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The Second Machine Age, in detail
The Second Machine Age is Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's argument that digital technology has entered a qualitatively new phase — one in which machines can perform cognitive tasks previously reserved for humans, creating economic disruption and opportunity simultaneously. The first machine age was the Industrial Revolution, which automated physical labor. The second machine age automates mental work.
The book's starting framework is exponential growth. Brynjolfsson and McAfee use the famous parable of the inventor who asked for one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on — producing a number larger than all the rice ever grown. They argue that digital technology has reached the second half of the chessboard, where the doublings start producing truly enormous numbers. Computing power, storage, bandwidth, and the capabilities built on them are now in this phase.
The economic argument is more cautious than the typical techno-optimism. The book distinguishes bounty — the growth in total output and the declining costs of digitally delivered goods and services — from spread — the growing inequality in how that bounty is distributed. Automation tends to raise productivity and lower costs for consumers while simultaneously concentrating gains among owners of capital and highly skilled workers who complement automation, while displacing workers in routinizable middle-skill jobs. This polarization of the labor market — strong demand at the top and bottom but declining demand in the middle — is documented with labor market data.
The policy recommendations include reforming education to emphasize creativity and interpersonal skills that are hard to automate, negative income taxes or earned income tax credits to support workers displaced by automation, investment in infrastructure and basic research, and rethinking immigration policy to attract skilled workers. The book is analytically stronger than it is prescriptively specific: the policy recommendations are sensible but familiar.
The big ideas
- 1.
Digital technology has entered a qualitatively new phase in which cognitive work is being automated alongside physical work — the second machine age, analogous to the first machine age of industrialization.
- 2.
Exponential growth in computing creates nonlinear effects: capabilities that seem modest double after double eventually become transformative, and many organizations are in the second half of the chessboard.
- 3.
Automation creates bounty — greater output, lower prices, more variety — and spread — growing inequality between workers who complement technology and workers who compete with it.
