THE SECOND MACHINE AGE

Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolffson

WHAT IS 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.
 HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM THE
FIRST MACHINE AGE?
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 Second Machine Age begins with a look at the “big stories” that
govern our perception of technological history,

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.
 THE TRANSITION OF FOCUS FROM
MOTOR TO COGNITIVE 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
 MOORE’S LAW AND THE SECOND
MACHINE AGE
• 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.
 DIGITIZATION AND THE MACHINE
DRIVEN DECISION MAKING
• 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.