Race Against the Machine

Not to be confused with Rage Against the Machine.
Race Against the Machine
Author Erik Brynjolfsson
Andrew McAfee
Country United States
Language English
Published 2011
ISBN 0-984-72511-3

Race Against the Machine is a non-fiction book from 2011 by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee about the interaction of digital technology, employment and organization. The full title of the book is: Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.

One of main theses in the book is that the pace of automation has picked up in recent years due to a combination of increasingly clever technologies including robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized inventory management software, speech recognition, speaker recognition, language translation, self-driving vehicles, pattern recognition and online commerce. The authors write that businesses are increasingly considering the possibility of substituting technology for people, and that corporate use of equipment and software appears to be increasing at a faster rate than employment.[1][2][3][4][5]

Brynjolfsson and McAfee write that advanced digital technologies are making people more innovative, productive and richer, both in the short- and long-term, but potentially at the cost of increasing wealth inequality in society. In the authors' view, one of the main in-egalitarian consequences of digital technological developments is its potentially negative impact on some types of employment, such as routine information processing work. The authors appear to advocate for a collaborative partnership between computers and humans as the road to future job creation. "In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing and even scientific discovery," they write, "the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines."[1][2][3][4][5]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Steve Lohr, More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People, book review in The New York Times, 2011.10.23
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Andrew Keen, Keen On How The Internet Is Making Us Both Richer and More Unequal (TCTV), interview with Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, TechCrunch, 2011.11.15
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 JILL KRASNY, MIT Professors: The 99% Should Shake Their Fists At The Tech Boom, Business Insider, 2011.11.25
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Ascher Schechter, After the Working Class, Technology is Eliminating the Middle Class, TheMarker, 2013.01.11. Quotations and citations in this Wikipedia article are based on the translation from Hebrew to English of the TheMarker article.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Scott Timberg, The Clerk, RIP, Salon.com, 2011.12.18

External links