Erik Brynjolfsson

speaker

201 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Erik Brynjolfsson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · The A.I. Trade Secrets War + Economists Say ‘We Must Act Now’ + HatGPT · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

It's a pleasure to be talking to you again, Kevin.

Well, this is something that's been brewing for a long time.

You're right, I've been thinking about it a long time.

I taught my first course about artificial intelligence back in 1987, before most of your listeners were probably born.

I've just been very convinced about what was happening.

But the nature of exponential curves is they grow slowly at first and then suddenly.

And now, especially this year, we're in that suddenly part of the curve.

The technology is going so fast, but our economic understanding is nowhere close to keeping up.

And so I'm doing what we can to try to change that.

Well, there's two main purposes.

First is that there's been a sea change, and we're hoping to catalyze that sea change in attitudes about how seriously we take AI.

As recently as a year or two ago, and certainly before that, most of the economists I talked to really were not very AI-pilled.

They thought, hey, it's not a big deal.

I remember one secretary of treasury saying to me, oh, do you think that maybe there'll be a couple of tenths of a percent of change in productivity over the coming years?

So they were sort of like imagining sort of a very small technological impact.

And I personally think it's going to be huge.

And I wanted more people to take it seriously and realize that I think this is the most important thing economists should be working on.

Whatever other projects they're working on, they should look at it through a lens of AI.

Part of what we were calling for is a better understanding, more economists thinking hard about this question, more research going into it.

That said, there was the beginning of a direction that, you know, Daron Acemoglu and I and others have been talking about for a while, which is this idea of complementing humans rather than substituting for them.

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