Author | Erik Brynjolfsson Andrew McAfee |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Published | 2014 |
Publisher | Norton & Company |
ISBN | 978-0393239355 |
Preceded by | Race Against the Machine |
History of technology |
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The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies is a 2014 book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee that is a continuation of their book Race Against the Machine . They argue that the Second Machine Age involves the automation of a lot of cognitive tasks that make humans and software-driven machines substitutes, rather than complements. They contrast this with what they call the "First Machine Age", or Industrial Revolution, which helped make labor and machines complementary. [1]
Some examples that the book cites include "software that grades students' essays more objectively, consistently and quickly than humans" and "news articles on Forbes.com about corporate earnings previews" — "all generated by algorithms without human involvement." [2]
The authors summarize the contents of their book's 15 chapters [3] on pages 11 and 12 of the book itself.
The book is divided into three sections: Chapters 1 through 6 describe "the fundamental characteristics of the second machine age," based on many examples of modern use of technology. Chapters 7 through 11 describe economic impacts of technology in terms of two concepts the authors call "bounty" and "spread." What they call "bounty" is their attempt to measure the benefits of new technology in ways reaching beyond such measures as GDP, which they say is inadequate. They use "spread" as a shorthand way to describe the increasing inequality that is also resulting from widespread new technology.
Finally, in chapters 12 through 15, the authors prescribe some policy interventions that could enhance the benefits and reduce the harm of new technologies.
The Washington Post says that its strength is how it weaves micro and macroeconomics with insights from other disciplines into an accessible story. It says that the weaknesses of the book are that its policy prescriptions are "straight from the talking points that tech executives have been peddling for years on their visits to the capital", even though they are "perfectly reasonable". [4]
The hacker ethic is a philosophy and set of moral values within hacker culture. Practitioners believe that sharing information and data with others is an ethical imperative. The hacker ethic is related to the concept of freedom of information, as well as the political theories of anti-authoritarianism, socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and libertarianism.
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines. Automation has been achieved by various means including mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, electronic devices, and computers, usually in combination. Complicated systems, such as modern factories, airplanes, and ships typically use combinations of all of these techniques. The benefit of automation includes labor savings, reducing waste, savings in electricity costs, savings in material costs, and improvements to quality, accuracy, and precision.
McAfee Corp., formerly known as McAfee Associates, Inc. from 1987 to 1997 and 2004 to 2014, Network Associates Inc. from 1997 to 2004, and Intel Security Group from 2014 to 2017, is an American global computer security software company headquartered in San Jose, California.
John David McAfee was an American computer programmer, businessman, and two-time presidential candidate who unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and in 2020. In 1987, he wrote the first commercial anti-virus software, founding McAfee Associates to sell his creation. He resigned in 1994 and sold his remaining stake in the company. McAfee became the company's most vocal critic in later years, urging consumers to uninstall the company's anti-virus software, which he characterized as bloatware. He disavowed the company's continued use of his name in branding, a practice that has persisted in spite of a short-lived corporate rebrand attempt under Intel ownership.
In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. The distribution could involve popularities, random numbers of occurrences of events with various probabilities, etc. The term is often used loosely, with no definition or an arbitrary definition, but precise definitions are possible.
The productivity paradox, also referred to as the Solow paradox, could refer either to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s despite rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) over the same period, or to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and developed countries from the 2000s to 2020s; sometimes the newer slowdown is referred to as the productivity slowdown, the productivity puzzle, or the productivity paradox 2.0. The 1970s to 1980s productivity paradox inspired many research efforts at explaining the slowdown, only for the paradox to disappear with renewed productivity growth in the developed countries in the 1990s. However, issues raised by those research efforts remain important in the study of productivity growth in general, and became important again when productivity growth slowed around the world again from the 2000s to the present day.
Erik Brynjolfsson is an American academic, author and inventor. He is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University where he directs the Digital Economy Lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, with appointments at SIEPR, the Stanford Department of Economics and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a best-selling author of several books. From 1990 to 2020, he was a professor at MIT.
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Andrew Paul McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT and cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies how digital technologies are changing the world.
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation is a 2013 book by American economist Tyler Cowen laying out his vision for the future trajectory of the global economy. It is a sequel to Cowen's 2011 pamphlet The Great Stagnation, which argued that America had exhausted many of the low-hanging fruit that had powered its growth in the 19th and early 20th century.
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Polanyi's paradox, named in honour of the British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi, is the theory that human knowledge of how the world functions and of our own capability are, to a large extent, beyond our explicit understanding. The theory was articulated by Michael Polanyi in his book The Tacit Dimension in 1966, and economist David Autor gave it a name in his 2014 research paper "Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth".
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