Ep 4. Andrew McAfee

Our Guest 

Andrew is a principal research scientist at MIT, he is a cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the Sloan School of Management. He studies how digital technologies are changing the world.

And he is known for his work in describing the impact of technology on businesses, work and the broader culture. 

He is the author of Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson. 

Also co authored with Brynjolfsson are The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future. 

And last but certainly not least Andrew published More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — and What Happens Next. 

You should know Andrew’s ideas are often counter intuitive  - we should embrace technology even as we admit that it might make many jobs - including ours - redundant - and maybe the most controversial - we should embrace capitalism in order to make the environment better!

Despite this hyperbolic introduction - These arguments made by MacaFee are always ground in data and presented not as a potential Davos tech utopia - but as a potential path, a path that could (with the right balance of wisdom and humility) point us to a progressive future where we could build a better tomorrow for the earth and everything on it. 

I suspect after Covid-19 there will be a great sorting, a dividing line - a BC and AD if you will - and some ideas and thus some organizations will wither and others will prosper. As organizational people - we need to ask ourselves why? Are there ideas that can make sense of machines, work and the engine of our economic growth, organizations, societies, the environment and all of humanity