Scan barcode
bitterroot728's review against another edition
5.0
An interesting look at the economics of the coming technological boom. The idea of exponential growth, when it comes to Moore's Law and computing power, means that our lives are due to change dramatically in a very short time (two to three years). They come up with policy recommendations and what readers can do themselves to prepare for the coming SINGULARITY.
atxspacecowboy's review against another edition
3.0
Overall, The Second Machine Age was well done and hyper-relevant for the line of work I am in, so it was exciting at times.
...except when it wasn't.
Notes:
Roboticist Hans Moravec said, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult, or impossible, to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."
Moravec's Paradox:
Contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensory motor skills require you enormous computational resources.
With A.I., the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.
Digitization
Of the 3.5 trillion photos that have been snapped since the first photo in 1838, fully 10% have been taken in the last year.
It is estimated that more photos now are taken every 2 minutes than in all of the 19th century.
The primary driver for income inequality is exponential, digital and combinatorial change in the technology that undergirds our economic system. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that similar trends are apparent in similarly advanced countries. For instance, in Sweden, Finland and Germany income inequality has actually grown more quickly over the past 20-30 years than in the United States.
"In a very real sense, as long as there are unmet needs and wants in the world, unemployment is a loud warning that we simply aren't thinking hard enough about what needs doing. We aren't being creative enough about solving the problems we have, using the freedom of time and energy of the people whose jobs were automated away."
Voltaire said: "Judge a man by his questions not by his answers."
and
"Work save a man from three great evils; boredom, vice and need."
Economist Andrew Oswald found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of a spouse and that little of this decline arises from the loss of income. Instead, it arises from a loss of self worth.
Jim Clifton, Gallup CEO said, "The primary will of the world is no longer about peace, or freedom, or even democracy. It is not about having a family and it is neither about God nor owning a home or land. The will of the world is first and foremost to have a good job, everything else comes after that."
Sociologist William Julius Wilson:
The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless.
Some of the "We support _____ tax/cause/etc" statements towards the end were a little too much for me. Also, it's clear that they have ties to Apple or are just huge Apple fans because every time they brought up a piece of technology it was "like that which is featured in Apple's iPhone/pad/pood/whatever."
...except when it wasn't.
Notes:
Roboticist Hans Moravec said, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult, or impossible, to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."
Moravec's Paradox:
Contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensory motor skills require you enormous computational resources.
With A.I., the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.
Digitization
Of the 3.5 trillion photos that have been snapped since the first photo in 1838, fully 10% have been taken in the last year.
It is estimated that more photos now are taken every 2 minutes than in all of the 19th century.
The primary driver for income inequality is exponential, digital and combinatorial change in the technology that undergirds our economic system. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that similar trends are apparent in similarly advanced countries. For instance, in Sweden, Finland and Germany income inequality has actually grown more quickly over the past 20-30 years than in the United States.
"In a very real sense, as long as there are unmet needs and wants in the world, unemployment is a loud warning that we simply aren't thinking hard enough about what needs doing. We aren't being creative enough about solving the problems we have, using the freedom of time and energy of the people whose jobs were automated away."
Voltaire said: "Judge a man by his questions not by his answers."
and
"Work save a man from three great evils; boredom, vice and need."
Economist Andrew Oswald found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of a spouse and that little of this decline arises from the loss of income. Instead, it arises from a loss of self worth.
Jim Clifton, Gallup CEO said, "The primary will of the world is no longer about peace, or freedom, or even democracy. It is not about having a family and it is neither about God nor owning a home or land. The will of the world is first and foremost to have a good job, everything else comes after that."
Sociologist William Julius Wilson:
The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless.
Some of the "We support _____ tax/cause/etc" statements towards the end were a little too much for me. Also, it's clear that they have ties to Apple or are just huge Apple fans because every time they brought up a piece of technology it was "like that which is featured in Apple's iPhone/pad/pood/whatever."
blkmymorris's review against another edition
4.0
It's a fascinating generalist overview of the future of technology and how it will affect employment and the economy.
I can't lie that the displacement of jobs caused by some technology is depressing, like a dystopian science fiction novel. The most interesting bit were their discussion of how to prepare people for the changing economy and what the government could do about incomes.
I can't lie that the displacement of jobs caused by some technology is depressing, like a dystopian science fiction novel. The most interesting bit were their discussion of how to prepare people for the changing economy and what the government could do about incomes.
rc1140's review against another edition
2.0
Average book, the content was average as well with much of it just providing alot of back story (from mobile)
greg_talbot's review against another edition
5.0
Truly one of those books that just ties all these huge themes of technology, business and culture together.
The first book explores how to frame the AI revolution. We see the beginnings of this technology in the digitization of our experiences. This self-data that we publish into Facebook and Instragram is a sellable market research. As a consumer, it is exciting to see the optimization of product recommendations, dating partners, meetup groups or anything that we seek. And it's just the beginning.
Brynjolfsson states that steam propelled the industrial revolution in ways that we could not immediately comprehend. But as the myth of John Henry tells us, industrialization of labor changed the very kind of work we do. The analogy holds for the AI revolution. The type of work we are doing, and our identity is undergoing a dramatic change.
Technology's value to expand workforce production and our economy is tied to the underlying implemenation of this new suite of general purpose technologies. Brynjolfsson develops a theory of progress - that recombinate technologies, applying different lens and perspectives on the underlying tools can skyrocket innovation. Some of the "unbreakable" NASA and kaggle projects reviewed are cracked - by individuals with limited expertise in the focused area. Simialrly, we should expect dramatic updates to AI, Internet of Things, virtual reality, machine learning and quantum computer, but likely not in ways we think.
The second half of the book is just as riveting. The AI revolution will demand political action if democracy will survive. The extreme inequality of the .1% and the working class will likely get worse. We are given some perspectives to consider the means of production in this technocrat class. Ethical considerations and educating our young people to be prepared for this economy is prudent and necessary.
Ultimately a very thought-provoking book.
The first book explores how to frame the AI revolution. We see the beginnings of this technology in the digitization of our experiences. This self-data that we publish into Facebook and Instragram is a sellable market research. As a consumer, it is exciting to see the optimization of product recommendations, dating partners, meetup groups or anything that we seek. And it's just the beginning.
Brynjolfsson states that steam propelled the industrial revolution in ways that we could not immediately comprehend. But as the myth of John Henry tells us, industrialization of labor changed the very kind of work we do. The analogy holds for the AI revolution. The type of work we are doing, and our identity is undergoing a dramatic change.
Technology's value to expand workforce production and our economy is tied to the underlying implemenation of this new suite of general purpose technologies. Brynjolfsson develops a theory of progress - that recombinate technologies, applying different lens and perspectives on the underlying tools can skyrocket innovation. Some of the "unbreakable" NASA and kaggle projects reviewed are cracked - by individuals with limited expertise in the focused area. Simialrly, we should expect dramatic updates to AI, Internet of Things, virtual reality, machine learning and quantum computer, but likely not in ways we think.
The second half of the book is just as riveting. The AI revolution will demand political action if democracy will survive. The extreme inequality of the .1% and the working class will likely get worse. We are given some perspectives to consider the means of production in this technocrat class. Ethical considerations and educating our young people to be prepared for this economy is prudent and necessary.
Ultimately a very thought-provoking book.
hayesall's review against another edition
5.0
I was nervous that I'd have to write this off as "an entertaining bit of futurism surveying some cutting-edge technologies in 2014." But the last four chapters completely changed how I viewed the first few.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee wrote a book that is part history and part economics, with a focus on how advances in technology shaped (and certainly will continue to shape) human societies. The first few chapters weren't preparing to engage in futurism, they were an attempt to survey recent advances to convince people that we're in a place we've been before, but at a completely different scale. I'm not someone who needed convincing of this. In 2014 the authors were engaging with a serious problem that every nation on Earth should pay attention to: advances in technology are here, automation is changing the nature of work, so what do we do about it?.
The main policy items are: (1) updating the education system, and (2) developing public programs to protect the most vulnerable to this change. These are split into notes on "what individuals can do" and "what can be done collectively." I'll have read further to assess (1): the authors suggest a Montessori system focused on developing curiosity, but the main citations seem to be for a TED talk, and it wasn't clear how this should translate into higher education. Suggestions for (2) included universal basic income, but in lieu of that topic being a non-starter (until just prior to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election) they suggested slightly different ways to interpret U.S. tax codes, such as a negative income tax. They also challenged readers to think through some of their own, which I'll suggest toward the end.
I had a few qualms though. Their presentation of the "sharing economy" and "infinitely copyable digital goods" were each dressed in the language of exclusive rival goods, i.e.: the sort of things where "I have implies you don't have." In some ways they suggested this was a good thing: the average person's Spotify library now has more music than anyone on Earth had thirty years ago. In other ways they lamented that music being infinitely copyable now meant that median salaries for music artists (or record labels) fell while the 0.1% of artists reached record highs as a fact of the agglomerative processes underlying it. The authors also mentioned cooperative systems—particularly Wikipedia—as being able to provide more than any privately-maintained encyclopedia. But I didn't feel that their discussion of either example reached an obvious conclusion: a lot of goods that used to be exclusive are now common pool resources, and their presentation of what happens now didn't quite connect these examples back to the observation they made in chapter 4.
I'm definitely not the first person to suggest such a conclusion as the world goes digital. Eric Raymond (the open source evangelist that the authors invoked when discussing distributed innovation in chapter five) suggested in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2001) that "giving away software" would seem absurd to people used to thinking from a perspective of exclusive, rival goods; but made perfect sense if sharing some resources meant that each person wouldn't have to waste time reimplementing something infinitely copyable that already exists. But if every resource existed in the common pool, he concluded that a natural direction for society would be to engage in "gift culture," where participants gain social capital not according to what they have, but what they give away by putting into the pool. Brynjolfsson and McAfee's policy recommendations are sorely needed, but I think I'm more optimistic than both in terms of long-term prospects for human society—or, perhaps I just want to work on maintaining the commons more than I want to work on maintaining a share price. I agree with the spirit of the Voltaire quote the authors referenced, and I hope the coming years will allow people to pursue common resources and pursue work that is personally meaningful to them.
Some other thoughts:
It seems like this book should be borderline required reading alongside Hillbilly Elegy. I mentioned in my review that the book was interesting as an extremely-tailored-first-person-account of growing up in the 1990s Rust Belt, but wasn't great at accounting for wider economic forces shaping events in the narrative. "The Second Machine Age" on the other hand points to surveys comparing how college-educated U.S. citizens and high-school educated citizens in fairly similar locations are faring far differently, and a huge part of that has to do with education and automation.
It was uncanny how close the first ten chapters were with sections in C.G.P. Grey's Humans Need Not Apply. I spent a little time trying to piece together a timeline, both are listed as published in 2014, but The Second Machine Age publication date appears to be in January. I suspect all three respective authors were reading similar material, but if I need a refresher in the future I could probably watch the video and read the last section of this book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee wrote a book that is part history and part economics, with a focus on how advances in technology shaped (and certainly will continue to shape) human societies. The first few chapters weren't preparing to engage in futurism, they were an attempt to survey recent advances to convince people that we're in a place we've been before, but at a completely different scale. I'm not someone who needed convincing of this. In 2014 the authors were engaging with a serious problem that every nation on Earth should pay attention to: advances in technology are here, automation is changing the nature of work, so what do we do about it?.
The main policy items are: (1) updating the education system, and (2) developing public programs to protect the most vulnerable to this change. These are split into notes on "what individuals can do" and "what can be done collectively." I'll have read further to assess (1): the authors suggest a Montessori system focused on developing curiosity, but the main citations seem to be for a TED talk, and it wasn't clear how this should translate into higher education. Suggestions for (2) included universal basic income, but in lieu of that topic being a non-starter (until just prior to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election) they suggested slightly different ways to interpret U.S. tax codes, such as a negative income tax. They also challenged readers to think through some of their own, which I'll suggest toward the end.
I had a few qualms though. Their presentation of the "sharing economy" and "infinitely copyable digital goods" were each dressed in the language of exclusive rival goods, i.e.: the sort of things where "I have implies you don't have." In some ways they suggested this was a good thing: the average person's Spotify library now has more music than anyone on Earth had thirty years ago. In other ways they lamented that music being infinitely copyable now meant that median salaries for music artists (or record labels) fell while the 0.1% of artists reached record highs as a fact of the agglomerative processes underlying it. The authors also mentioned cooperative systems—particularly Wikipedia—as being able to provide more than any privately-maintained encyclopedia. But I didn't feel that their discussion of either example reached an obvious conclusion: a lot of goods that used to be exclusive are now common pool resources, and their presentation of what happens now didn't quite connect these examples back to the observation they made in chapter 4.
I'm definitely not the first person to suggest such a conclusion as the world goes digital. Eric Raymond (the open source evangelist that the authors invoked when discussing distributed innovation in chapter five) suggested in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2001) that "giving away software" would seem absurd to people used to thinking from a perspective of exclusive, rival goods; but made perfect sense if sharing some resources meant that each person wouldn't have to waste time reimplementing something infinitely copyable that already exists. But if every resource existed in the common pool, he concluded that a natural direction for society would be to engage in "gift culture," where participants gain social capital not according to what they have, but what they give away by putting into the pool. Brynjolfsson and McAfee's policy recommendations are sorely needed, but I think I'm more optimistic than both in terms of long-term prospects for human society—or, perhaps I just want to work on maintaining the commons more than I want to work on maintaining a share price. I agree with the spirit of the Voltaire quote the authors referenced, and I hope the coming years will allow people to pursue common resources and pursue work that is personally meaningful to them.
Some other thoughts:
It seems like this book should be borderline required reading alongside Hillbilly Elegy. I mentioned in my review that the book was interesting as an extremely-tailored-first-person-account of growing up in the 1990s Rust Belt, but wasn't great at accounting for wider economic forces shaping events in the narrative. "The Second Machine Age" on the other hand points to surveys comparing how college-educated U.S. citizens and high-school educated citizens in fairly similar locations are faring far differently, and a huge part of that has to do with education and automation.
It was uncanny how close the first ten chapters were with sections in C.G.P. Grey's Humans Need Not Apply. I spent a little time trying to piece together a timeline, both are listed as published in 2014, but The Second Machine Age publication date appears to be in January. I suspect all three respective authors were reading similar material, but if I need a refresher in the future I could probably watch the video and read the last section of this book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
nzagalo's review against another edition
4.0
Book about the changes occurred in the domains of technologies in the last 50 years, and its effects in society, mainly in current economy. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee start by overviewing technologies and then go in depth recognising the side effects of its advances in economy and capitalism, recognising that the effects of this second age are not similar to the ones from the first age (Industrial Revolution), mainly in terms of real job disappearance and inequality, supporting general ideas from the movement 99%.
The authors dedicate a big part also discussing new opportunities and some possible policies to deal with the revolution going on. A lot of the discussion here presented can be found elsewhere as with Lanier, but the possible ultimate book on this topic, not from a technological side, but from the economic perspective must be “Capital” (2014) by Thomas Piketty that I intend to read after.
I’ll have a more in depth look on the ideas presented by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee about future solutions for humans, in terms of learning skills and the rise of solutions where machines and humans work together to achieve the best of both worlds. In my blog in some days.
The authors dedicate a big part also discussing new opportunities and some possible policies to deal with the revolution going on. A lot of the discussion here presented can be found elsewhere as with Lanier, but the possible ultimate book on this topic, not from a technological side, but from the economic perspective must be “Capital” (2014) by Thomas Piketty that I intend to read after.
I’ll have a more in depth look on the ideas presented by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee about future solutions for humans, in terms of learning skills and the rise of solutions where machines and humans work together to achieve the best of both worlds. In my blog in some days.
allethio's review against another edition
4.0
Téma je obsáhle a zajímavé, ale mám pocit, že bych nad tou knížkou potřebovala strávit mnohem víc času, abych pochytila všechny myšlenky v ní prezentované. Lidé více než dřív potřebují získávat znalosti a dovednosti, které budou komplementární ke strojům, rozvíjet kreativitu a hledat nové způsoby, jak stroje využít.