The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (40 page)

3. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 162.

4. Jyotsna Sreenivasan,
Poverty and the Government in America: A Historical Encyclopedia
, 1st ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), p. 269.

5. “WGBH American Experience . Nixon | PBS,”
American Experience
, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/nixon-domestic/ (accessed August 12, 2013).

6. Voltaire,
Candide
, trans. Francois-Marie Arouet (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1991), p. 86.

7. Daniel H. Pink,
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
(New York: River-head Books, 2011).

8. Sarah O’Connor, “Amazon Unpacked,”
Financial Times
, February 8, 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html#slide0.

9. Don Peck, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,”
The Atlantic
, March 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform-america/307919/?single_page=true.

10. Jim Clifton,
The Coming Jobs War
(New York: Gallup Press, 2011).

11. William Julius Wilson,
When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage, 1997).

12. Charles Murray,
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
(New York: Crown Forum, 2013, repr.).

13. Murray argues that harmful changes in values are the most important explanatory factor. As he writes, “The deterioration of social capital in lower-class white America strips the people who live there of one of the main resources through which Americans have pursued happiness. The same may be said of the deterioration in marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. These are not aspects of human life that may or may not be important, depending on personal preferences. Together, they make up the stuff of life” (p. 253).

14. Interview with Milton Friedman,
Newsfront
, NET, May 8, 1968; quoted in Gordonskene, “Milton Friedman Explains The Negative Income Tax—1968,”
Newstalgia
, December 6, 2011, http://newstalgia.crooksandliars.com/gordonskene/milton-friedman-explains-negative-inco.

15. Raj Chetty et al., “The Economic Impacts of Tax Expenditures: Evidence From Spatial Variation Across the U.S.,” White Paper, 2013, http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/tax_expenditure_soi_whitepaper.pdf.

16. “Citi Community Development Marks National EITC Awareness Day with Release of Money Matters Publication,”
News
, Citigroup Inc., January 25, 2013, http://www.citigroup.com/citi/news/2013/130125a.htm.

17. “Gas Guzzler Tax,”
Fuel Economy
, United States Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/guzzler/ (accessed August 12, 2013).

18. “History of the Income Tax in the United States,”
Infoplease
, 2007, http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005921.html.

19. Roberton Williams, “The Numbers: What Are the Federal Government’s Sources of Revenue?”
The Tax Policy Briefing Book: A Citizens’ Guide for the Election, and Beyond
(Tax Policy Center: Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, September 13, 2011), http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/revenue.cfm.

20. In the United States, only income below $113,700 was taxed for Social Security in 2013. See “Social Security and Medicare Tax Rates; Maximum Taxable Earnings,”
Social Security: The Official Website of the U.S. Social Security Administration
, February 6, 2013, http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/240/~/social-security-and-medicare-tax-rates%3B-maximum-taxable-earnings.

21. Even when a tax or benefit is nominally paid for by the employer, much of it will ultimately be borne by the employee in the form of lower wages or even lack of employment. See Melanie Berkowitz, “The Health Care Reform Bill Becomes Law: What It Means for Employers,”
Monster: Workforce Management
, n.d., http://hiring.monster.com/hr/hr-best-practices/workforce-management/employee-benefits-management/health-care-reform.aspx.

22. Bruce Bartlett,
The Benefit and The Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need It and What It Will Take
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).

23 Steve Lohr, “Computer Algorithms Rely Increasingly on Human Helpers,”
New York Times
, March 10, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/technology/computer-algorithms-rely-increasingly-on-human-helpers.html.

24. Jason Pontin, “Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans,”
New York Times
, March 25, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/yourmoney/25Stream.html.

25. Gregory M. Lamb, “When Workers Turn into ‘Turkers,’ ”
Christian Science Monitor
, November 2, 2006, http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1102/p13s02-wmgn.html.

26. Pontin, “Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans.”

27. Daren C. Brabham, “Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving An Introduction and Cases,”
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
14, no. 1 (2008): 75–90, doi:10.1177/1354856507084420.

28. Alyson Shontell, “Founder Q&A: Make a Boatload of Money Doing Your Neighbor’s Chores on TaskRabbit,”
Business Insider
, October 27, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/taskrabbit-interview-2011-10 (accessed August 12, 2013).

29. Tomio Geron, “Airbnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy,”
Forbes
, January 23, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/01/23/airbnb-and-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-share-economy/ (accessed August 12, 2013).

30. Johnny B., “TaskRabbit Names Google Veteran Stacy Brown-Philpot as Chief Operating Officer,”
TaskRabbit Blog
, January 14, 2013, https://www.taskrabbit.com/blog/taskrabbit-news/taskrabbit-names-google-veteran-stacy-brown-philpot-as-chief-operating-officer/ (accessed August 12, 2013).

31. Johnny B., “TaskRabbit Welcomes 1,000 New TaskRabbits Each Month,”
TaskRabbit Blog
, April 23, 2013, https://www.taskrabbit.com/blog/taskrabbit-news/taskrabbit-welcomes-1000-new-taskrabbits-each-month/.

32. “Employment Situation News Release,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 3, 2013, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.htm.

Chapter 15
TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE

1. Charles Perrow,
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999);
Interim Report on the August 14, 2003 Blackout
(New York Independent System Operator, January 8, 2004), http://www.hks.harvard.edu/hepg/Papers/NYISO.blackout.report.8.Jan.04.pdf.

2. Steven Cherry, “How Stuxnet Is Rewriting the Cyberterrorism Playbook,”
IEEE Spectrum
podcast, October 13, 2010, http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/telecom/security/how-stuxnet-is-rewriting-the-cyberterrorism-playbook.

3. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,”
Wired
, April 2000, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html.

4. The costs of gene sequencing are dropping even more quickly than those of computing. A comprehensive discussion of the genomics revolution is far beyond the scope of this book; we mention it here simply to highlight that it is real, and likely to bring profound changes in the years and decades to come. See Kris Wetterstrand, “DNA Sequencing Costs: Data from the NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP),” National Human Genome Research Institute, July 16, 2013, http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/.

5. On gaming, see Nicholas Carr,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011); on cyberbalkanization, see Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Electronic Communities: Global Villages or Cyberbalkanization?”
ICIS 1996 Proceedings
, December 31, 1996, http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis1996/5; and Eli Pariser,
The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think
(New York: Penguin, 2012); on social isolation see Sherry Turkle,
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(New York: Basic Books, 2012); and Robert D. Putnam,
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
, 1st ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); finally, on environmental degradation, see Albert Gore,
The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, 2013.

6. Chad Brooks, “What Is the Singularity?”
TechNewsDaily
, April 29, 2013, http://www.technewsdaily.com/17898-technological-singularity-definition.html.

7. To improve the odds that he will be alive to see the singularity (he’ll be ninety-seven in 2045), Kurzweil has put himself on a self-engineered diet that includes taking 150 nutritional supplements every day. See Kristen Philipkoski, “Ray Kurzweil’s Plan: Never Die,”
Wired
, November 18, 2002, http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/11/56448.

8. Steve Lohr, “Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing,”
New York Times
, December 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/creating-artificial-intelligence-based-on-the-real-thing.html.

9. Gareth Cook, “Watson, the Computer
Jeopardy!
Champion, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence,”
Scientific American
, March 1, 2011, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=watson-the-computer-jeopa.

10. Martin Luther King Jr., “Sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood,” February 26, 1965, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlktempleisraelhollywood.htm.

ILLUSTRATION SOURCES

Figure 1.1 and 1.2
Human Social Development Index figures from Ian Morris,
Why the West Rules . . . For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
(New York: Picador, 2011).

Worldwide human population figures are an average of estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s “Historical Estimates of World Population,” http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php.

World population for 2000 from the CIA World Factbook

3.1
Author’s own

3.2
Author’s own

3.3
Supercomputer speeds:

http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/publications/riken_research/2006/

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm

http://www.green500.org/home.php

Hard drive cost:

http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/publications/riken_research/2006/

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm

http://www.green500.org/home.php

Supercomputer energy efficiency:

http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CRAY-1-HardRefMan/CRAY-1-HRM.html

http://www.green500.org/home.php

Transistors per chip:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm

Download speed:

http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/

7.1
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis

7.2
Chad Syverson, “Will History Repeat Itself? Comments on ‘Is the Information Technology Revolution Over?’,”
International Productivity Monitor
25 (2013), 37–40. John W. Kendrick, “Productivity Trends in the United States,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 1961. David M. Byrne, Stephen D. Oliner, and Daniel E. Sichel, “Is the Information Technology Revolution Over?,”
International Productivity Monitor
25 (Spring 2013), 20–36.

9.1
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=USARGDPC

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/

9.2
D. Acemoglu and David Autor, “Skills, tasks and technologies: Implications for employment and earnings,”
Handbook
of Labor Economics
4 (2011), 1043–1171.

9.3
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=GDPCA

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=A055RC0A144NBEA

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=W270RE1A156NBEA

10.1
N/A

11.1
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USPRIV

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=USARGDPH

INDEX

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
(Arum and Roksa)

Acemoglu, Daron

Affinnova

Aftercollege.com

Agarwal, Anant

Age of Spiritual Machines, The: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
(Kurzweil)

Agrarian Justice
(Paine)

agriculture:

development of

inelastic demand in

Ahn, Luis von

Aiden, Erez Lieberman

Airbnb.com

Alaska, income guarantee plan in

algorithms

Allegretto, Sylvia

Allstate

Amazon

Amazon Web Services

American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)

Android

animals, domestication of

Apple

Arthur, Brian

artificial intelligence (AI)

future of

SLAM problem in

uses of

see also
robots

Arum, Richard

ASCI Red

ASIMO

Asimov, Isaac

Asur, Sitaram

Athens, ancient

ATMs

Audi

Australia, immigrant entrepreneurship in

Autodesk

automation:

future of

labor market effects of

in manufacturing

Autor, David

Baker, Stephen

Barnes & Noble

Bartlett, Albert A.

Bartlett, Bruce

Bass, Carl

batteries

Baxter

Beane, Matt

Bebchuk, Lucian

Beck, Andrew

Bed Bath & Beyond

Berners-Lee, Tim