The Second Machine Age summary

Legend has it that when chess was invented, the ruling emperor was so pleased with the game that he told the inventor to name his reward. After some thought, the man asked for some rice: one grain on the first square of the chessboard, two on the next square, four on the next and so on.

How much rice do you think he had when all 64 squares were covered?

Anyone who’s ever surfed the internet knows that there is a vast amount of information available. But you may nevertheless be surprised at just how vast it is.

In 2012, there were 2.7 sextillion (ten to the power of 21) bytes of data online. If the amount keeps growing at the current rate, the metric system may soon run out of orders of magnitude big enough to describe it.

How do you measure the productivity of a society?

For several decades, the generally accepted answer has been to use Gross Domestic Product (GDP): the total economic output of a country measured in terms of the market price of the goods and services it produces. The idea is that the more a country produces and sells, the healthier its economy must be.

Many recent technological innovations have become household names, and the companies that produced them have met with enormous success.

Consider the incredibly successful photography app Instagram. In just 15 months it went from a small start-up with 15 employees to having over 16 billion photos shared on its service. Eventually, Facebook bought the company for over one billion dollars.

As you saw in the previous blink, the fruits of the Second Machine Age are not distributed evenly. In fact, we can clearly see an immensely wealthy elite forming at the top of society: in the United States the highest-earning 0.01 percent of society earns a whopping 20 percent of all income.

Now, you probably think that most people in this group are Wall Street bankers and CEOs whose massive bonuses you have read about in the newspapers. They do indeed belong in the mega-earners group, but you may be surprised to find out it also comprises writers, entertainers, and computer programmers.

Now you know that the Second Machine Age will not bring prosperity to all, but instead heap riches upon a few lucky individuals while others lose their jobs to machines.

So what exactly does the future of human labor look like?