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SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur argues in the Santa Fe New Mexican, in a reprint of an essay recently published in McKinsey Quarterly, that a deep, slow, and silent transformation of our economy is taking place today as a second digital economy supplants the physical one we know. Every 60 years or so, he writes, a technological innovation comes along that slowly alters the economy. In the late 19th century it was the railroads linking east and west, goods and labor, and eventually fueling the industrial revolution.  Information technology is that technology today -- vast, interconnected, and extraordinarily productive. "Processes in the physical economy are being entered into the digital economy, where they are 'speaking to' other processes in the digital economy, in a constant conversation among multiple servers and multiple semi-intelligent nodes that are updating things, querying things, checking things off, readjusting things, and eventually connecting back with processes and human in the physical economy." Previously, humans were responsible for these processes. "Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy, and I believe this effect is dwarfing the much more publicized effect of jobs disappearing to places like India and China," Arthur writes.

There's something big happening right now. I'm not referring to any of the popular technology memes per se-big data, social, cloud, mobile, augmented reality, context, post-PC devices, consumerization, 3-D printing, etc. I'm referring to something behind, and beyond, all of these technologies: the digitization of decision making. This increasing trend is creating a "second economy" underneath and alongside the physical economy we know so well, and on a revolutionary scale.

This study calculates the impact of investment in broadband technology on employment and output of Germany's economy. Two sequential investment scenarios are analyzed: the first one is based on the Government's "National Broadband Strategy" aimed at ensuring that 75 percent of German households have broadband access of at least 50 Mbps by 2014. The second scenario, covering 2015-2020, is labeled "ultra-broadband", and ensures that 50 percent of German households have access to at least 100 Mbps and another 30 percent to 50 Mbps by 2020. 

In a little over 20 years, the use of the Internet has become ubiquitous. Access to the Internet at increasingly higher connection speeds, is assuming a key role in guaranteeing both economic prosperity as well as social cohesion. The European Commission ("EC") has therefore set out an ambitious programme for increasing the accessibility of Internet provision in Europe under its Next Generation Access ("NGA"), a programme with ambitious roll-out targets that include improving download speeds so that all EU citizens will have Internet access at 30 Megabits per second ("Mbps") by the year 2020 and that 50% of households will have the ability to access the Internet at speeds of 100 Mbps or more. NGA will be key to the development of a European economy that is smart, sustainable and inclusive

Pour McKinsey Quarterly, l'économiste Brian Arthur, chercheur invité au Laboratoire de systèmes intelligents du Parc, le Centre de recherche de Palo Alto, professeur externe à l'Institut de Santa Fé et auteur de The Nature of Technology : What it is and How it Evolves (La nature des technologies : ce qu'elle est et comment et évolue) a livré une très intéressante réflexion sur l'économie numérique, qu'il a baptisée "La deuxième économie".

La Cour suprême du Canada a rendu jeudi un jugement très attendu dans le milieu artistique. Les habitués de l'achat de musique en ligne savent qu'il est possible d'écouter un court extrait d'une chanson - moins de 30 secondes - avant d'acheter le morceau complet.