The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
Authors: Erik Brynjolfsson,Andrew McAfee
ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON ANDREW MCAFEE
To Martha Pavlakis, the love of my life.
To my parents, David McAfee and Nancy Haller, who prepared me for the second machine age by giving me every advantage a person could have.
Chapter 2 THE SKILLS OF THE NEW MACHINES: TECHNOLOGY RACES AHEAD
Chapter 3 MOORE’S LAW AND THE SECOND HALF OF THE CHESSBOARD
Chapter 4 THE DIGITIZATION OF JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING
Chapter 5 INNOVATION: DECLINING OR RECOMBINING?
Chapter 6 ARTIFICIAL AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IN THE SECOND MACHINE AGE
Chapter 10 THE BIGGEST WINNERS: STARS AND SUPERSTARS
Chapter 11 IMPLICATIONS OF THE BOUNTY AND THE SPREAD
Chapter 12 LEARNING TO RACE
WITH
MACHINES: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR INDIVIDUALS
Chapter 13 POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
Chapter 14 LONG-TERM RECOMMENDATIONS
Chapter 15 TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE
(Which Is Very Different from “Technology
Is
the Future”)
“Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.”
—Freeman Dyson
W
HAT
HAVE
BEEN
THE
most important developments in human history?
As anyone investigating this question soon learns, it’s difficult to answer. For one thing, when does ‘human history’ even begin? Anatomically and behaviorally modern
Homo sapiens
, equipped with language, fanned out from their African homeland some sixty thousand years ago.
1
By 25,000 BCE
2
they had wiped out the Neanderthals and other hominids, and thereafter faced no competition from other big-brained, upright-walking species.
We might consider 25,000 BCE a reasonable time to start tracking the big stories of humankind, were it not for the development-retarding ice age earth was experiencing at the time.
3
In his book
Why the West Rules—For Now
, anthropologist Ian Morris starts tracking human societal progress in 14,000 BCE, when the world clearly started getting warmer.
Another reason it’s a hard question to answer is that it’s not clear what criteria we should use: what constitutes a truly important development? Most of us share a sense that it would be an event or advance that significantly changes the course of things—one that ‘bends the curve’ of human history. Many have argued that the domestication of animals did just this, and is one of our earliest important achievements.
The dog might well have been domesticated before 14,000 BCE, but the horse was not; eight thousand more years would pass before we started breeding them and keeping them in corrals. The ox, too, had been tamed by that time (ca. 6,000 BCE) and hitched to a plow. Domestication of work animals hastened the transition from foraging to farming, an important development already underway by 8,000 BCE.
4
Agriculture ensures plentiful and reliable food sources, which in turn enable larger human settlements and, eventually, cities. Cities in turn make tempting targets for plunder and conquest. A list of important human developments should therefore include great wars and the empires they yielded. The Mongol, Roman, Arab, and Ottoman empires—to name just four—were transformative; they affected kingdoms, commerce, and customs over immense areas.
Of course, some important developments have nothing to do with animals, plants, or fighting men; some are simply ideas. Philosopher Karl Jaspers notes that Buddha (563–483 BCE), Confucius (551–479 BCE), and Socrates (469–399 BCE) all lived quite close to one another in time (but not in place). In his analysis these men are the central thinkers of an ‘Axial Age’ spanning 800–200 BCE. Jaspers calls this age “a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness” and holds that its philosophers brought transformative schools of thought to three major civilizations: Indian, Chinese, and European.
5
The Buddha also founded one of the world’s major religions, and common sense demands that any list of major human developments include the establishment of other major faiths like Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each has influenced the lives and ideals of hundreds of millions of people.
6
Many of these religions’ ideas and revelations were spread by the written word, itself a fundamental innovation in human history. Debate rages about precisely when, where, and how writing was invented, but a safe estimate puts it in Mesopotamia around 3,200 BCE. Written symbols to facilitate counting also existed then, but they did not include the concept of zero, as basic as that seems to us now. The modern numbering system, which we call Arabic, arrived around 830 CE.
7
The list of important developments goes on and on. The Athenians began to practice democracy around 500 BCE. The Black Death reduced Europe’s population by at least 30 percent during the latter half of the 1300s. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, beginning interactions between the New World and the Old that would transform both.
The History of Humanity in One Graph
How can we ever get clarity about which of these developments is the
most
important? All of the candidates listed above have passionate advocates—people who argue forcefully and persuasively for one development’s sovereignty over all the others. And in
Why the West Rules—For Now
Morris confronts a more fundamental debate: whether any attempt to rank or compare human events and developments is meaningful or legitimate. Many anthropologists and other social scientists say it is not. Morris disagrees, and his book boldly attempts to quantify human development. As he writes, “reducing the ocean of facts to simple numerical scores has drawbacks but it also has the one great merit of forcing everyone to confront the same evidence—with surprising results.”
8
In other words, if we want to know which developments bent the curve of human history, it makes sense to try to draw that curve.
Morris has done thoughtful and careful work to quantify what he terms
social development
(“a group’s ability to master its physical and intellectual environment to get things done”) over time.
*
As Morris suggests, the results are surprising. In fact, they’re astonishing. They show that none of the developments discussed so far has mattered very much, at least in comparison to something else—something that bent the curve of human history like nothing before or since. Here’s the graph, with total worldwide human population graphed over time along with social development; as you can see, the two lines are nearly identical:
FIGURE 1.1
Numerically Speaking, Most of Human History Is Boring.
For many thousands of years, humanity was a very gradual upward trajectory. Progress was achingly slow, almost invisible. Animals and farms, wars and empires, philosophies and religions all failed to exert much influence. But just over two hundred years ago, something sudden and profound arrived and bent the curve of human history—of population and social development—almost ninety degrees.
Engines of Progress
By now you’ve probably guessed what it was. This is a book about the impact of technology, after all, so it’s a safe bet that we’re opening it this way in order to demonstrate how important technology has been. And the sudden change in the graph in the late eighteenth century corresponds to a development we’ve heard a lot about: the Industrial Revolution, which was the sum of several nearly simultaneous developments in mechanical engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, and other disciplines. So you’ve most likely figured out that these technological developments underlie the sudden, sharp, and sustained jump in human progress.
If so, your guess is exactly right. And we can be even more precise about
which
technology was most important. It was the steam engine or, to be more precise, one developed and improved by James Watt and his colleagues in the second half of the eighteenth century.