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

instead of scarcity, freedom instead of constraint—but one that will bring with it some difficult challenges and choices.
    This book is divided into three sections. The first, composed of chapters 1 through 6, describes the fundamental characteristics of the second machine age. These chapters give many examples of recent technological progress that seem like the stuff of science fiction, explain why they’re happening now (after all, we’ve had computers for decades), and reveal why we should be confident that the scale and pace of innovation in computers, robots, and other digital gear is only going to accelerate in the future.
    The second part, consisting of chapters 7 through 11, explores bounty and spread, the two economic consequences of this progress. Bounty is the increase in volume, variety, and quality and the decrease in cost of the many offerings brought on by modern technological progress. It’s the best economic news in the world today. Spread, however, is not so great; it’s ever-bigger differences among people in economic success—in wealth, income, mobility, and other important measures. Spread has been increasing in recent years. This is a troubling development for many reasons, and one that will accelerate in the second machine age unless we intervene.
    The final section—chapters 12 through 15—discusses what interventions will be appropriate and effective for this age. Our economic goals should be to maximize the bounty while mitigating the negative effects of the spread. We’ll offer our ideas about how to best accomplish these aims, both in the short term and in the more distant future, when progress really has brought us into a world so technologically advanced that it seems to be the stuff of science fiction. As we stress in our concluding chapter, the choices we make from now on will determine what kind of world that is.
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    * Morris defines human social development as consisting of four attributes: energy capture (per-person calories obtained from the environment for food, home and commerce, industry and agriculture, and transportation), organization (the size of the largest city), war-making capacity (number of troops, power and speed of weapons, logistical capabilities, and other similar factors), and information technology (the sophistication of available tools for sharing and processing information, and the extent of their use). Each of these is converted into a number that varies over time from zero to 250. Overall social development is simply the sum of these four numbers. Because he was interested in comparisons between the West (Europe, Mesopotamia, and North America at various times, depending on which was most advanced) and the East (China and Japan), he calculated social development separately for each area from 14,000 BCE to 2000 CE. In 2000, the East was higher only in organization (since Tokyo was the world’s largest city) and had a social development score of 564.83. The West’s score in 2000 was 906.37. We average the two scores.
    * We refer to the Industrial Revolution as the first machine age. However, “the machine age” is also a label used by some economic historians to refer to a period of rapid technological progress spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This same period is called by others the Second Industrial Revolution, which is how we’ll refer to it in later chapters.

I N THE SUMMER OF 2012, we went for a drive in a car that had no driver.
    During a research visit to Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, we got to ride in one of the company’s autonomous vehicles, developed as part of its Chauffeur project. Initially we had visions of cruising in the back seat of a car that had no one in the front seat, but Google is understandably skittish about putting obviously autonomous autos on the road. Doing so might freak out pedestrians and other drivers, or attract the attention of the police. So we sat in the back while two members of