Authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, a pair of MIT
business technology gurus offer up interesting perspectives on how technology impacts
not only our lives, but also the economics of it all in The Second Machine Age – Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of
Brilliant Technologies.
The pair make the case that not only is there the tangible
impact of the improvements on our lives that technological advancements in many
fields have brought us, but also that technology has elevated the level of even
the those at the lowest end of the economic scale.
While politicians and many economists have argued that the
widening spread between the haves and the have-nots is somehow a fatal flaw of
capitalism, Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit the theory of “the bounty” that
technology has delivered to us all in that “spread.” They also offer up some
suggestions for policy makers to address some of the problems created in
society by the rapid advancement of technologies as we prepare for what will
continue to be an evolving workforce, that we are merely in the early stages of
currently.
One problem that the authors do not address is the valuation
of many of the technological “advancements” that we have seen rapidly create
new millionaires and billionaires while not really creating much in the way of
new value. Websites and apps that allegedly “improve” our lives, really don’t
have the same impact as say the creation of the automobile or the refrigerator
from a prior machine age. We aren’t taking base raw materials and creating
something of greater value with the advent of Facebook; where rather than
creating an increased value, we have further diluted a static pool of dollars.
The size of the pie hasn’t increased, there are just more people looking for a
slice and it’s only natural that some will take a larger hunk while others are
left with crumbs.
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