✨💪 AI, jobs, and productivity: My chat with economist Erik Brynjolfsson

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.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe