Three years after the release of The Second Machine Age, a sweeping, largely optimistic look at how technology is radically changing our lives, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are back with a deep dive into the key forces driving our increasingly digital age.

In their new book, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, the pair guide us through how to build a future that doesn't leave humans behind. How can we use machines to better, not simply displace, human work? How can we ensure increasingly powerful platforms like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook actually improve the way we run our companies and live our lives? And how much should we embrace the way crowd-based projects—which are frequently innovating faster than corporate R&D labs—are shaping our future?

Join Future Tense at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 29, in New York for a wide-ranging conversation about how we might navigate through these turbulent technological transformations and steer toward better tomorrows. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.

PARTICIPANTS

Erik Brynjolfsson
Co-author, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
Director, Center for Digital Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Andrew McAfee
Co-author, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
Principal research scientist, Center for Digital Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alison Griswold
Reporter, Quartz