Race Against the Machine

October 26th, 2011
A few weeks ago, a reader sent me a gift, an ebook from Amazon. I don’t have a physical Kindle reader, so I downloaded the Kindle application for Windows and, in a few seconds, I was able to read the book.
I went to look at the Amazon page for the book, A Zombie Prescription by Jose Santos, and noticed that it cost $1.99.
A buck ninety nine!? Really?
I wondered if it was common for authors to publish their books on Amazon for such low prices. Yes, it’s very common! Next, out of curiosity, I wondered if anyone ever became wealthy by selling Kindle books for a buck or two or three, totally bypassing the traditional, bloodsucking publishing industrial complex.
Be sitting down for this one…
Amanda Hocking has made two million dollars by selling her young-adult fiction stories though Amazon’s Kindle store. The ebooks cost between $1 and $3. See The Very Rich Indie Writer, if you’d like to read more about what Amanda Hocking has done.
Ok, what’s the point?
The point is that a twenty six year old woman, who was an assisted living worker until 2010 (that’s hard, low wage work, in case you don’t know), became wealthy by combining her skill as an author with the digital marketplace that Amazon provides.
In other words, the ascendency of the machine definitely cuts a couple of ways.
As grim as it is, for most, there are opportunities for individuals to attain results (asymmetric results) that are far beyond what was possible before.
I’m not saying to peg your hopes on becoming a millionaire ebook author, but rather to be open to work opportunities that do not lend themselves to automation, and/or where the market is too small for large organizations to care. Get the machine on your side, instead of the other way around.
You might be able to outsource yourself to a place with a drastically lower cost of living. That’s what Becky and I did. I earn a bit of money from Cryptogon, do some trading, and Becky runs her small business. All of this is done completely over the Internet. You don’t have to be a computer person. Becky doesn’t even go on her computer everyday. If it wasn’t for having to see how many orders she had received every two or three days, I doubt that she would spend much time online at all.
These are just a couple of examples of how people are using the machine to escape the traditional grind. Maybe some of you would like to share your experiences with using technology to find opportunities for work that might not have existed before.

Via: MIT Technology Review:
Recent advances in information technologies may be driving people out of work and enriching the already rich, a new book argues. The book challenges the long-held view that new technology displaces workers in the short term but always creates more jobs in the long term.
Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the center, cowrote the new e-book, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, which is released today.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that technology seems to be doing three things simultaneously: enabling CEOs and other leaders in some fields to earn outsize incomes; replacing people with software in certain kinds of service jobs; and—as factories automate at a faster pace—benefiting owners at the expense of workers.
Some 60 percent of the wealth created in the United States between 2002 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of Americans. This is not merely the result of financial deregulation or favorable Bush-era tax breaks; information technology has enabled the far-broader sale of digital goods and expansion of software-aided management, the pair argues.
EBook: Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Related: I don’t like recommending The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, because Ferriss is a shallow megalomaniac, but the book is worth reading.
Related: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal
Related: More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People