When artificial intelligence is bad news for the boss

That advice, quoted in Machine, Platform, Crowd, is well followed by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson in their latest business book, which tries to make sense of the "technology surge" that is bewildering so many executives. The two academic authors from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who became the pin-up boys of the Davos crowd for their previous book on The Second Machine Age (2014), do a neat job of scanning the technological horizon and highlighting significant landmarks. This is a clear and crisply written account of machine intelligence, big data and the sharing economy. But McAfee and Brynjolfsson also wisely acknowledge the limitations of their futurology and avoid over-simplification. No one can really have much idea how the business world is going to evolve or predict the precise interplay between all these fast-changing forces.