrop Farms, 224–6 Sunstein, Cass, 112 supply and demand, 28, 132–6, 143, 253 supply chains, 10 Sweden, 6, 255, 275, 281 swishing, 264 Switzerland, 42, 66, 80, 131, 186–7, 275 T Tableau économique (Quesnay), 16 tabula rasa, 20, 25, 63, 291 takarangi, 54 Tanzania, 121, 190, 202 tar sands, 264, 269 taxation, 78, 111, 165, 170, 176, 177, 237–8, 276–9 annual wealth tax, 200 environment, 213–14, 215 global carbon tax, 201 global financial transactions tax, 201, 235 land-value tax, 73, 149, 180 non-renewable resources, 193, 237–8, 278–9 People’s QE, 185 tax relief v. tax justice, 23, 276–7 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), 202, 258 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 61, 63, 93 Texas, United States, 120 Thailand, 90, 200 Thaler, Richard, 112 Thatcher, Margaret, 67, 69, 76 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 96 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 180 3D printing, 83–4, 192, 198, 231, 264 thriving-in-balance, 54–7, 62 tiered pricing, 213–14 Tigray, Ethiopia, 226 time banking, 186 Titmuss, Richard, 118–19 Toffler, Alvin, 12, 80 Togo, 231, 292 Torekes, 236–7 Torras, Mariano, 209 Torvalds, Linus, 231 trade, 62, 68–9, 70, 89–90 trade unions, 82, 176, 189 trademarks, 195, 204 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 92 transport, 59 trickle-down economics, 111, 170 Triodos, 235 Turkey, 200 Tversky, Amos, 111 Twain, Mark, 178–9 U Uganda, 118, 125 Ulanowicz, Robert, 175 Ultimatum Game, 105, 117 unemployment, 36, 37, 276, 277–9 United Kingdom Big Bang (1986), 87 blood donation, 118 carbon dioxide emissions, 260 free trade, 90 global material footprints, 211 money creation, 182 MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), 64–5, 75, 142, 262 New Economics Foundation, 278, 283 poverty, 165, 166 prescription medicines, 123 wages, 188 United Nations, 55, 198, 204, 255, 258, 279 G77 bloc, 55 Human Development Index, 9, 279 Sustainable Development Goals, 24, 45 United States American Economic Association meeting (2015), 3 blood donation, 118 carbon dioxide emissions, 260 Congress, 36 Council of Economic Advisers, 6, 37 Earning by Learning, 120 Econ 101 course, 8, 77 Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), 9 Federal Reserve, 87, 145, 146, 271, 282 free trade, 90 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 87 greenhouse gas emissions, 153 global material footprint, 211 gross national product (GNP), 36–40 inequality, 170, 171 land-value tax, 73, 149, 180 political funding, 91–2, 171 poverty, 165, 166 productivity and employment, 193 rust belt, 90, 239 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 92 wages, 188 universal basic income, 200 University of Berkeley, 116 University of Denver, 160 urbanisation, 58–9 utility, 35, 98, 133 V values, 6, 23, 34, 35, 42, 117, 118, 121, 123–6 altruism, 100, 104 anthropocentric, 115 extrinsic, 115 fluid, 28, 102, 106–9 and networks, 110–11, 117, 118, 123, 124–6 and nudging, 112, 113, 114, 123–6 and pricing, 81, 120–23 Veblen, Thorstein, 82, 109, 111, 142 Venice, 195 verbal framing, 23 Verhulst, Pierre, 252 Victor, Peter, 270 Viner, Jacob, 34 virtuous cycles, 138, 148 visual framing, 23 Vitruvian Man, 13–14 Volkswagen, 215–16 W Wacharia, John, 186 Wall Street, 149, 234, 273 Wallich, Henry, 282 Walras, Léon, 131, 132, 133–4, 137 Ward, Barbara, 53 Warr, Benjamin, 263 water, 5, 9, 45, 46, 51, 54, 59, 79, 213–14 wave energy, 221 Ways of Seeing (Berger), 12, 281 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 74, 78, 96, 104 wealth ownership, 177–82 Weaver, Warren, 135–6 weightless economy, 261–2 WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic), 103–5, 110, 112, 115, 117, 282 West Bengal, India, 124, 178 West, Darrell, 171–2 wetlands, 7 whale hunting, 106 Wiedmann, Tommy, 210 Wikipedia, 82, 223 Wilkinson, Richard, 171 win–win trade, 62, 68, 89 wind energy, 75, 118, 196, 202–3, 221, 233, 239, 260, 263 Wizard of Oz, The, 241 Woelab, 231, 293 Wolf, Martin, 183, 266 women’s rights, 33, 57, 107, 160, 201 and core economy, 69, 79–81 education, 57, 124, 178, 198 and land ownership, 178 see also gender equality workers’ rights, 88, 91, 269 World 3 model, 154–5 World Bank, 6, 41, 119, 164, 168, 171, 206, 255, 258 World No Tobacco Day, 124 World Trade Organization, 6, 89 worldview, 22, 54, 115 X xenophobia, 266, 277, 286 Xenophon, 4, 32, 56–7, 160 Y Yandle, Bruce, 208 Yang, Yuan, 1–3, 289–90 yin yang, 54 Yousafzai, Malala, 124 YouTube, 192 Yunnan, China, 56 Z Zambia, 10 Zanzibar, 9 Zara, 276 Zeitvorsoge, 186–7 zero environmental impact, 217–18, 238, 241 zero-hour contracts, 88 zero-humans-required production, 192 zero-interest loans, 183 zero-marginal-cost revolution, 84, 191, 264 zero-waste manufacturing, 227 Zinn, Howard, 77 PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Illustrations are reproduced by kind permission of: archive.org


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

The notion of mass automation and job losses hangs over Silicon Valley like the low-lying San Francisco fog. While the argument is an old one, it re-emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century – as the advances in AI that we explored in Chapter 1 started to come to fruition. Bookshops were soon awash with books called things like The Second Machine Age and Surviving AI – all making, in one way or another, a devilishly simple argument: artificial intelligence changes the game. We have a generalised technology that is adaptable; it can be used in many different circumstances. And it is adaptive; it learns from experience. As a result, it will continually improve over time, making large chunks of the workforce redundant.

Howard, The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation (The Project on Computational Propaganda, 26 September 2019) <https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/posts/the-global-disinformation-order-2019-global-inventory-of-organised-social-media-manipulation/#continue> [accessed 2 January 2021] Bremmer, Ian, ‘Why We Need a World Data Organization. Now.’, GZERO, 25 November 2019 <https://www.gzeromedia.com/why-we-need-a-world-data-organization-now> [accessed 20 March 2020] Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014) Buchanan, Ben, and Fiona S. Cunningham, ‘Preparing the Cyber Battlefield: Assessing a Novel Escalation Risk in a Sino-American Crisis’, Texas National Security Review, October 2020 <http://tnsr.org/2020/10/preparing-the-cyber-battlefield-assessing-a-novel-escalation-risk-in-a-sino-american-crisis/> [accessed 23 April 2021] Choudary, Sangeet Paul, Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires with Minimum Investment, 1st edn (Singapore: Platform Thinking Labs Pte.

.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!


pages: 402 words: 126,835

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.

What is remarkable are the odds against any one of these hopefuls making the cut: with an estimated 3 million applicants in a single year, only 1 in 428 got the offer. As a point of comparison, the odds of an applicant getting into Harvard are quite a bit better: 1 in 14. Andrew McAfee, coauthor of The Second Machine Age and principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, joined me to mull over the implications of all this at Legal Seafoods, a popular restaurant just a few steps from Google’s Cambridge campus. At the time, McAfee seemed a tad preoccupied, as though he, too, was dreaming of Google.


pages: 318 words: 77,223

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

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.”

,” 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).


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

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.

Blake Marsh, and Thao Tran, “Trends in the Labor Share Post-2000,” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, December 7, 2018, https://www.kansascityfed.org/en/publications/research/mb/articles/2018/trends-labor-share-post; and “A New Look at the Declining Labor Share of Income in the United States,” McKinsey, May 2019, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/a-new-look-at-the-declining-labor-share-of-income-in-the-united-states. 62. 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.

See also economic dignity net conservatives and work requirements, 90 use of term, 190 Saga Education, 286 Sanberg, Joe, 166 Sánchez, Wilkin, 284 Sandel, Michael, 14 Sanders, Bernie, 160 sanitation workers, 14–15, 155–56 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 8 Sasse, Ben, 163–67, 170, 171, 329n SAT/ACT test gap, 277, 289–90 SAT/ACT test prep, 42–43, 289 Saudi Arabia, GDP, 5 Sawhill, Isabel, 60, 285 SBA (Small Business Administration), 321n Schaeffer, Sam, 215 school counselors, 208–9 school psychologists, 216 school teachers, 215–16, 250–51, 262–63 Schularick, Moritz, 295 Schultz, Howard, 102 Seattle Domestic Workers Ordinance, 75, 257–58 Fight for $15, 258 “second-chance” policies, 141–46 rethinking previous trade policies, 144–46 UBI to Rise, 142–44, 146 second chances, 48–53 criminal justice system and betrayal, 53–56 hope and deaths of despair, 59–61 long-term unemployment and denial of, 50–53 weak economic compact and denial of, 50 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 146–47, 148 sectoral collective bargaining, 253–54, 258–59 self-employment. See contract workers self-potential and purpose. See pursuit of potential and purpose; worker potential self-sufficiency, 91, 94–96 Semuels, Alana, 98 Sen, Amartya, 8, 48, 135 Seneca Falls Convention, 15 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 77, 79, 187, 205, 210, 254 sexual harassment.


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

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. I would suggest that “Remote Intelligence” (RI) could end up as at least as transformative.

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. They can’t write software, or come up with a scientific hypothesis, or sniff out a story.

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.


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

The biggest changes are still ahead, and every industry and every organization will have to transform itself in the next few years, in multiple ways, or fade away. We need to ask ourselves whether the fundamental social safety nets of the developed world will survive the transition, and more important, what we will replace them with. Andy McAfee, coauthor of The Second Machine Age, put his finger on the consequence of failing to do so while talking with me over breakfast about the risks of AI taking over from humans: “The people will rise up before the machines do.” This book provides a view of one small piece of this complex puzzle, the role of technology innovation in the economy, and in particular the role of WTF?

“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.

., 98 Rothman, Simon, 196 Rushkoff, Douglas, 251 Rwanda, 370 Safari service for ebooks, 50, 344 Sanders, Bernie, 255 Saudi Arabia, 305–6 scenario planning, 358–67 Scheifler, Bob, 16 Schlossberg, Edwin, 3 Schmidt, Eric, 126, 129, 137 Schneier, Bruce, 177 Schrage, Michael, xiv, 58 Schulman, Andrew, 10 Schumpeterian profits, 296 Schumpeterian waste, 277–78 Schwartz, Peter, 359 Science and Sanity (Korzybski), 20 Scoble, Robert, 39 Search, The (Battelle), 161 search engine optimization, 160–61 search engines, 39, 92, 157–59, 207, 288. See also Google Seattle, Washington, 138–40 Second Machine Age (McAfee), xxii–xxiii secular stagnation, 271 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 125–26 security on platforms, 135–36 self-driving vehicles, 232–33 data collection for, 32–33, 34–35 jobs resulting from, 94–95 as manifestation of the global brain, 46 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations, 188–89 for Uber and Lyft, x, 62–64 self-service marketplaces, 91 sensors, xviii–xix, 33, 34–35, 40, 41, 85, 176–77, 326 SETI@home project, 26 sewing as WTF?


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Jacobs, Green Growth: Economic Theory and Political Discourse, Working Paper 92, Grantham Institute, 2012. 10 In 1934, Hansen’s ‘Capital goods and the restoration of purchasing power’, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, vol. 16, no. 1, Money and Credit in the Recovery Program (April), pp. 11–19, and in 2014 L. H. Summers’s ‘Reflections on the “new secular stagnation hypothesis”’, in C. Teulings and R. Baldwin, eds, Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures, London, CEPR Press, pp. 27–38. 11 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Race Against the Machine; E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, The Second Machine Age, London, W. W. Norton & Co, 2014. 12 See particularly Gordon, Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? ch. 4. 13 J. A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1939; N. Kondratieff, The Major Economic Cycles, 1922, published in English in G.

R. Martin eds, The Triple Challenge for Europe: Economic Development, Climate Change and Governance, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, ch. 9. 20 M. Twain and C. D. Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, Hartford, CT, The American Publishing Co., 1873. 21 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. 22 Even bolder were the creators of the Swedish model, Rehn and Meidner, whose model of cooperation between business government and trade unions brought the country to the first ranks in productivity, competitiveness, skills and well-being. That model became inadequate once the mass production revolution approached exhaustion, as happened with the orthodox Keynesian recipes across the rest of the advanced world.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

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. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call this the Great Decoupling.

See human preferences preference utilitarianism, 220 Price, Richard, 54 pride, 230–31 Primitive Expounder, 133 prisoner’s dilemma, 30–31 privacy, 70–71 probability theory, 21–22, 273–84 Bayesian networks and, 275–77 first-order probabilistic languages, 277–80 independence and, 274 keeping track of not directly observable phenomena, 280–84 probabilistic programming, 54–55, 84, 279–80 programming language, 34 programs, 33 prohibitions, 202–3 Project Aristo, 80 Prolog, 271 proofs for beneficial AI assistance games, 184–210, 192–203 learning preferences from behavior, 190–92 mathematical guarantees, 185–90 recursive self-improvement and, 208–10 requests and instructions, interpretation of, 203–5 wireheading problem and, 205–8 propositional logic, 51, 268–70 Putin, Vladimir, 182, 183 “put it in a box” argument, 161–63 puzzles, 45 quantum computation, 35–36 qubit devices, 35–36 randomized strategy, 29 rationality Aristotle’s formulation of, 20–21 Bayesian, 54 critiques of, 24–26 expected value rule and, 22–23 gambling and, 21–23 game theory and, 28–32 inconsistency in human preferences, and developing theory of beneficial AI, 26–27 logic and, 39–40 monotonicity and, 24 Nash equilibrium and, 30–31 preferences and, 23–27 probability and, 21–22 randomized strategy and, 29 for single agent, 20–27 transitivity and, 23–24 for two agents, 27–32 uncertainty and, 21 utility theory and, 22–26 rational metareasoning, 262 reading capabilities, 74–75 real-world decision problem complexity and, 39 Reasons and Persons (Parfit), 225 Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, 155 recombinant DNA research, 155–56 recursive self-improvement, 208–10 redlining, 128 reflex agents, 57–59 reinforcement learning, 17, 47, 55–57, 105, 190–91 remembering self, and preferences, 238–40 Repugnant Conclusion, 225 reputation systems, 108–9 “research can’t be controlled” arguments, 154–56 retail cashiers, 117–18 reward function, 53–54, 55 reward system, 17 Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Ford), 113 risk posed by AI, 145–70 deflection arguments, 154–59 denial of problem, 146–54 Robinson, Alan, 5 Rochester, Nathaniel, 4–5 Rutherford, Ernest, 7, 77, 85–86, 150 Sachs, Jeffrey, 230 sadism, 228–29 Salomons, Anna, 116 Samuel, Arthur, 5, 10, 55, 261 Sargent, Tom, 191 scalable autonomous weapons, 112 Schwab, Klaus, 117 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson & McAfee), 117 Sedol, Lee, 6, 47, 90, 91, 261 seismic monitoring system (NET-VISA), 279–80 self-driving cars, 65–67, 181–82, 247 performance requirements for, 65–66 potential benefits of, 66–67 probabilistic programming and, 281–82 sensing on global scale, 75 sets, 33 Shakey project, 52 Shannon, Claude, 4–5, 62 Shiller, Robert, 117 side-channel attacks, 187, 188 Sidgwick, Henry, 224–25 silence regarding risks of AI, 158–59 Simon, Herbert, 76, 86, 265 simulated evolution of programs, 171 SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), 283 Slate Star Codex blog, 146, 169–70 Slaughterbot, 111 Small World (Lodge), 1 Smart, R.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Not long afterwards US productivity growth picked up, assisted presumably by advances in information technology. As Gordon’s book The Rise and Fall of American Growth went to press in early 2016 (its publication facilitated by digital technologies), the internet continued to disrupt countless industries while the media fanned fears of an impending ‘second machine age’, in which robots replace human workers. Gordon’s Northwestern colleague Joel Mokyr suggested that a ‘shortfall of imagination [is] largely responsible for much of today’s pessimism’. Mokyr listed a number of revolutionary new technologies then under development, including 3D printing, graphene and genetic engineering, to which might be added autonomous cars and clean energy.19 Finance writer William Bernstein accused secular stagnationists of conflating what they couldn’t conceive with that which was not possible.20 Hansen made the same mistake.

Schumpeter would have approved. After 2008, a different picture emerged. Fewer bankruptcies and fewer start-ups meant less job creation and destruction. The decline in employment turnover (known as the ‘churn rate’) roughly tracked the falling interest rate.fn7 While the media ran horror stories about a ‘Second Machine Age’, in which robots were replacing humans in the workplace, the reality was that fewer jobs were created or destroyed by technology than at any time since the Industrial Revolution.42 More Americans suffered from prolonged spells of unemployment. Even as the US economy recovered, the labour force participation rate declined, hitting a three-decade low in 2014.

., 96–7 neo-Keynesian economists, 87* Nero, Roman Emperor, 20 New Haven Railroad, 159 New Paradigm (Goldilocks Economy), 111 new technologies: in 1920s, 89, 90, 96, 100; in 1930s USA, 142–3; in China, 276, 284; and ‘creative destruction’ idea, 140; and demand for capital, 125, 126, 127; digital, 127–8, 149–50, 151–2, 176, 177, 179, 204, 276, 283; digital currencies concept, 294, 312; Dotcom bubble, 111–12, 136–7, 176, 204; FAANGs, 176; low marginal costs in New Economy, 127–8; mass-production techniques, 142; meme stocks, 307; in robber baron era, 158–9; ‘Second Machine Age’ narratives, 128, 151–2; and stock market bubbles, 176; zombies slow adoption of, 153 New Zealand, 119 NFTs (‘nonfungible tokens’), 308 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 218 Nigeria, 262 Norman, Montagu, 82–3, 86, 87, 92, 93, 110, 232* North, Sir Dudley, 37, 40, 236† Northern Rock, 253† Norway, 239 Obama, Barack, 213 Office for Financial Research, US, 164 OGX Petróleo e Gás, 257 Olson, Mancur, 117 Ordos (Inner Mongolian city), 274 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 146 Origo, Iris, 21, 22 Orléans, Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchess of, 51, 56 Orlik, Tom, 89*, 270 OTX Classic Car Index, 210 Overend Gurney, collapse of (1866), 72–4, 75–6, 77 Overstone, Samuel Jones-Loyd, Lord, 63 Palmstruch, Johan, 244 Park Chung-hee, 267 Pearson, Michael, 161, 169 Pension Benefits Guarantee Corporation, US, 197 pensions: ballooning deficits in post-crisis decade, 195–8, 211; defined benefit plans, 195–7; defined contribution plans, 197; liability hedging by corporate funds, 198; and low-interest regimes, xxi, 190, 194, 195–8, 211, 237, 245; ‘retirement gaps’, 198; state pensions, 197; widespread use of dubious assumptions, 197 People’s Bank of China, 265, 266, 267–8, 270, 271, 272, 281, 282, 282*, 284–5, 289 Petrobras, 225, 257, 258 Pettis, Michael, 269, 278–9, 278*, 287* Petty, Sir William, 31, 40, 173 Peyrefitte, Alain, 265 Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, 48, 49–50, 51, 56, 57 Phillips, Chester, 96–7 Pigou, Arthur, 131 Piketty, Thomas, 205, 216–17 PIMCO, 113*, 217, 221, 235, 236 plague, bubonic, 33 ‘platform companies’, 161 Plato, 200* Plaza Accord (1985), 241*, 271 Poland, 253 Pole, Thornton & Company, 66 Ponzi, Carlo, 90 Ponzi schemes/structures, 166, 230*, 284–5, 284*, 312 Poole, William, 116, 246 populism, resurgence of, xxii, 299 Portnoy, Dave, 308–9 Portugal, 144–5, 245 Potter, William, 47 Powell, J.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Automation and AI technologies, which many corporations in the social quantification sector actively develop and promote, seem to be designed to eliminate laborers, not liberate them. Given the investment in AI of companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Scott Galloway argues they should be referred to as job destroyers, not job creators.112 With the arrival of the “second machine age,”113 the destruction of many jobs is a given, even if the scope of the transformation is still up for debate. According to some estimates, digital automation puts up to 47 percent of all US employment at “high risk” of vanishing.114 In the retail sector alone, this translates into 7.5 million jobs out of a total of 16 million.115 Other estimates that focus on tasks instead of occupations present a much smaller figure of 9 percent of jobs at risk of disappearing.116 Looking at historical data instead of predictions reveals that adding one robot to a workforce of one thousand human workers has increased unemployment and reduced wages, even if the shifts are very small thus far.117 Nonetheless, it is hard to project past trends into the future without accounting for the disruptive power of technology.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Bucher, Taina. “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms.” Information Communication and Society 20, no. 1 (2017): 30–44. . “The Friendship Assemblage: Investigating Programmed Sociality on Facebook. Television & New Media 14, no. 6 (2013): 479–93. .


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

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. Some of this would come from self-driving vehicles, which are likely to appear on our roads in significant numbers from 2017.


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

Nobody knows better than Sinan Aral how ideas spread online, and in these pages he’s distilled a brilliant career into a fascinating read. Don’t miss it if you care about how the Internet is changing our world.” —ANDREW MCAFEE, MIT, author of More from Less and bestselling co-author of The Second Machine Age “In this book, Sinan Aral, one of the world’s leading computational social scientists, tackles one of the great challenges of our time: how to reengineer digital technology to better serve society. Authoritative, comprehensive, nuanced, and engaging, The Hype Machine is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.”

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.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

I don’t wish to put AI in the dock for crimes as yet uncommitted. But this kind of tech-fuelled inequality is a familiar pattern. ‘There is no economic law that says that all workers, or even a majority of workers, will benefit from technological progress,’ write McAfee and Brynjolfsson in their influential book The Second Machine Age, which argues persuasively that, while other factors are of course at play – including globalisation – technological advance over the last 30 years has been the main factor behind growing economic inequality. Skilled workers, they explain, tend to benefit most from new technologies, while others fall further behind.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]) Avent, Ryan, The Wealth of Humans (Allen Lane, 2016) British Academy, Future of the Corporation, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/programmes/future-of-the-corporation/ Brynjolfsson, Eric, and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton & Co., 2014) Chapman, Tim, Why Workplace: A Leader’s Guide to Rebuilding the Post-Pandemic Workplace (Leesman, 2021) Cséfalvay, Zoltán, TECHtonic Shifts (Kairosz Kiadó, 2017) Cushman & Wakefield Workplace Insights, https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/insights/covid-19/the-future-of-workplace d’Ancona, Matthew, Identity, Ignorance, Innovation: Why the Old Politics is Useless – and What to Do About It (Hodder & Stoughton, 2021) Ferris, Joshua, Then We Came to the End (Penguin, 2008) Fosslien, Liz, and Mollie West Duffy, No Hard Feelings: Emotions at Work (and How They Help Us Succeed) (Penguin Business, 2019) Galbraith, Robert, The Cuckoo’s Calling (Sphere, 2014) Gallup Workplace portal, https://www.gallup.com/topic/workplace.aspx Gratton, Lynda, and Andrew Scott, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity (Bloomsbury Business, 2017) Hazzard, Shirley, Collected Stories (Virago, 2020) Hobsbawm, Julia, The Nowhere Office (Demos, 2021), https://demos.co.uk/project/the-nowhere-office/ Hochschild, Arlie Russell, The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us (Metropolitan Books, 2012) Howkins, John, Invisible Work: The Future of the Office is in Your Head (September Publishing, 2021) International Labour Organisation (ILO) https://www.ilo.org/global/lang--en/index.htm Ipsos’s workplace polling, https://www.ipsos.com/en/search?


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: 173 words: 53,564

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Bridgman, Benjamin, Andrew Dugan, Mikhael Lal, Matthew Osborne, and Shaunda Villones. “Accounting for Household Production in the National Accounts, 1965–2010.” Bureau of Economic Analysis, May 2012. https://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2012/05%20May/0512_household.pdf. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton, 2016. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment Status of the Civilian Population by Race, Sex, and Age.” Economic News Release, November 3, 2017. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm. Cambridge Associates LLC.


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

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: 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

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. See Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Myths in Risk and Innovation (London: Anthem Press, 2013). 37.

Gordon Brown MP, at the Mansion House, London’, 21 June 2006. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/00a235ba-015d-11db-af16-0000779e2340.html. Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee. Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). Brynjolfsson, Erik 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). Buffett, Warren. ‘Goodreads’. http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/756.Warren_Buffett. Buiter, Willem. ‘The Unfortunate Uselessness of Most State of the Art Academic Macroeconomics’, 3 March 2009. http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/03/the-unfortunate-uselessness-of-most-state-of-the-art-academic-monetary-economics.


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.

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: 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

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. He pointed to the efflorescence of tech unicorns – private start-ups valued at more than $1 billion – that are working on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, gene-splicing medicine and the like.


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: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

New York Times, December 25, 2011. Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Ford, Martin. Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. McCullough, David. The Wright Brothers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Krznaric, Roman. Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It. New York: TarcherPerigee, 2014. Schwab, Klaus. The Fourth Industrial Revolution.


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

(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: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

The results sat in two bulging canvas bags on his kitchen table. One was filled with manila folders labeled “platform economics” and “future of work.” They were stuffed with white copy paper, clipped together in sections with black clamps. The other was filled with books: David Weil’s book about how technology will impact jobs. A book about the second machine age. I’d chipped in a copy of Janesville, a book that followed a small town near where I’d grown up after the local GM assembly plant shut down, taking thousands of good jobs with it. Dan’s plan was to read the entire foot-and-a-half stack during a four-day solo trip to a cabin, a goal which somehow didn’t strike him at all as unrealistically ambitious.


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

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: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

But it was a bad time to be a skilled artisan whose job could be done by a machine. The Luddites who destroyed machines were not deluded. They didn’t have the right to vote or to form unions, so they pursued their economic self-interest by destroying machines. One historian called it “collective bargaining by riot.” We are living in the middle of a second machine age. It’s computers and software now, not weaving machines. But some of the same things are happening. People talk about the rise of the 1 percent. About how income for ordinary people is stagnant. Part of that is caused by technological change. The traditional economist’s response to this is: these problems are temporary.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

What used to be regarded as the fantasy of a handful of lunatics will then have become an irreversible and self-evident achievement. 247 Notes 1. The Instrument of Freedom 1. Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) and Frey and Osborne (2014) provided influential forecasts. Often presented in eloquent and dramatic fashion, the anticipation of this “second machine age” has been playing a major role in motivating the need to take the idea of basic income seriously. See, for example, Santens 2014, Huff 2015, Srnicek and Williams 2015, Mason 2015 (284–286), Reich 2015 (chapters 22–23), Stern 2016 (chapter 3), Bregman 2016 (chapter 4), Walker 2016 (chapter 5), Thornhill and Atkins 2016, Wenger 2016, Reed and Lansley 2016, Reeves 2016, Murray 2016, and so forth. 2.

“Marxism and the Transnational Migration of Â�People.” In Brian Barry and Robert E. Goodin, eds., Â�Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People Â� and of Money, 127–144. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, ProÂ�gress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton. Büchele, Hervig, and Lieselotte Wohlgenannt. 1985. Grundeinkommen ohne Arbeit. Auf dem Weg zu einer kommunikativen Gesellschaft. Vienna: Europaverlag. Reprinted Vienna: ÖGB Verlag, 2016. Bureau of Â�Labor Statistics. 2015.


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.” — RUSLAN SALAKHUTDINOV, Carnegie Mellon professor; Director of AI Research, Apple “I encounter so many people who feel excited but overwhelmed by AI.


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. The Spread of the Movement. Bob Baumhower is quoted in “Alabama’s Aloha Hospitality Launches 4-Day Workweek,” AL.com, March 28, 2019, www.al.com/press-releases/2018/10/alabamas_aloha_hospitality_lau.html.


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

John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 325. 5. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? (Oxford Martin School 2013). 6. Ibid., 38, 42. 7. Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton & Co. 2014), 10. 8. Cynthia Estlund, ‘What should we do after work? Automation and employ- ment law’ (2017) New York University Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers No. 578, 21. 9. Ibid., 23. 10. David Autor, ‘Polyani’s paradox and the shape of employment growth’ (2014) NBER Working Paper No. 20485, 129. 11.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. HarperBusiness. Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2012). Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Digital Frontier Press. Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton & Company. Catmull, E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House. Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2009). Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.


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.”


pages: 308 words: 84,713

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

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. W. Norton, 2014). 25.“March of the Machines,” 60 Minutes, CBS, January 13, 2013, cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57563618/are-robots-hurting-job-growth/. 26.Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman, “Recession, Tech Kill Middle-Class Jobs,” AP, January 23, 2013, bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs. 27.Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon, “Will Smart Machines Create a World without Work?


pages: 304 words: 80,143

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

“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. “Hyperloop,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop. 47.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Making It in America: Social mobility in the immigrant population, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 12088, Cambridge, MA, March 2006 Boughton, J. ‘Dirtying White: Why does Benn Steil’s history of Bretton Woods distort the ideas of Harry Dexter White?’, The Nation, 5 June 2013, available at https://www.thenation.com/article/dirtying-white/ Brynjolfsson, E. and A. McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies, Norton, New York, 2014 Buchanan, J.M. ‘An economic theory of clubs’, Economica, 32:125 (1965), pp. 1–14 Bullard, J. ‘Testing long-run monetary neutrality propositions: Lessons from the recent research’, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review, November/December 1999, available at: https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/99/11/9911jb.pdf Bush, G.W.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Liberty Street Economics. 24 February. http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/02/the-graying-of-american-debt.html#.V_AHIoWmqU0. Bryden, John, and Charles Geisler. 2007. ‘Community-Based Land Reform: Lessons from Scotland’. Land Use Policy 24 (1): 24–34. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton. BSA (Building Societies Association). 2015. ‘The History of Building Societies (BSA Factsheet)’. https://www.bsa.org.uk/information/consumer-factsheets/general/the-history-of-building-societies. Buiter, Willem H., and Ebrahim Rahbari. 2015.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

It is for this reason that I think that it is more appropriate to speak of Kuznets cycles, or waves, and to view the current upward swing in advanced countries as the beginning of the second Kuznets wave. Like the first wave, it is the product of technological innovation and change, of the substitution of labor by capital (the “second machine age”), and the transfer of labor from one sector to another. In the first Kuznets wave, the transfer was from agriculture (and thus rural areas) to manufacturing (and thus urban areas); in the second, it is from manufacturing to services. As discussed before, this second wave is also driven by pro-rich changes in economic policies.


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. In 1977, Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Lab in Japan developed a computerized driverless car that achieved speeds of up to 20 mph by using machine vision to follow white street markers.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

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

., Human Capital in History: The American Record (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014) Brynjolfsson, Erik, and McAfee, Andrew, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Digital Frontier Press, 2011) _____, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014) Cairncross, Frances, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution is Changing Our Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997) Christensen, Clayton M., The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997) Cowen, Tyler, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York, NY: E.


pages: 295 words: 90,821

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success by Dietrich Vollrath

active measures, additive manufacturing, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, falling living standards, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, old age dependency ratio, patent troll, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, women in the workforce, working-age population

Boppart, T. 2014. “Structural Change and the Kaldor Facts in a Growth Model with Relative Price Effects and Non-Gorman Preferences.” Econometrica 82:2167–96. Brynjolfsson, E., and A. McAfee. 2011. Race against the Machine. N.p.: Digital Frontier Press. Brynjolfsson, E., and A. McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Byrne, D. M., J. G. Fernald, and M. B. Reinsdorf. 2016. “Does the United States Have a Productivity Slowdown or a Measurement Problem?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 47 (1): 109–82. Card, D. 1999.


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

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: 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. I discuss the social and political consequences of life extension in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), pp. 57–71. 16.

New York: Cambridge University Press. ______. 2004. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brusco, Valeria, Marcelo Nazareno, and Susan Carol Stokes. 2004. “Vote Buying in Argentina.” Latin American Research Review 39(2):66–88. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: Norton. Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Burke, Edmund. 2000. On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters.


The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

Kotler, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (New York: Free Press 2012), 34. 2. W. B. Arthur, The Nature of Technology, What It Is and How it Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009). 3. P. H. Diamandis and S. Kotler, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (New York: Free Press, 2012). 4. E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York; W.W. Norton). 5. J. Schwerin and C. Werker, “Learning Innovation Policy Based on Historical Experience,” Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 14, no. 4 (2004): 385–404. 6. C. Freeman and F. Lou ç ã, As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolution to the Information Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); J.


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

Technology Funding—What’s Going On?” Andreessen Horowitz presentation, June 2015. Brynjolfsson, Erik, 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, 2012. ———. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton & Co., 2016. ———. “Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines.” Atlantic, October 26, 2011. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Andrew McAfee, and Michael Spence. “New World Order.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014. Caramanica, Jon.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Hoynes, ‘Heterogeneity in the impact of economic cycles and the Great Recession: Effects within and across the income distribution’, American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 2015, 105 (5): 154–60. 39 L. Michel, J. Bernstein and S. Allegretti, The State of Working America 2006/2007 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2007). 40 E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York: W. Norton, 2014). 41 T. Krebs and M. Scheffel, ‘Macroeconomic evaluation of labour market reform in Germany’, IMF Economic Review, 2013. 42 L. Elliott, ‘UK wage growth stifled by tepid investment and low-skilled migration’, The Guardian, 23 September 2015. 43 ‘The tax-free recovery’, The Economist, 20 September 2014, p. 33. 44 A.


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

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. Gordon in his 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S.


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

Books Alpaydin, Ethem, Machine Learning, MIT Press, 2016 Barthes, Roland, S/Z, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991 Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, 1972 Bishop, Christopher, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Springer, 2007 Boden, Margaret, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990 , AI: Its Nature and Future, OUP, 2016 Bohm, David, On Creativity, Routledge, 1996 Bostrom, Nick, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, OUP, 2014 Braidotti, Rosi, The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013 Brandt, Anthony and David Eagleman, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, Canongate, 2017 Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Norton, 2014 Cawelti, John, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, University of Chicago Press, 1977 Cheng, Ian, Emissaries Guide to Worlding, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2018; Serpentine Galleries/Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 2018 Cope, David, Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style, MIT Press, 2001 , Computer Models of Musical Creativity, MIT Press, 2005 Domingos, Pedro, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World, Basic Books, 2015 Dormehl, Luke, The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, Penguin Books, 2014 , Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future, W.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Brooks, R. A. “I, Rodney Brooks, Am a Robot.” IEEE Spectrum 45, no. 6 (2008). Brundage, M., et al., “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07228. Brynjolfsson, E., and A. McAfee. The Second Machine Age. New York: Norton, 2014. Bryson, J., M. Diamantis, and T. Grant. “Of, For, and By the People: The Legal Lacuna of Synthetic Persons.” Artificial Intelligence and Law 25, no. 3 (September 2017): 273–291. Bueno de Mesquita, B., and A. Smith. The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.


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

—Lindsay Levin, founding partner, Leaders’ Quest and Future Stewards “With great clarity and passion, Rebecca Henderson provides a stellar guide to building a purpose-driven organization, the surest path to success in a time of rising temperatures and declining trust.” —Andrew McAfee, author of More from Less and coauthor of The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd “Rebecca Henderson weaves together research and personal experience with clarity and vision, illustrating the potential for business to benefit both itself and society by leading on the most challenging issues of our day. Read, and feel hopeful.” —Judith Samuelson, vice president, the Aspen Institute “Reimagining Capitalism is a breath of fresh air.


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

Sharkey’s foundation’s advocacy for an international bill of human technological rights would define and constrain the kinds of decisions machines can make about humans and human interaction with robots. This immediately brings to mind Asimov’s famous “Three Laws of Robotics,” but in real life things are far more complex. When I asked MIT’s Andrew McAfee, coauthor of The Second Machine Age and Race Against the Machine, what he thought was the biggest misunderstanding about artificial intelligence today, he was succinct: “The greatest misconception is the hope that the singularity—or the fear that super-intelligence—is right around the corner.” McAfee’s commonsensical and humane investigations into the impact of technology on society most closely match my own outlook.


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

New York: Basic Books. Brynjolfsson, E., A. Collis, W. E. Diewert, F. Eggers, and K. J. Fox (2019). GDP-B: Accounting for the value of new and free goods in the digital economy. NBER Working Paper No. 25695, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, March. Brynjolfsson, E., and A. McAfee (2014). The Second Machine Age. New York: W. W. Norton. Buccirossi, P., L. Ciari, T. Duso, G. Spagnolo, and C. Vitale (2013). Competition policy and productivity growth: An empirical assessment. Review of Economics and Statistics 95(4), 1324–1336. Bundestags-Drucksache (2013). Parliamentary paper no. 17/12340. Byrne, D.


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

The Book of Looms. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1979. Brown, Noam, and Tuomas Sandholm. “Superhuman AI for Multiplayer Poker.” Science, 11 July 2019. Brynjolfsson, Erik. “AI and the Economy.” Lecture at the Future of Life Institute, 1 July 2017. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age. London: W. W. Norton, 2014. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Tom Mitchell. “What Can Machine Learning Do? Workforce Implications.” Science 358, no. 6370 (2017). Caines, Colin, Florian Hoffman, and Gueorgui Kambourov. “Complex-Task Biased Technological Change and the Labor Market.” International Finance Division Discussion Papers 1192 (2017).


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: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy. Columbia University Press. On Swedish schools, Stanfield, James B. 2012. The Profit Motive in Education: Continuing the Revolution. Institute of Economic Affairs. On MOOCs, Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. 2014. The Second Machine Age. Norton. On Minerva College, Wood, Graeme. The future of college?. The Atlantic September 2014. Sugata Mitra’s TED talks are available at TED.com. His short book is Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning. TED Books 2012. On environmental indoctrination, Montford, A. and Shade, J. 2014.


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/.


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

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. Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 248; James Bessen, Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 5.


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: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead. New York: Penguin Press, 2013. Blyth, Mark. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Bogle, John C. The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. Bughin, Jacques, and James Manyika. Internet Matters: The Rise of the Digital Economy, Essays on Digital Transformation, Vol. 4. N.p.: McKinsey & Company, 2013. Burlingham, Bo. Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big.


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

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. Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); Draut, Sleeping Giant; Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017). 12.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

W. W. Norton, 2014. Brooks, Rosa. “Failed States, or State as Failure.” University of Chicago Law Review (Fall 2005). Brotton, Jerry. A History of the World in 12 Maps. Viking, 2013. Brown, Donald. Human Universals. McGraw-Hill Humanities, 1991. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton, 2014. Buckley, F. H. The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America. Encounter Books, 2014. Burrows, Matthew. The Future Declassified: Megatrends That Will Undo the World Unless We Take Action.


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

Plants & People, Jones & Bartlett, 2012 Mayer, Colin Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good, Oxford University Press, 2018 Mazzucato, Marianna The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths, Perseus Books, 2015 McAfee, Andrew and Brynjolfsson, Erik Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, W.W. Norton, 2017 —— Race Against the Machine, Digital Frontier Press, 2012 —— The Second Machine Age, W.W. Norton, 2016 McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, University of Chicago Press, 2016 —— “The great enrichment was built on ideas, not capital”, Foundation for Economic Education, https://fee.org McConnell, John J. and Buser, Stephen A.


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

“The Welfare Implications of Rising Price Dispersion.” University of Chicago, unpublished paper, 2009. Brulle, Robert J. “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations.” Climatic Change 122, no. 4 (2014): 681–94. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Bursztyn, Leonardo, et al. “Misinformation During a Pandemic.” University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper no. 2020-44, April 2020. Campbell, Richard J.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The Upswing brings together his vast knowledge, love of data, storytelling ability, and passion. It’s an astonishing work that reminds Americans we are a great people, shows us what we can accomplish when we come together, and makes clear that we need to do so again. Now.” —Andrew McAfee, MIT scientist, author of More from Less, and coauthor of The Second Machine Age “The Upswing is a revelation—tailor-made for this polarized age and destined to be a central reference point for urgent debates and determined activism. Here, one of America’s most renowned public intellectuals gives us a new understanding of our history and a profoundly insightful roadmap for a future we can only create together.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Income Inequality and Evolution of High Incomes (London: The Institute for Fiscal Studies Briefing Note No. 76). Brogan, Hugh, 2006, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Brookhiser, Richard, 2011, James Madison (New York: Basic Books). Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee, 2014, The Second Machine Age: Work Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company). Buchan, James, 2006, The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company). Buchanan, James M. 1960, “La Scienza delle Finanze” in Fiscal Theory and Political Economy, edited by J.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

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

May 25. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4114905. Brundage, Vernon Jr. 2017. “Profile of the Labor Force by Educational Attainment.” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Spotlight on Statistics, www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/educational-attainment-of-the-labor-force. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W.W. Norton. Buchanan, Angus. 2001. Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. London: Bloomsbury. Buchanan, Robertson. 1841. Practical Essays on Millwork and Other Machinery, 3rd ed. London: John Weale.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Federal taxation in America: a short history. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Brueckner, Markus, and Lederman, Daniel. 2015. “Effects of income inequality on aggregate output.” World Bank Policy Discussion Paper No. 7317. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and McAfee, Andrew. 2014. The second machine age: work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. New York: Norton. Buffett, Warren E. 2011. “Stop coddling the super-rich.” New York Times August 15, 2011: A21. Burbank, Jane, and Cooper, Frederick. 2010. Empires in world history: geographies of power, politics of difference.


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

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). On the venture capital industry in the Valley and elsewhere, useful sources are John W.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

‘An Early and Enduring Advanced Technology Originating 71,000 Years Ago in South Africa’, Nature, 491 (22 November 2012), pp. 590–3. Brown, William & Jonathan Trevor. ‘Payment Systems and the Fall and Rise of Individualism’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 35 (2014), pp. 143–55. Brynjolfsson, Erik & Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014). Buchanan, Francis. An Account of the District of Purnea in 1809–10 (New Delhi: Usha, 1986a). Buchanan, Francis. An Account of the District of Shahabad in 1812–13 (New Delhi: Usha, 1986b). Bücher, Karl.


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.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

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

Brown, Vivienne. 1994. Adam Smith’s Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce, and Conscience. London: Routledge. Bruckner, Pascal. 2000 (2010). Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy. Trans. Steven Rendall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McFee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: Norton. Bryson, Bill. 2003. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books. Buber, Martin. 1909 (1923). I and Thou. Trans. Ronald Gregory Smith. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Buchanan, James, and Gordon Tullock. 1962.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

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 American Commonwealth, Louis M. Hacker, ed. New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Bryne, David M., Oliner, Stephen D., and Sichel, Daniel E. (2013). “Is the Information Technology Revolution Over?” International Productivity Monitor no. 25 (spring): 20–36. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and McAfee, Andrew. (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 80. Bryon, Kevin A., Minton, Brian D., and Sarte, Pierre-Daniel G. (2007). “The Evolution of City Population Density in the United States,” Economic Quarterly 93, no. 4 (fall): 341–60.