In 1950, Alan Turing proposed an imitation game as the ultimate test of whether a machine was intelligent: could a machine imitate a human so well that its answers to questions indistinguishable from a human. Ever since, creating intelligence that matches human intelligence has implicitly or explicitly been the goal of thousands of researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs. The benefits of human-like artificial intelligence (HLAI) include soaring productivity, increased leisure, and perhaps most profoundly, a better understanding of our own minds. But not all types of AI are human-like. In fact, many of the most powerful systems are very different from humans. So an excessive focus on developing and deploying HLAI can lead us into a trap. As machines become better substitutes for human labor, workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become increasingly dependent on those who control the technology. In contrast, when AI is focused on augmenting humans rather than mimicking them, then humans retain the power to insist on a share of the value created. Furthermore, augmentation creates new capabilities and new products and services, ultimately generating far more value than merely human-like AI. While both types of AI can be enormously beneficial, there are currently excess incentives for automation rather than augmentation among technologists, business executives, and policymakers.

One of my 2019 new year resolutions was to read more books. I signed up for GoodReads and stated a reading challenge with a modest goal of finishing twelve books. I finished twenty-four, and many of these books are great reads for entrepreneurs, CIOs, and other digital transformation leaders. What makes a good book? My favorites have a strong focus, come from a unique perspective, are easy to read/listen, deliver a clear message, back their hypotheses with data or testimonials, tell personal stories, and are concise.

AI has arrived, but are companies ready for it? According to an MIT scientist, executives are underestimating the speed, scope, and scale of the disruption it will bring. The promises and practical applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are here. In this interview with Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and cofounder of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, he explains how AI, and machine learning in particular, is quickly disrupting companies' economic models, strategy, culture, and even the very nature of how they are structured and run. But there are opportunities for companies that can answer the call--and meet the needs and wants of consumers. An edited transcript of McAfee's remarks follows.

In this interview with BCG, McAfee focuses on "machine," the rise of artificial intelligence. McAfee is a big booster of most things digital, but he's also a realist. He cautions, for example, that an AI engine is only as good as the data fed into it. Machines are still a long way from mastering many human tasks, and the biggest impediment to machine learning and other AI tools may be the imagination of business leaders. But he's not worried about tech giants cornering the AI market, and he's relatively sanguine about an automated economy in which many forms of work have disappeared.

Technology is getting smarter, faster. Experts including the authors of The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, examine the impact that "thinking" machines may have on top-management roles.

Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) is the director of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy, the Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a research associate at NBER. His research examines the effects of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and performance, digital commerce, and intangible assets. Brynjolfsson is the author of several books, including, with Andrew McAfee, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (2017) and the New York Times best seller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014). With Erik Brynjolfsson he coauthored Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (2017) and The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014), which was a New York Times best seller and was shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) is the director of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy, the Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a research associate at NBER. His research examines the effects of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and performance, digital commerce, and intangible assets. Brynjolfsson is the author of several books, including, with Andrew McAfee, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (2017) and the New York Times best seller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014). With Erik Brynjolfsson he coauthored Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (2017) and The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014), which was a New York Times best seller and was shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan School professor, explains how rapid advances in machine learning are presenting new opportunities for businesses. He breaks down how the technology works and what it can and can't do (yet). He also discusses the potential impact of AI on the economy, how workforces will interact with it in the future, and suggests managers start experimenting now. Brynjolfsson is the co-author, with Andrew McAfee, of the HBR Big Idea article, "The Business of Artificial Intelligence." SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. It's a pretty sad photo when you look at it. A robot, just over a meter tall and shaped kind of like a pudgy rocket ship, laying on its side in a shallow pool in the courtyard of a Washington, D.C. office building. Workers – human ones – stand around, trying to figure out how to rescue it. The security robot had just been on the job for a few days when the mishap occurred. One entrepreneur who works in the office complex wrote: "We were promised flying cars. Instead we got suicidal robots."

In their groundbreaking book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee pointed to employment trends to illustrate a workforce that is inarguably affected by automation--and how companies must transform in order to remain relevant. Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and McAfee, principal research scientist and co-director at the MIT IDE, have follow-up book out in June. And this one pinpoints specific qualities of the "second machine age," which the authors argue is maturing to a point at which technologies are now replacing workplace tasks once considered routine. We are now, they write in Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, at the "second wave of the second machine age." In a keynote panel at MIT's CIO Symposium in Cambridge, MA, Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of the MIT Technology Review, moderated a session with Brynjolfsson and McAfee that addressed questions such as: How can businesses harness AI and machine learning to stay ahead of the curve?

Robots moving deeper into the American workplace--how much decision-making will we turn over to machines? For all the change that has come with the digital revolution – in the ways we work and communicate and do business – the real impact still lies ahead. Computers – machines themselves – are become smarter all the time. That intelligence is being wired into real world action. It's moving in on what we thought only humans could do.