Erik Brynjolfsson quotes:

Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power-the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks, and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them. They could be software robots; they could be physical robots.

Technology has made it easier for different firms to coordinate their activities with one another, and they don't have to be part of one company. They can get the benefits of scale without the inertia of scale.

The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer.

But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance.

Technology has always been destroying jobs, and it has always been creating jobs.

G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers. Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.

Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.

The kind of job where you have to hustle and hustle and where you're not sure whether you will have enough clients next month, where you have less job security, is becoming much more common.

Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment.

Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny

Because the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation.

The heart of science is measurement.

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs.

We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.

Some people think it's a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits. There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It's possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don't share in that gain.

What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to try to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine.

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs. But right now the pace is accelerating. It's faster we think than ever before in history. So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.