The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

In particular, it would be a mistake to assume that all ‘college-level tasks’ are hard to automate while ‘kindergarten tasks’ are easy.

Digital ranking and filtering create disproportional returns even in labor markets for workaday, non-superstar careers.

One of our favorite quotes of his is, “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.”21 When we look at the amount of digital data being created and think about how much more insight there is to be gained, we’re pretty sure he’s not wrong, either.

Hans Moravec has observed, “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

Not only was this software at least as accurate as humans, it also identified three features of breast cancer tissue that turned out to be good predictors of survival rates.

IBM estimates that it would take a human doctor 160 hours of reading each and every week just to keep up with relevant new literature.

As these examples show, our economic welfare is only loosely related to GDP.

Rapid advances in our digital tools are creating unprecedented wealth, but there is no economic law that says all workers, or even a majority of workers, will benefit from these advances.

OF THE 3.5 TRILLION photos that have been snapped since the first image of a busy Parisian street in 1838, fully 10 percent were taken in the last year.