Legal future: machine, platform, crowd

Reading is one of the pleasures of my life. Personally, I have rather idiosyncratic tastes—met rather too temptingly by the excellent London Library (how retro is that?) and which extend to re-reading the total bodies of work by John Buchan and Joseph Conrad (worse). But, the book of the year for me has been about the impact of technology: Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjojlfsson’s Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future (W W Norton). This is not really about the law at all but, boy, does it have relevance.

McAfee and Brynjolfsson are thoughtful observers of the emerging technological revolution which they described in their earlier The Second Machine Age . Depending on your view, this is completely terrifying or utterly exhilarating. The book’s essential notion is that there are three key elements of the brave new technological world: the creation of machines like those represented by artificial intelligence;