My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
Will artificial intelligence displace workers or make them more valuable? Probably plenty of both. But how much in either direction, and how fast will all this change happen?
Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the world’s top economists studying how AI is reshaping productivity, jobs, and the American economy.
Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He is also the co-author, along with Andrew McAfee, of Machine, Platform, Crowd, The Second Machine Age, and the classic Race Against the Machine. He is a co-founder of Workhelix, which helps large companies measure, track, and maximize the return of their AI investments.
We explore what the next decade of AI could mean for workers, businesses, and the broader economy, and what the relationship between humans and intelligent machines may look like. We discuss why views from Silicon Valley and the East Coast differ so sharply on AI’s impact, why the technology has produced dramatically different results across companies, and why some firms and departments are already seeing meaningful productivity gains while others have yet to unlock AI’s full potential.
In This Episode:
* What AI brings to the table (0:35)
* Does AI bring too much? (6:49)
* Moving away from the Valley view (10:55)
* How perspectives are formed (16:05)
* Companies and productivity (23:01)
* AI in the foreseeable future (29:21)
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
But here are some edited highlights from the chat:
What’s the positive case for workers in an AI future that currently sounds like it only benefits CEOs, tech firms, and data-center builders
This is, I think, the best time to be alive if you’re somebody who's got agency and ambition and intention and wants to do something, create new things for themselves and for the world. But that's not the story that's out there. …There's going to be a lot of new jobs created. You got to tell both parts of that story. Of course, you want to lean into the second part of the story about the new stuff that's being created [and not just job disruption and loss], because that's where people should be focusing. There's no point staring at the things that are disappearing… My company, Workhelix, is all about doing that. So I'm doing what I can for my part. I would love to see more people lean into that part of the story.
Can someone coherently believe both that AI may become extremely powerful—possibly AGI or superintelligence—and that the future labor market can still be broad, humane, and full of useful work?
I think we're going to have several decades worth of humans and machines working together. I'd like to extend that window where we can still have an important role for humans to contribute and for us to expand that pie, not simply automate what's already existing. We should probably be preparing for some further time in the future when there's less of a role for people. But most of my friends here in Silicon Valley, I think their timelines are way too short for when humans no longer have a role.
If AI eventually becomes capable of doing almost all economically valuable work, would that actually be a desirable future for humanity, and what would make it a good society rather than a dystopia?
We should start preparing for a period where AI can do almost everything and we need to come up with mechanisms so that we still have freedom and power in that kind of world. I don't think that's automatic. And one of my biggest concerns, to be frank, is not that we don't have abundance, I think we will, but it's that we don't have freedom and autonomy. That's something that's not to be taken for granted, and we need to put in place ways that we not only have the wealth, but we also have widely shared prosperity and widely shared decision making rights.
Is AI already delivering real business value and productivity gains, or are the impressive lab results still mostly failing to show up in the economy?
The returns (AI productivity gains) have been somewhat disappointing. To me, that’s totally natural. That’s totally understandable. As you know, I’ve done a lot of work, we call it the Productivity J Curve on the need for complementary investments for intangible investments in new business process design and new skills for the workforce, even new products and services. Those take time. With past general purpose technologies like the steam engine and electricity, it took literally decades before you got those returns.
How should we think about AI’s usefulness when some high-profile business uses have produced embarrassing hallucinations?
They (AI) can also do wondrous things that are incredibly valuable. My advice is to keep a human in the loop. Ultimately, you, the person, is responsible for the output. You can identify where the good things are and not the bad things.
Can AI progress happen so quickly that society can’t adapt, and should policymakers worry about the speed of change, not just the destination?
How fast do we want to go with this? It's not infinitely fast. We want to be able to digest and manage it. Now, the way I would handle that is I would put more resources into speeding up our ability to understand and adapt, and we're not doing enough of that. And that means, for instance, instead of cutting the budget for economic statistics, I would be massively boosting it so we get more visibility.
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