The Second Machine Age
by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee · first published 2014
45% recommend50% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Broad, accessible look at how digital technologies and automation are reshaping work, productivity, and prosperity. It serves as a solid general overview for readers new to AI's economic effects.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
A revolution is under way. 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 reinvent
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1. Race Against the Machine by Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2. The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee 3. The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford 4. Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford 5. Average is Over by Tyler Cowen -specifically, the parts about labor market bifurcation…
on “Ask HN: Any good books on the economic impact of automation?” ↗…or typing, but humans are using intelligent systems of varying degrees all the time. The real question is how people can adapt to that quickly changing world. Brynjolfsson and McAfee's new book "The Second Machine Age"is awesome on the general effect of AI on society: http://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technolo...
on “Ask HN: Are you looking forward to AI?” ↗I would encourage anyone who hasn't read The Second Machine Age to check out the discussion of this topic. It is true, as you say, that a relatively poor person and a billionaire can both have the same iPhone. The contrary side of that is when it comes to paying for…
on “Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?” ↗The full video of Rupert's opening keynote at the Luxury Summit [1], informed by Brynjolfsson's recent monograph, The Second Machine Age [2], is epic and well worth a listen. [1]: https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/108160 [2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp...
on “Billionaires to the Barricades” ↗…comment. His very interesting book, Capital in the 21st Century, argues that our current system favours capital owners and we should tax capital, not income. About labour being displaced, I can recommend Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, however it does not contain silver bullets. :-) I can only theorize on what Stephen Hawkings meant with his answer, but to me it didn't look like a general critic…
on “Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capitalism, Not Robots” ↗I can recommend the book The Second Machine Age that discuss this topic thoroughly: https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technol... There is also a (imho) great SF short story by Marshall Brain about this: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
on “The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China, It’s Automation” ↗> You will be unemployed or in a UBI or your parents' basement eating Ramen, and that job will be done by an MIT gold medalist or a Math Olympiad medalist. Along these lines I recommend the book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
on “I wish GPT4 had never happened” ↗The Second Machine Age
on “Ask HN: Best books on AI?” ↗I imagine The Second Machine Age is old news on HN, but I highly recommend it for a discussion of these topics. It's a very readable book and discusses these social shifts in an intelligent manner without descending into pessimism or…
on “Rise of the Machines: The Future Has Lots of Robots, Few Jobs for Humans” ↗This problem has been weighing heavily on my mind since reading The Second Machine Age. The first thing I've read that gives me some hope for finding a solution is Rushkoff's "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus" I highly recommend reading both books, because more perspective is needed to…
on “The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class” ↗Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two MIT economists, recently wrote a book about this, called The Second Machine Age (here: http://www.amzn.to/0393239357). We're teetering on the edge of economic shifts, and we have a lot of questions we're going to need to ask about how people will live in a world where jobs simply…
on “Have you had the “AI talk” with your kids?” ↗In the Second Machine Age, though, argues 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. Automation is what I love most about…
on “If I Had a Hammer” ↗…railroad financial data. (Google Books has tons of this kinda thing!) The Book: Playing The Percentages In Baseball - Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, Andrew Dolphin. For a website project I'm working on. The Second Machine Age - Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew Mcafee. Theories on what's happening to society now and in the future thanks to the things tech people are doing. The Year's Best Science Fiction, 2013 - Gardner Dozois, ed.…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗…aircraft requires fewer than 100 people for a single mission." It's well known that the industrial revolution created countless new jobs that were unimaginable at the time, a sentiment echoed in The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson. But how do you pick the winners that will bring the most jobs? Some say disruptive innovation, but it still seems like an open question.
on “Marc Andreessen: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas”” ↗01. The second machine age 02. The Firm: The secret history of McKinsey and it's influence on American business 03. The Simpsons and their mathematical secrets 04. League of denial 05. The Martian chronicles 06. The Sixth…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?” ↗