The Second Machine Age

Loosely extending from their previous collaboration, Race Against the Machine, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014), argues that a new technological age, which they term the Second Machine Age, is about to emerge. They characterize the Second Machine Age as the period in which automation overtakes the cognitive requirements of labor, rendering labor mostly unnecessary for humans to engage in themselves. They refute the contemporary argument that technology and humanity will always complement each other in the labor domain, relegating that phenomena to the earlier, “First Machine Age.” The book uses a mixture of evidence and speculation to project, in a rigorous manner, the near-future of technological evolution.

The Second Machine Age begins with a look at the “big stories” that govern our perception of technological history, and which simultaneously bias us when we try to look into the future. The authors contend that the evolution of global society began with the advent of the steam machine in the mid-eighteenth century. When this new device enabled the production of huge amounts of power and became widely accessible, humans no longer needed to exert themselves for many large-motor tasks. In contrast, the second machine age is characterized by the arrival of computers, which exert mental power. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that machines are now starting to process symbols, the crux of cognition. As examples, he uses the Apple product Siri, the self-driving car, and the artificial intelligence engine that now beats the best Jeopardy! player. Robots are tireless, giving them an inherent advantage over humans.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee tie the second machine age to Moore’s Law, which posits that the complexity of the essential units of hardware increases twofold each year. The law has held to be more or less true since it was introduced half a century ago. As this complexity increases, computers can take on increasingly more difficult tasks. This has led to increased digitization; that is, the computer rendering and storage of objects and knowledge that were once located in the physical world or the human mind. Machines can now make decisions that would take as long as human lives, or longer, to make without them. This fact has ramifications in virtually every industry and academic field, from statistics to law.



Brynjolfsson and McAfee spend a good deal of time on defining the subtleties of the often-used concept, “innovation.” The authors argue that just about every modern process can be accurately called an innovation, since it is in the process of transformation even as it is utilized. They argue that innovation consists of the experimental and accidental combination of older concepts. As a corollary of this definition, they argue that the increase in educated and intelligent agents, including computerized ones, will cause innovation to accelerate, increasing our capacity for accurately predicting the future. The authors credit innovation, writ large, with the totality of economic growth, since it leads to the diversification and specialization of goods and services, leading to more efficient human actions.

After their broad survey of the technological landscape, Brynjolfsson and McAfee make recommendations for policy and behavior in the short- and long-run. They exhort policymakers to invest more in education, focus on training better teachers, paying them better, and revamping curricula. They also recommend reducing the financial barriers to entrepreneurship, especially in the case of software startups. As part of that recommendation, they recommend a decrease in taxes, believing that it will increase productivity. Finally, they recommend that we make an effort to ensure that everyone has work that creates personal value, adding intellectual and emotional richness to our lives. Human happiness is the ultimate object of human progress, and the domain of technology is not exempt from that truth.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee believe that machine intelligence and social networks will define our future. The Second Machine Age, while it warns us of the ramifications of our changing world, looks hopefully toward the time when these two core industries drastically improve our lives.