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A review by hayesall
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson
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