Tech Tent - the Second Machine Age - BBC News

From driverless cars to smartphone apps offering instant translation, the evidence of rapid progress in artificial intelligence is now clear to see. On this week's Tech Tent we report on two tech giants, Facebook and Baidu, which are spending heavily on artificial intelligence research. And we meet the man who was among the first to predict just how disruptive the automation revolution was going to be. When a book called The Second Machine Age was published in 2014 it had a far greater impact than most academic works. But the timing of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's book about the wave of automation sweeping through the workplace was perfect, as the world woke up to the rapid progress of computing and robotics and grew anxious about it.