The essential lesson here is that, when datasets are large enough, the knowledge encapsulated in all that data will often trump the efforts of even the best programmers.

chance to also specialize and thereby earn a higher income.

History suggests that the ideal is a mildly inflationary trajectory where incomes grow faster than consumer prices, making the things we want to buy more affordable over time.

This time is always different where technology is concerned: that, after all, is the entire point of innovation. Ultimately, the question of whether smart machines will someday eclipse the capability of average people to perform much of the work demanded by the economy will be answered by the nature of the technology that arrives in the future—not

the result very often is credential inflation; many occupations that once required only a high school diploma are now open only to those with a four-year college degree, the master’s becomes the new bachelor’s, and degrees from nonelite schools are devalued.

On January 2, 2010, the Washington Post reported that the first decade of the twenty-first century resulted in the creation of no new jobs. Zero.2 This hasn’t been true of any decade since the Great Depression; indeed, there has never been a postwar decade that produced less than a 20 percent increase in the number of available jobs. Even the

the problem is not that more jobs are being destroyed in downturns; it is that fewer are being created during recoveries.

As a practical matter, for the majority of people who lose middle-class jobs, access to a smart phone may offer little beyond the ability to play Angry Birds while waiting in the unemployment line.

human-machine collaboration, rather than full automation, will come to dominate the workplaces of the future.