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. In The Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson predicted some of the far-reaching effects of digital technologies on our lives and businesses. Now they’ve written a guide to help readers make the most of our collective future. Machine, Platform, Crowd outlines the opportunities and challenges inherent in the science fiction-worthy technologies that have come to life in recent years, like self-driving cars and 3D printers, online platforms for renting outfits and scheduling workouts, or crowd-sourced medical research and financial instruments.

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Reviews

... a reliable guide to the most relevant technologies that will shape the future of business... -- Business books to recommend - Financial Times For startups and established businesses, or for anyone interested in what the future holds, Machine, Platform, Crowd is essential reading. -- Five of the Best Business Books to Read in 2018 Whether technology is moral or not, it is still changing the world-and business-in ways we are barely aware of, as Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson show in fascinating detail in Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future. -- Books of 2017 - Supply Management In their latest book, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson encourage you to adopt a much more global vision in order to enhance your digital transformation, which, in their opinion, must rest on 3 key trends: machine, platform, and crowd. -- 10 unmissable books from 2017 - Business Digest Throughout, they [McAfee and Brynjolfsson] are eloquent and informed... This is a long and complex book, but it is important. -- People Management Machine, Platform, Crowd is a forward-looking take on how business will interact with artificial intelligence and what that will mean for the transformation of industries. -- Business Books of the Year 2017 - The International New York Times The two academic authors from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who became the pin-up boys of the Davos crowd for their previous book on The Second Machine Age (2014), do a neat job of scanning the technological horizon and highlighting significant landmarks. This is a clear and crisply written account of machine intelligence, big data and the sharing economy. -- Financial Times ... Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson [use] 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... 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. -- Book of the Week - Times Higher Education For an astute romp through important digital trends, Machine, Platform, Crowd is hard to beat. -- The Economist Machine, Platform, Crowd, by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. Following on from The Second Machine Age in 2014, the authors are back with this title that analyses a new world of work and offers a toolkit on how to survive in it. -- FT business books of the month: June 2017 - Financial Times

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 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, former president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, author of Thrive and The Sleep Revolution 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, former CEO of Google, executive chairman of Alphabet, Inc. 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 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, managing director of the International Monetary Fund 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, partner at Greylock Partners, cofounder of LinkedIn, and coauthor of The Start-Up of You 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. -- Randall Stross - Wall Street Journal 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. -- John Thornhill - Financial Times For an astute romp through important digital trends, Machine | Platform | Crowd is hard to beat. -- The Economist

Author Information

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.

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