New innovations such as Uber’s decision to launch a fleet of self-driving taxis in Pittsburg is one example of the future discussed in The Second Machine Age. As a computer scientist with an interest in finance and economics the book appealed to me on multiple levels. The book is so well written that you neither need to be a computer scientist nor an economist to read it. Just as the industrial revolution (the first machine age) and the green revolution increased the standard of living and made food more abundant, the second machine age is going to usher in new bounties for humanity and at the same time is likely to cause a lot of disruption.
So what exactly is the second machine age? The second machine age is the advent of self-driving cars, the 3D printing of custom prosthetics or aircraft engine parts, it is the use of deep machine learning to defeat the world’s best Go player and it is a vision of having 1 million robots at FoxConn assembling your next iPhone amongst other things. What I really love about this book is not just the behind the scenes look it offers of the second machine age, but also the recommendations it provides to both individuals and governments about how they can harness the power of rapid technology driven advances and deal with the inevitable displacement caused on account of it.