If I Had a Hammer

From Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s fascinating new book, “The Second Machine Age,”

• The First Machine Age, they argue, was the Industrial Revolution that was born along with the steam engine in the late 1700s. This period was “all about power systems to augment human muscle ... but they all required humans to make decisions about them.” Therefore, the inventions of this era actually made human control and labor “more valuable and important.” Labor and machines were complementary.

• In the Second Machine Age, though, argues Brynjolfsson, “we are beginning to automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that determine what to use that power for. In many cases today artificially intelligent machines can make better decisions than humans.”

• So humans and software-driven machines may increasingly be substitutes, not complements.

What’s making this possible, the authors argue, are three huge technological advances that just reached their tipping points:

• Exponential: Example - Unlike the steam engine, which was physical and doubled in performance every 70 years, computers “get better, faster than anything else, ever,”

• Digital: Example - Add the spread of the Internet to both people and things — soon everyone on the planet will have a smartphone, and every cash register, airplane engine, student iPad and thermostat will be broadcasting digital data via the Internet. All this data means we can instantly discover and analyze patterns, instantly replicate what is working on a global scale and instantly improve what isn’t working. Suddenly, the speed and slope of improvement, they argue, gets very fast and steep.

• Combinatorial: Example - , Take Google Maps and combine them with a smartphone app like Waze, through which drivers automatically transmit traffic conditions on their routes by just carrying their phone in their car, and meld both into a GPS system that not only tells you what the best route is to your destination but what the best route now is because it also sees all the traffic everywhere. Instantly, you’re the smartest driver in town.

Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology.

Read the whole story at The New York Times