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

by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

Overview

The future of business, work, and the economy in a digital world.

In recent years, computers have learned to diagnose diseases, drive cars, write clean prose, and win at Jeopardy!. Advances like these have created unprecedented economic bounty, but in their wake median income has stagnated and the share of the population with jobs has fallen. MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee reveal the technological forces driving this reinvention of our economy and chart a path toward future prosperity. Businesses and individuals, they argue, must learn to race with machines. Drawing on years of research, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies and policies for doing so. These include honing the ability to mix and match different technological resources and designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity. A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age will radically alter how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393241259
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/13/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	396,288
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Erik Brynjolfsson is the Schussel Family Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research and teaching focus on how businesses can effectively use information technology. Brynjolfsson has made important contributions to the world of IT Productivity research and his research has been recognized with nine "best paper" awards by fellow academics, including the John DC Little Award for the best paper in Marketing Science. Brynjolfsson is the founder of two companies and has been awarded five U.S. patents. His recent research examines intangible assets, information worker productivity, the Long Tail in digital goods, and business process replication. At MIT, he teaches a class on "The Economics of Information: Strategy, Structure and Pricing" and hosts a related blog Economics of Information. Brynjolfsson earned his A.B., Magna cum laude, and S.M. in Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in Managerial Economics from the MIT Sloan School of Management and has served on the faculties of MIT, Harvard and Stanford. Brynjolfsson lectures and consults worldwide, and serves on corporate boards. He was also a contributing member to the Winter, 2004 Boston Ski and Sports Club (BSSC) Championship flag football team.

Andrew McAfee, author of "Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges," studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself--the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry. He coined the phrase "Enterprise 2.0" in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. He also began blogging at that time, both about Enterprise 2.0 and about his other research. McAfee's blog is widely read, becoming at times one of the 10,000 most popular in the world (according to Technorati). In the July / August issue of Harvard Business Review McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson published "Investing in the IT that Makes a Competitive Difference," a summary of their research investigating IT's links to changes in competition. This work was the first to reveal that competition began to heat up in the US in the mid 1990s--to become faster paced, more turbulent, and more winner-take-all--and that this acceleration was greater in industries that spent more on IT. This research continues, and continues to highlight that technology appears to be significantly reshaping the landscape of competition. McAfee is the author or co-author of more than fifteen scholarly articles and ninety case studies and other materials for students and teachers of technology. This work has convinced him that modern information technology is the most powerful tool available to business leaders, yet also the most misunderstood and under-appreciated resource at their disposal. In 2008 McAfee was named by the editors of the technical publishing house Ziff-Davis number 38 in their list of the "100 Most Influential People in IT." He was also named by Baseline magazine to a separate, unranked list of the 50 most influential people in business IT that year. He was invited by Prof. Gary Hamel to join a 'renegade brigade' of thinkers in the task of assembling a set of Moon Shots for Management, which was published in the January 2009 Harvard Business Review. He speaks frequently to both academic and industry audiences, and has taught in executive education programs around the world. McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.