Jason Furman's Reviews > Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

Machine, Platform, Crowd is insightful, engagingly written, a nice combination of economics, business, technology and real world examples, that builds on The Second Machine Age. Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee organize their book around three developments: artificial intelligence, platform technologies and crowd sourcing. The book is "speaking" to managers of businesses, talking about how they can take advantage of these developments in their own businesses. Brynjolfsson and McAfee have no shortage of enthusiasm for these developments but in all cases they present nuanced arguments about the perils of the extremes, like the importance of humans in organizations, the limits of platforms, and the best ways to combine the "crowd" and the "core." They are techno-optimists but also realists, the world they describe is much like our own, with companies, markets, and the like, just all continuing to improve through technology, big data, the cloud, and the like.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee put it very well when they say that it makes no sense to ask if technology will be good or bad for us, because technology is a tool and we can make choices about how to use the tool. The book, however, focuses on how businesses make those choices and the role of policymakers was outside of its scope.

My big disappointment was that no where in the book did the authors grapple with the significant slowdown in productivity growth, why they think it is happening, what they think the outlook is. And not just the aggregate macroeconomic data, but also the increased effort it takes to make progress in individual areas. They have a striking description of how AI is advancing productivity in farming--but they do not point out that we have been making progress in farming for over a century but despite the massive technology we are bringing to bear the progress is not getting any faster.