The Future Is Here: Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee

KPFA Radio 94.1FM presents:

The Future Is Here
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee
"The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity In a Time of Brilliant Technologies"
Hosted by Brian Edwards-Tiekert

$12 advance tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/539815 :: 800-838-3006
or Pegasus (3 locations), Marcus Books, Moe's, Walden Pond, Diesel a Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloway's Books, SF: Modern Times, $15 door, KPFA benefit http://www.kpfa.org/events
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As life inevitably changes around us, tension grows, our worries multiply. How will we work in the future? How will we live? Exactly who will prosper in this brave new digital epoch unfurling around us? These are the sort of questions MIT investigators Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee consider in their new study, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. The authors are predominately hopeful, even exhilarated by the new inventions on the horizon - futuristic entities that will unarguably have the power to profoundly transform our daily lives. What prompts such optimism? Will robots increasingly steal our jobs? Will they reduce or simply eliminate our livelihoods? What radical changes should we expect for our planet, and our vulnerable human bodies.

The authors, both MIT research scientists, argue that we must learn to race with the new machines by using our human ingenuity in mixing and matching the varying new technologies. They identify what they claim are the best strategies for doing this. Are they right? Is science our savior?

Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business. Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business. Together they wrote Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming.