Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

Overview

From the authors of the best-selling The Second Machine Age, a leader’s guide to success in a rapidly changing economy.

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs.

MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd. In all three cases, the balance now favors the second element of the pair, with massive implications for how we run our companies and live our lives.

In the tradition of agenda-setting classics like Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, McAfee and Brynjolfsson deliver both a penetrating analysis of a new world and a toolkit for thriving in it. For startups and established businesses, or for anyone interested in what the future holds, Machine, Platform, Crowd is essential reading.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393254297
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/27/2017
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	877,931
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Andrew McAfee is the co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of the best-selling The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future. He and co-author Erik Brynjolfsson are the only people named to both the Thinkers 50 list of the world’s top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics.

Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School. He is the author of several best-selling books with co-author Andrew McAfee, and one of the world’s most cited scholars in information systems and economics.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Triple Revolution 1

Part 1 Mind and MaChine

Chapter 2 The Hardest Thing To Accept About Ourselves 31

Chapter 3 Our Most Mind-Like Machines 66

Chapter 4 HI, Robot 87

Chapter 5 Where Technology And Industry Still Need Humanity 110

Part 2 Product and Platform

Chapter 6 The Toll Of A New Machine 129

Chapter 7 Paying Complements, And Other Smart Strategies 151

Chapter 8 The Match Game: Why Platforms Excel 177

Chapter 9 Do Products Have A Prayer? 200

Part 3 Core And Crowd

Chapter 10 That Escalated Quickly: The Emergence Of The Crowd 229

Chapter 11 Why The Expert You Know Is Not The Expert You Need 252

Chapter 12 The Dream Of Decentralizing All The Things 278

Chapter 13 Are Companies Passé? (Hint: No) 301

Conclusion: Economies And Societies Beyond Computation 329

Notes 335

Acknowledgments 379

Index 385

Editorial Reviews

"This is a book for managers whose companies sit well back from the edge and who would like a digestible introduction to technology trends that may not have reached their doorstep—yet."

Wall Street Journal - Randall Stross

"For an astute romp through important digital trends, Machine | Platform | Crowd is hard to beat. "

The Economist

"On their own, AI, platforms, and crowds are all transformative forces. That they’re evolving in parallel means we’re beginning to experience a new era of networked disruption, where productive but disorienting change becomes the status quo. For citizens, entrepreneurs, companies, and governments that want to successfully navigate this new world, the first step lies in finding reliable and prescient guides. Andrew and Erik are two of the best."

Reid Hoffman

"The authors aptly illustrate how the extraordinary progress of technology is reshaping our lives, and they share powerful ideas relevant to world leaders. Nobody knows exactly how this future will unfold. What we do know is that the disruptive power of technology must be seized as an opportunity to design our future. The book compels us to ponder: will we apply technology to help accelerate development, improve living standards, and foster inclusive growth? Will we take advantage of its power to cut red tape, invest in education, unleash entrepreneurial energy, and create new kinds of jobs? The book is a must-read for policymakers who seek a road map for how to combine the strengths of humanity and technology to build a better future for their citizens."

Christine Lagarde

"A clear and crisply written account of machine intelligence, big data and the sharing economy. But McAfee and Brynjolfsson also wisely acknowledge the limitations of their futurology and avoid over-simplification."

Financial Times - John Thornhill

"Even Silicon Valley is surprised by the speed and scope of change today. The best way to stay on top of it is to understand the principles that will endure even as so much gets disrupted. This book is the best explanation of those principles out there."

Eric Schmidt

"The digital revolution we’re entering can be unsettling, but McAfee and Brynjolfsson show how these incredibly powerful technologies will make our choices more important than ever. Machine | Platform | Crowd is a road map for leaders to make wise choices as they navigate this new world."

Arianna Huffington

"Such is the speed of development in these emergent technologies that it is refreshing to take a step back and a look at some of the ways in which our lives and careers are changing – and will continue to change – at a fundamental level. Happily this volume by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson offers exactly this opportunity, using their deep knowledge of the business and technology sectors to build a detailed, cogent and conversational guide to where we are and where we are going. The story is warmly and richly told, using footnotes approaching a third of a page in length when things get really exciting, and amply supported by notes, references and links. This book is in many senses a primer, a thorough grounding for the digital warrior in the driving forces of the 21st-century economy."

Times Higher Education

2017-06-05
Science fiction? Your wallet is soaking in it, as this textbook-ish look at the "second machine age" tells us.It's a highly disrupted world out there, and we have plenty of indexes to show it. Shopping malls used to open all the time; in the last decade, more than 20 percent have closed. Two-thirds of millennials don't have landline phones. The hotel business is down, and cab drivers are suffering, all thanks to "gig economy" innovations like Airbnb and Uber, both of which offer a line to MIT School of Management researchers McAfee and Brynjolfsson's (The Second Machine Age, 2014) thesis that "platforms"—organizations without inventory and sometimes without much of an organization—are likely to be more competitive than brick-and-mortar companies in the future economy. Among the components of that economy, the technological will be dominant. Machine learning, AI, and robotics will have further disruptive effects, sometimes displacing humans, while the winning firms of the near-term future will leverage these shifts to "bring together minds and machines, products and platforms, and the core and the crowd very differently than most do today." Among the facets of this different world are algorithmically driven "automatic decisions," by which Amazon cross-recommends products to shoppers and airfare prices respond to the laws of supply and demand; in time, machines will be coming up with proposals and projects "that people can extend and improve." In chapter-closing exercises, the authors invite readers to ponder how all this applies to them ("which do you think are generally more biased: algorithms or humans"). The authors appear less interested in sociology than finance and to favor profits over the attendant human costs. On that note, fans of Citizens United will be relieved to hear that the corporation will endure. "The leading companies of the second machine age may look very different from those of the industrial era," write the authors, "but they will almost all be easily recognizable as companies." Provocative reading for futurists, investors, and inventors.

Kirkus Reviews

"McAfee and Brynjolfsson are thoughtful observers of the emerging technological revolution which they described in their earlier The Second Machine Age.… They write clearly and are at their most devastating in analyzing how the various elements of the new age combine, wiping out large sectors of media, retail and music industries as they have gone."

New Law Journal - Roger Smith

"A book for managers whose companies sit well back from the edge and who would like a digestible introduction to technology trends that may not have reached their doorstep—yet."

Wall Street Journal

"Written… with real human intelligence, concern, feeling, and values. [Machine | Platform | Crowd] is a big, intense, always interesting, and almost intimidating book—and well worth the effort."

Dylan Schleicher

"[McAfee and Brynjolfsson] have done us all a great service in explaining some of the powerful trends that will shape our future."

Mark Cliffe

"The authors explain the whys and hows soberly, answering just about every question on AI you could ask: which channels it will colonise next, whether we’ll still need physical products in a virtual world and how Bitcoin will change commerce, among others. Throughout, they are eloquent and informed. They don’t think humans will be obsolete, but they also don't pretend the solutions are simple."

People Management