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Digital Frontier Press
February 2012
On Sale: January 23, 2012
98 pages ISBN: 0984725113 EAN: 9780984725113 Kindle: B005WTR4ZI Paperback / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Why has median income stopped rising in the
US? Why is the share of population that is
working falling so rapidly?
Why are our
economy and society are becoming more unequal?A
popular explanation right now is that the root cause
underlying these symptoms is technological stagnation-- a
slowdown in the kinds of ideas and inventions that bring
progress and prosperity. In Race Against the
Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by
their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show
that there's been no stagnation in technology -- in fact,
the digital revolution is accelerating. Recent advances are
the stuff of science fiction: computers now drive cars in
traffic, translate between human languages effectively, and
beat the best human Jeopardy! players. As these
examples show, digital technologies are rapidly encroaching
on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This
phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic
implications. Many of these implications are positive;
digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices
(sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic
pie. But digital innovation has also changed how the
economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good
for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can
leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been
mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and
see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial
business models, new organizational structures and different
institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is
not left behind by cutting-edge machines. In Race
Against the Machine Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring
together a range of statistics, examples, and arguments to
show that technological progress is accelerating, and that
this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and
jobs. The book makes the case that employment prospects are
grim for many today not because there's been technology has
stagnated, but instead because we humans and our
organizations aren't keeping up.
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