Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 those from corporate research laboratories.

Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd. The balance now favours the second element of the pair, with massive implications for how we run our companies and live our lives. McAfee and Brynjolfsson deliver a penetrating analysis of a new world and a toolkit for thriving in it. For start-ups and established businesses or for anyone interested in the future, Machine, Platform, Crowd is essential reading.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Chapter 1 The Triple Revolution (p. 1)
• Part 1 Mind and Machine
• Chapter 2 The Hardest Thing to Accept About Ourselves (p. 31)
• Chapter 3 Our Most Mind-Like Machines (p. 66)
• Chapter 4 Hi, Robot (p. 87)
• Chapter 5 Where Technology and Industry Still Need Humanity (p. 110)
• Part 2 Product and Platform
• Chapter 6 The Toll of a New Machine (p. 129)
• Chapter 7 Paying Complements, and Other Smart Strategies (p. 151)
• Chapter 8 The Match Game: Why Platforms Excel (p. 177)
• Chapter 9 Do Products have a Prayer? (p. 200)
• Part 3 Core and Crowd
• Chapter 10 That Escalated Quickly: The Emergence of the Crowd (p. 229)
• Chapter 11 Why the Expert You Know is not the Expert You Need (p. 252)
• Chapter 12 The Dream of Decentralizing All the Things (p. 278)
• Chapter 13 Are Companies Passé? (Hint: No) (p. 301)
• Conclusion: Economies and Societies Beyond Computation (p. 329)
• Notes (p. 335)
• Acknowledgments (p. 379)
• Index (p. 385)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Science fiction? Your wallet is soaking in it, as this textbook-ish look at the "second machine age" tells us.It's a highly disrupted world out there, and we have plenty of indexes to show it. Shopping malls used to open all the time; in the last decade, more than 20 percent have closed. Two-thirds of millennials don't have landline phones. The hotel business is down, and cab drivers are suffering, all thanks to "gig economy" innovations like Airbnb and Uber, both of which offer a line to MIT School of Management researchers McAfee and Brynjolfsson's (The Second Machine Age, 2014) thesis that "platforms"organizations without inventory and sometimes without much of an organizationare likely to be more competitive than brick-and-mortar companies in the future economy. Among the components of that economy, the technological will be dominant. Machine learning, AI, and robotics will have further disruptive effects, sometimes displacing humans, while the winning firms of the near-term future will leverage these shifts to "bring together minds and machines, products and platforms, and the core and the crowd very differently than most do today." Among the facets of this different world are algorithmically driven "automatic decisions," by which Amazon cross-recommends products to shoppers and airfare prices respond to the laws of supply and demand; in time, machines will be coming up with proposals and projects "that people can extend and improve." In chapter-closing exercises, the authors invite readers to ponder how all this applies to them ("which do you think are generally more biased: algorithms or humans"). The authors appear less interested in sociology than finance and to favor profits over the attendant human costs. On that note, fans of Citizens United will be relieved to hear that the corporation will endure. "The leading companies of the second machine age may look very different from those of the industrial era," write the authors, "but they will almost all be easily recognizable as companies." Provocative reading for futurists, investors, and inventors. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.