A bestseller on the New York Times list. An Amazon number one bestseller in its business development book category. The MIT Center for Digital Business has a director (Brynjolfsson) and a principal research scientist (McAfee) who know how to get attention, sell books, and get headlines.

Written briskly in a journalistic, non-technical style, the 300 pages and 15 chapters cover a great deal of ground. Chapters include “The Skills of the New Machines: Technology Races Ahead,” “The Digitization of Just About Everything,” “Innovation: Declining or Recombining?” “Beyond GDP,” “The Biggest Winners: Stars and Superstars,” “Implications of the Bounty and the Spread,” “Learning to Race with Machines: Recommendations for Individuals,” “Policy Recommendations,” and “Long-Term Recommendations” (Ch. 14), and the book concludes with “Technology and the Future (Which is Very Different from ‘Technology Is The Future’).” The titles are indicative of the writing flavor of the book.

The blurb about the book on the publisher’s site (http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Second-Machine-Age/) summarizes thus:

As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.

Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds--from lawyers to truck drivers--will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.

This sounds like the common view in the industrialized center these days. The authors have little to say in terms of a “third world“ point of view except that the less developed economies face no choice but to follow in the steps of the advanced societies. So it is not a technical question, but a policy one. The authors’ policy recommendations offer a so-called “new path to prosperity.” For example, they recommend transforming education so that it prepares people for the “new“ economy, and designing collaborations that pair processing power with human ingenuity.

Some economic arguments seem specious: for example, there is a lengthy argument (p. 114ff) that time spent on activities such as email and YouTube should be calculated as additions to GDP. Less specious and more philosophically interesting are the arguments (p. 190ff) regarding what humans can do that computers cannot, and what the implications of this “ideation” unique to humans might be.

The index is excellent and complete. Footnotes are extensive; however, there is no bibliography, nor are there suggestions for further reading.

There is little here that will offer insight to computer scientists or engineers, and the policy recommendations are so vanilla and general that public policy experts will find little to add to their arsenal. For generalists in the public who have little background knowledge, or who may have previously given little thought to the topics addressed, this book will stimulate thought and may add to the voices for rational planning.

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