Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

Sit at the feet of the new elite, and glean what you can.

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. —John Maynard Keynes, 1930

Computers are the GPT of our era, especially when combined with networks and labeled “information and communications technology” (ICT).

As a result, technology enables more and more opportunities for what Google chief economist Hal Varian calls “micromultinationals”—businesses with less than a dozen employees that sell to customers worldwide and often draw on worldwide supplier and partner networks.