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

originated at the California research institute SRI International and was purchased by Apple in 2010, listened to what iPhone users were saying to it, tried to identify what they wanted,

This reflects the career advice that Google chief economist Hal Varian frequently gives: seek to be an indispensable complement to something that’s getting cheap and plentiful.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.” —Elbert Hubbard

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” —Albert A. Bartlett

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.” —Freeman Dyson

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power—the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments—what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. . . . As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

There is no better resource for improving the world and bettering the state of humanity than the world’s humans—all 7.1 billion of us.

Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.

When technology advances too quickly for education to keep up, inequality generally rises.

The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.

But they are useless. They can only give you answers.” —Pablo Picasso, on computers

The Gross National Product does not include the beauty of our poetry or the intelligence of our public debate. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” —Robert F. Kennedy

Not only are the new technologies exponential, digital, and combinatorial, but most of the gains are still ahead of us. In the next twenty-four months, the planet will add more computer power than it did in all previous history. Over the next twenty-four years, the increase will likely be over a thousand-fold.

To invent something is to find it in what previously exists.

As a system capitalism is not perfect, but it’s far better than the alternatives. Winston Churchill said that, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”2 We believe the same about capitalism.

Between 1811 and 1817, a group of English textile workers whose jobs were threatened by the automated looms of the first Industrial Revolution rallied around a perhaps mythical, Robin Hood–like figure named Ned Ludd and attacked mills and machinery before being suppressed by the British government.

A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.” —Mahatma Gandhi

Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” —Voltaire

Montessori classrooms emphasize self-directed learning, hands-on engagement with a wide variety of materials (including plants and animals), and a largely unstructured school day. And in recent years they’ve produced alumni including the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales). These examples appear to be part of a broader trend. Management researchers Jeffrey Dyer and Hal Gregersen interviewed five hundred prominent innovators and found that a disproportionate number of them also went to Montessori schools, where “they learned to follow their curiosity.” As a Wall Street Journal blog post by Peter Sims put it, “the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia.” Whether or not he’s part of this mafia, Andy will vouch for the power of SOLEs. He was a Montessori kid for the

The argument that technology cannot create ongoing structural unemployment, rather than just temporary spells of joblessness during recessions, rests on two pillars: 1) economic theory and 2) two hundred years of historical evidence. But both of these are less solid than they first appear. First, the theory. There are three economic mechanisms that are candidates for explaining technological unemployment: inelastic demand, rapid change, and severe inequality. If technology leads to more efficient use of labor, then as the economists on the National Academy of Sciences panel pointed out, this does not automatically lead to reduced demand for labor. Lower costs may lead to lower prices for goods, and in turn, lower prices lead to greater demand for the goods, which can ultimately lead to an increase in demand for labor as well.

Albert Einstein once said that black holes are where God divided by zero, and that created some strange physics. While the marginal costs of digital goods do not quite approach zero, they are close enough to create some pretty strange economics.