Race Against the Machine should not be confused with Rage Against the Machine.
| Race Against the Machine | |
| Author: | Erik Brynjolfsson Andrew McAfee |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Published: | 2011 |
| Isbn: | 0-984-72511-3 |
| Followed By: | The Second Machine Age |
Race Against the Machine is a non-fiction book from 2011 by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee about the interaction of digital technology, employment and organization. The full title of the book is: Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.
The main thesis of the book is that we are in the midst of a technological revolution that is radically redefining what work is, how value is created, and how the economy distributes that value. In particular, the authors observe that after the Great Recession of 2007–2008, many measures of economic health (such as GDP, corporate profits, and investment in equipment and software) rebounded quickly, while unemployment lagged behind, which they attribute to technology eliminating the need for many forms of human labor. Examples of technology they point to are robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized inventory management software, speech recognition, speaker recognition, language translation, self-driving vehicles, pattern recognition and online commerce. The authors write that businesses are increasingly substituting machines for people, and that rate at which digital technologies are advancing is exponentially higher than that of the organizations, institutions, and individuals within our economy. Additionally, the corporate use of equipment and software is increasing faster than the rate of employment.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Brynjolfsson and McAfee write that advanced digital technologies are making people more innovative, productive and richer, both in the short- and long-term, but potentially at the cost of increasing wealth inequality in society. In the authors' view, one of the main in-egalitarian consequences of digital technological developments is its potentially negative impact on some types of employment, such as routine information processing work. The authors appear to advocate for a collaborative partnership between computers and humans as the road to future job creation. "In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing and even scientific discovery," they write, "the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines."[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Given the advancement of technology, the authors have several recommendations for policymakers in the United States to increase economic prosperity, including:[6]
Like Jeremy Rifkin's book The End of Work, The Race against the Machine has been criticized for lacking credible evidence in making predictions about future job loss.[7] Recent research suggest the invention and distribution of computers during the 1990s increased employment, rather than decreased it.[8]