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

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

By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

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A New York Times Bestseller. A "fascinating" (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times ) look at how digital technology is transforming our work and our lives.

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Book Information

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: 01/25/2016
Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780393350647
ISBN-10: 0393350649
Language: English

What We're Saying

December 09, 2014

The 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards category winners (and shortlist for the best book of the year) 2014. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

November 13, 2014

The culling process we undertake during the awards process is always rigorous, but we've narrowed it down to 40 books—5 each in 8 categories. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

November 12, 2014

The business and economic world's most visible book award was announced today. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

November 05, 2014

The s+b yearly list is always decidedly and refreshingly different than most others. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

September 25, 2014

A shortlist for the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award was announced yesterday. The books chosen focus very much on the big-picture issues of the day, "the most important trends shaping our world" as the press release puts it, so the switch from Goldman Sachs to McKinsey as a partner to FT has not reduced the scope of the books as I thought it may. (I speculated back in May when the announcement was made that McKinsey would now be backing the award that it may change focus to the more nuts-and-bolts business management issues that McKinsey ostensibly focuses on in its own work. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

August 07, 2014

I speculated back in May when submissions opened for The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company 2014 Business Book of the Year Award that the books they looked at would be more focused on business nuts-and-bolts issues now that a consultancy firm (McKinsey) had taken over for an investment bank (Goldman Sachs) as the Financial Times' partner on the awards. I also thought they would not be announcing a longlist as they had in the past because it was not on their awards schedule. It seems I was wrong on both counts, because The Financial Times and McKinsey announced a longlist this morning, and the books on it are mostly big-picture books, not nut-and-bolts business and management books. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

August 14, 2015

Jerry Kaplan presents provocative ideas for how our broader economy—even our basic definition of “work”—will have to change as artificial intelligence advances. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

Full Description

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.

About the Authors

Erik Brynjolfsson, Schussel Family Professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, is the coeditor of Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools, and Research (MIT Press).

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Andrew McAfee coined the phrase Enterprise 2. 0 in a 2006 Sloan Management Review article. He is on the faculty of Harvard Business School's Technology and Operations Management department.

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