The good news about information technology, according to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy is that it’s making America more innovative, productive and richer. But the bad news, the two MIT professors add, is that this new wealth, innovation and productivity is being spread unequally, so that only a minority of Americans are benefitting from it.
I interviewed Brynjolfsson and McAfee today at David Kirkpatrick’s Techonomy conference where they explained to me their economic dilemma of the new economy. Yes, they both agreed, we should be optimistic about the long-term future of technological innovation and productivity; but, they confessed, the inegalitarian consequences of today’s digital revolution is deeply worrying, particularly its inability to produce more jobs for the less well educated workforce.
This is the second interview in a series conducted at Techonomy this week. Earlier today, I posted my interview with the economist Tyler Cowen whom Erik Brynjolfsson debated at the event. Future interviewees include Microsoft Chief Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook, Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee and the high flying angel investor Esther Dyson.
Erik Brynjolfsson is the Schussel Family Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Brynjolfsson’s research and teaching focuses on three questions: How can information technology transform the structures of markets and firms? What is the impact of information technology investments on productivity and business value? How does the Internet affect commerce in general and information goods in particular? His work...
Andrew McAfee studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself – the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry. He coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0†in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches...
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