Rating: Not rated
Tags: Economics, Lang:en
Summary
*A New York Times* Bestseller. A
“fascinating” (Thomas L. Friedman,
New York Times) look at how digital technology is
transforming our work and our lives.** In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged
thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson
trounced the best human
Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies―with
hardware, software, and networks at their core―will in
the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors
can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and
accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human. In
The Second Machine Age MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson
and Andrew McAfee―two thinkers at the forefront of their
field―reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our
lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital
technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the
form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure,
and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our
lives. Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions
of all kinds―from lawyers to truck drivers―will be
forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die.
Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are
working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits
soar. Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends,
Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for
survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include
revamping education so that it prepares people for the next
economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations
that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and
embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed
landscape. A fundamentally optimistic book,
The Second Machine Age alters how we think about
issues of technological, societal, and economic progress. **