Second Machine Age

“Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”

by E. Brynjolfsson, A. McAfee

If you like the notes, go ahead and buy the book!

• 1st machine age
  • James Watt’s invention (or, more accurately, the refinement) of the steam engine
• Humanity has reached a inflection point for the computer age
• Technology
  • Moore’s Law & 2nd part of chessboard
  • Examples: Self driving cars, IBM Watson, Waze app, ..
• Innovation: Declining or Recombining?
• Economy
  • GDP, Bounty & spread
  • The Biggest Winners: Stars and Superstars
  • Universal Basic Income
  • Negative Income Tax
  • Peer economy
• Policy recommendations
  • 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
  • embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape