Go Out There and Win One for the Motherboard

One of the many delights of reading Tyler Cowen’s new book, “Average is Over,” is the instinctive effort to extend his twinned theses. The provocative little volume has generated a lot of controversy -- even President Barack Obama was asked about it on National Public Radio -- and, like many controversial works, it has been widely misread.

This isn’t a review, although I found the book mesmerizing; rather, it’s an effort to generalize from an analysis that Cowen aims at the probable future of labor and wealth. He argues principally two theses: The first is the familiar claim that rapid technological change is increasing the returns to cognitive capacity, resulting in a growing concentration of wealth, and a rapid shrinkage of jobs that can be done more efficiently by machines. The second (and the more provocative) is that the future belongs to those who are trained to work alongside the intelligent machines that will come to dominate every corner of the culture.