“RACE WITH MACHINES” by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee with introduction by Giulio Sapelli
Translation by Lisa Badocco
BACK COVER
Is man losing the race with technology? Are technology and innovation impoverishing it? Is innovation destroying jobs instead of creating them? Why is the economic recovery out of work? How can it happen that the enormous value created by technology does not benefit the entire society but only a minority? How can technologies accelerate while incomes stagnate? The two authors, MIT professors, try to answer these questions that seem like paradoxes in this short ebook that has sparked a vast debate far beyond that of economists. Thomas Friedman, winner of 3 Pulitzer prizes, called it "A terrifying book". And it's just like that, exceptional and also terrifying. The development of technology and innovation does not benefit everyone, rather it accelerates society's problems and inequalities. But there is a way out. It consists of working with machines by innovating organizations, investing in human capital through school and continuous training. The authors indicate 19 areas of intervention. Let us recommend them to the Italian Government as a platform for the country's development. Will they listen to us? Will they understand these "enlightenment advice" as Giulio Sapelli defines them in the introduction? The ebook makes use of a large array of graphics, illustrations and insights and one-minute film scenes dedicated to the relationship between man and his machines.
THE INTRODUCTION BY GIULIO SAPELLI
The e-book "Race Against the Machines" by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, offered to the Italian reader in an excellent translation, upsets many usual interpretations of the interaction between technological development, economic growth and organization. First, it shows that all these years have continued to be years of digital revolution. More, of the robotic revolution, of mechatronics: today computers can guide cars and any vehicle capable of moving in traffic, both in the metropolis and in the skies, as the story of the so-called drones has recently shown us. All of this in a sort of continuous translation of complex organizational systems and highly clustered technologies into products that allow simple executions, whether serial or idiosyncratic, as happens in manufacturing which is upsetting the usual product and professional classifications both in factories and in research centers.
The basic question that the text raises is the truth, ascertained through an infinite number of experiments, that these processes can only be brought to fruition by human intelligence. Naturally, a theoretical approach of this type upsets many consolidated ideas on the subject of work and its future. Indeed, it is true that the digital revolution increases productivity and can reduce some control costs to zero. But at the same time, to be brought to fruition, i.e. to solve the technological and production problems for which it was and is continually created, it needs not less work, but more work.
A work that however does not come primarily from the digital world, but from the wider world of technological creativity, of the humanistic ability to keep different technologies together for different purposes. In short, an increasingly qualified job and increasingly characterized by the ability to respond to the variations of the process rather than to the continuity of the models. The book recalls the need for a new institutional order of education for work and in the workplace which allows for a continuous retraining of all operators who, with their interaction, make the continuity of the digital revolution possible.
It is a book that touches the mood of the great utopian works, hoping for the reconciliation of machines with human spirituality. In this lies its charm and at the same time its limit. Its limit is to assume that this continuous development of the productive forces and of human intelligence together is possible in that sort of enterprise which we have before our eyes in a prevalent form. The capitalist one which certainly produces the marvels described here, but is always held back in producing them by the obsession of having to distribute a part of the profit in favor of the property instead of only to the continuity of the company itself and its workers, unlike what happens in cooperative or not for profit enterprises.
A beautiful Enlightenment book, therefore, with all the strengths and weaknesses of the case.
