Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
Andrew McAfee
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Don’t anthropomorphize computers—they hate it.”
“Good decisions are critical to well-functioning societies:”
“Because we humans are so fond of our judgment, and so overconfident in it, many of us, if not most, will be too quick to override the computers, even when their answer is better.”
“Getting rid of human judgments altogether—even those from highly experienced and credentialed people—and relying solely on numbers plugged into formulas, often yields better results.”
“radically simplify[ing] the environment in which machines work to enable autonomous operation, as in the familiar example of a factory assembly line.”
“company’s existing high-speed Internet connections. Might these resources be valuable to people who wanted to build a database, application, website, or other digital resource but didn’t want to go through the trouble of maintaining all required hardware and software themselves? Amazon decided to find out and launched Amazon Web Services in 2006. It originally offered storage (Amazon S3) and computing (Amazon EC2) services on the platform.”
“What should employees do once technologies like enterprise software and the World Wide Web free them from the “paperwork mine”? Hammer and Champy offered a clear answer in Reengineering the Corporation: with the computers handling the routine, people should be empowered to exercise their judgment. “Most of the checking, reconciling, waiting, monitoring, tracking—the unproductive work . . .—is eliminated by reengineering. . . . People working in a reengineered process are, of necessity, empowered. As process team workers they are both permitted and required to think, interact, use judgment, and make decisions.”
“There’s an old joke that the factory of the future will have two employees: a human and a dog. The human’s job will be to feed the dog, and the dog’s job will be to keep the human from touching any of the machines. Is that actually what the company of tomorrow will look like?”
“The successful companies of the second machine age will be those that bring together minds and machines, products and platforms, and the core and crowd very differently than most do today.”
“The platform can also use the extensive tool kit of revenue management techniques to shape which suppliers each buyer sees, and how prominently. It’s not too cynical to expect that a platform might use this power to feature lesser-known suppliers over more famous ones, all else being equal.”
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Book Keywords:
business, marketplaces, platforms, judgement, decision-making, networks
