Erik Brynjolfsson Quotes
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.
Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014, p. 7.
In the1969 mission to the moon, the lunar module control computer flashed a Program Alarm warning message, and the Mission Control officer Steve Bates, with less than 30 seconds to go, had to make a decision whether to abort the module landing or continue. He spoke to Garman, who concluded that since the message did not repeat, that the message was most likely a spurious message—a false alarm. German told him to go ahead when most others wanted to abort. As Garman was the most familiar staff member with the software, Bates followed his lead and continued the landing. Garman was right and he became known as “The Man who saved the Moon Landing”.
Erik Brynjolfsson (born 1962) is an American academic. Erik Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He also is the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), Professor by Courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Department of Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). A best-selling author of several books, he is known for his contributions to the world of IT productivity research and work on the economics of information and the digital economy more generally.
