The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

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.

作者簡介

艾瑞克 ‧ 布林優夫森（Erik Brynjolfsson）

　　MIT 史隆管理學院教授，任 MIT 數位商業中心主任、國家經濟研究局（NBER）研究員。長期關注資訊科技的經濟影響力。著有《與機器競賽》（Race Against the Machine）。

安德魯 ‧ 麥克費（Andrew McAfee）
　　MIT 數位商業中心副主任，跨產業及學術的知名講者，曾任教於哈佛商學院，論述常見於《哈佛商業評論》、《經濟學人》、《富比士》、《華爾街日報》。著有《企業 2.0》（Enterprise 2.0）、《與機器競賽》。

　　Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and one of the most cited scholars in information systems and economics.


　　Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business and the author of Enterprise 2.0.