Race Against the Machine

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.

One of main theses in the book is that the pace of automation has picked up in recent years due to a combination of increasingly clever technologies including 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 considering the possibility of substituting technology for people, and that corporate use of equipment and software appears to be increasing at a faster rate than 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]}

Recommendations

Given the advancement of technology, the authors have several recommendations for policymakers in the United States to increase economic prosperity, including:^[6]

• Investing more in education, starting with increasing teacher salaries
• More accountability for teachers on performance metrics, possibility including the elimination of tenure
• Focus education on useful outcomes and less on signaling prestige, time, or effort, by separating instruction from certification and testing
• More instructional hours per year for K-12 students
• Expand immigration of entrepreneurs and skilled workers, including both permanent residents and H1-B
• Teach entrepreneurship skills in higher education (outside of business schools)
• Speed the creation of startups with franchise opportunities, online guides, and clearinghouses
• Reduce regulatory barriers to new business creation
• Invest more in communication and transportation infrastructure improvements
• Invest more in government funding for basic research
• Maintain labor market fluidity and the ability to hire and fire
• Reduce payroll taxes (to make it more attractive to hire a person rather than a machine) and increase taxes on congestion and pollution
• De-couple health insurance from employment
• Keep crowdsourcing businesses like Amazon Mechanical Turk lightly regulated to allow experimentation
• Eliminate tax breaks for home mortgages and reallocate the proceeds to education and research
• Reduce government subsidies for the financial services industry, to free talent for other industries
• Reform the patent system, and speed up patent adjudication
• Reduce the length of copyright terms and expand fair use

See also

• Technological unemployment
• Automate This
• Martin Ford (author)

References

External links

• Official website