Andrew McAfee is an American technology and management researcher, a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Co-Founder and Co-Director of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy. He is known for a sequence of books on the economics of digital technology and AI, several co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson.
Roles
McAfee is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Books and research
With Erik Brynjolfsson, McAfee co-authored Race Against the Machine (2011), an earlier precursor to their later work; *The Second Machine Age* (2014), which set out the Bounty and Spread framework; and *Machine, Platform, Crowd* (2017), framed around three axes of digital-economy rebalancing.
His solo book More from Less (2019) argues that advanced economies are decoupling growth from resource use, achieving more GDP with less metal, energy, land, and water. The argument informs his views on AI as part of a broader trajectory of progress. The Geek Way (2023) examines why technology companies outperform incumbents, attributing the difference to culture, norms, and operating model, themes relevant to corporate competition in the AI era.
Positions
McAfee writes from a more uniformly tech-optimistic stance than Brynjolfsson, closer to the bounty side of the bounty-and-spread frame. He is generally skeptical of heavy regulation and emphasizes market-and-incentives approaches. He situates AI within a broader progress narrative alongside improvements in energy density and materials efficiency.
Relationships
- supports: The Second Machine Age — Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) / Machine, Platform, Crowd — McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2017) / Bounty and Spread
- related: Erik Brynjolfsson — frequent co-author.
- related: AI and Productivity / AI Labor Disruption — concept pages anchored by the McAfee/Brynjolfsson work.