検索キーワード： "Andrew McAfee" 政治学・社会科学

A new model is being pioneered by geeks; a radical new mindset that has shifted the paradigm entirely on what a business can – and should – be. They do not follow the rules of the Industrial era, with their hierarchies and bureaucratic ways of thinking. They do not follow the principles preached in business schools since the dawn of time. They have all dedicated themselves to approaching business as a geek would: through trial and error, egalitarianism, evidence and stress-testing ideas in a group setting – rather than relying on the boss’s instincts.

A compelling argument - masterfully researched and brilliantly articulated - that despite increasing prosperity for most of Earth’s inhabitants and an explosion of goods overall, consumption of natural resources such as metals, water, and timber has begun to decline. Best-selling author and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Andrew McAfee says there’s a new reason for optimism: We’re past the point of "peak stuff" - from here on out, it'll take fewer resources to make things and fewer dollars to lead a comfortable life.

The promises of science fiction are quickly becoming workaday realities. Cars and trucks are starting to drive themselves in normal traffic. Machines have begun to understand our speech, figure out what we want, and satisfy our requests. They have learned to write clean prose, generate novel scientific hypotheses (that are supported by later research), compose evocative music, and beat us, quite literally, at our own games: chess, poker, and even go.

The debate over what technology does to work, jobs, and wages is as old as the industrial era itself. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, a group of English textile workers called the Luddites protested the introduction of spinning frames and power looms, machines of the nascent Industrial Revolution that threatened to leave them without jobs. Since then, each new burst of technological progress has brought with it another wave of concern about a possible mass displacement of labor.