YouSaid · the spoken record

Erik Brynjolfsson

lines on the record: 118
first: 2020-11-25
most recent: 2020-11-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, thank you so much. And I think we're all part of the invisible college as we call it. We're all part of this intellectual and human community where we all can learn from each other. It doesn't really matter physically where we are so much anymore.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we're social animals and we're wired to help others. And ultimately, that's something that's really deeply rooted in our psyche. And if we do help others, if we do or at least feel like we're helping others, our reward systems kick in and we end up being more deeply satisfied than if we just do something selfish and shallow.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just too shallow. And I think I've convinced myself that real happiness doesn't come from seeking pleasure. It's kind of a little, it's ironic. Like if you really focus on being happy, I think it doesn't work. You got to like be doing something bigger. I think the analogy I sometimes use is, you know, when you look at a dim star in the sky, if you look right at it, it kind of disappears, but you have to look a little to the side and then the parts of your retina that are better at absorbing light can pick it up better. It's the same thing with happiness. I think you need to sort of find something other goal, something, some meaning in life, and that ultimately makes you happier than if you go squarely at just pleasure. And so for me, you know, the kind of research I do that I think is trying to change the world, make the world a better place. And I'm not like an evolutionary psychologist, but my guess is that our brains are wired not just for pleasure.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he made a really good intellectual argument for it too. And I just didn't strike me as right. And I think that, you know, while I am kind of a utilitarian, like, you know, I do think we should do the grace good for the grace number.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope you've gotten the answer to that from somebody. I think we're all still working on that one. But what is it? I actually learned a lot from my son, Luke, and he's 19 now, but he's always loved philosophy. And he reads way more sophisticated philosophy than I do. I once took him to Oxford and he spent the whole time pulling all these obscure books down and reading them. A couple of years ago, we had this argument, and he was trying to convince me that hedonism was the ultimate meaning of life, just pleasure seeking.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It's a little bit of a pun, I think he says. They're really small. You take these little things, but also like atomic power, it can have big impact.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's just a good name because he writes very clearly. And most of the sentences I read in that book, I was like, yeah, I know that, but it just really helps to have somebody remind you and tell you and kind of just reinforce it.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A personal kind of self help book that I found kind of useful. People is atomic habits. I think it's, what's his name? James Clear.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, he's terrific. I love the way his brain works and he makes you think about profound things. He's got such a joyful approach to life. And so that's been a great book. And I learn a lot from it. I think everybody explains it in a way, even though he's so brilliant that everyone can understand that I can understand. That's three, but let me mention maybe one or two others. I mean, I recently read more from less by my sometimes co-author Andrew McAfee. It made me optimistic about how we can continue to have rising living standards while living more lightly on the planet. In fact, because of higher living standards, because of technology, because of digitization that I mentioned, we don't have to have as big an impact on the planet. And that's a great story to tell. And he documents it very carefully.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I think that's exactly right. It kind of takes you through the different things. So you can understand how they reach thinking some of the strengths and weaknesses. I mean, probably is a little out of date now. It needs to be updated a bit, but you could at least look through the first couple hundred years of economics, which is not a bad place to start. More recently, I mean, a book I really enjoy is by my friend and colleague Max Tagmark called Life 3.0. You should have him on your podcast if you haven't already.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I go back to my team years, and I read Siddhartha, which is a philosophical book and kind of helps keep me centered about. Yeah, my Hermann Hest, exactly. Don't get too wrapped up in material things or other things and just sort of try to find peace on things. A book that actually influenced me a lot in terms of my career was called The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Haubrenner. It's actually about economists. It goes through a series of different companies written in a very lively form. It probably sounds boring, but it did describe whether it's Adam Smith or Karl Marx or John Mayner Keynes. And each of them sort of what their key insights were, but also kind of their personalities. And I think that's one of the reasons I became an economist was just Understanding how they grappled with the big questions of the world.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fun, yeah. And we feel like we're working on important problems and we're doing things that, you know, I think our first order in terms of what's important in the world. And that's very satisfying to me.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I couldn't even understand it. It's like way, way more brilliant. And that's really, to me, actually, I really enjoy that being in a room with lots of other smart people. And Stanford has made it very easy to attract those people. I just, you know.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This stuff that I really love, and I hope someday everybody can have jobs that are like that. And I appreciate that it's not necessarily easy for everybody to have a job that they both love and also they get paid for. So there are things that don't go well in academia, but by and large, I think it's a kind of kinder gentler version of a lot of the world. We sort of cut each other a little slack on things like, you know, on just a lot of things. You know, of course there's harsh debates and discussions about things and some petty politics here and there. Personally, I try to stay away from most of that sort of politics. It's not my thing. And so it doesn't affect me most of the time, sometimes a little bit maybe. But, you know, being able to pull together something, we have the digital economy lab. We got all these brilliant grad students and undergraduates and postdocs that are just doing stuff that I learned from.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I mean, first off, I mean, economists have this concept called revealed preference. You can ask people what they say, or you can watch what they do. And so obviously by revealed preferences, I love academia. I'm out here. I could be doing lots of other things, but it's something I enjoy a lot. And I think the word magical is exactly right. At least it is for me. I do what I love. Hopefully my dean won't be listening, but I would do this for free. It's just what I like to do. I like to do research. I love to have conversations like this with you and with my students, with my fellow colleagues. I love being around the smartest people I can find and learning something from them and having them challenge me. And that just gives me joy. And every day I find something new and exciting to work on. And a university environment is really filled with other people who feel that way. And so I feel very fortunate to be part of it. And I'm lucky that I'm in a society where I can actually get paid for it and put food on the table while doing it.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“MIT is great. MIT has been very good to me. It continues to be very good to me. It's an amazing place. I continue to have so many amazing friends and colleagues there. I'm very fortunate to have been able to spend a lot of time at MIT. Stanford's also amazing. And part of what attracted me out here was not just the weather, but also, you know, Silicon Valley, let's face it, is really more of the epicenter of the technological revolution. And I want to be close to the people who are inventing AI and elsewhere. A lot of it is being invented MIT for that matter in Europe and China and elsewhere, in NIA. But being a little closer to some of the key technologists was something that was important to me. And it may be shallow, but I also do enjoy the good weather. And I felt a little ripped off when I came here a couple months ago. And immediately there are the fires. My eyes were burning. The sky was orange.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's blow it up. And there were the Luddites almost exactly 200 years ago who smashed the looms and the spinning machines because they felt like those machines weren't helping them. We have a real imperative not just to do the morally right thing, but to do the thing that is going to save the country, which is make sure that we create not just prosperity, but shared prosperity.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Off. It makes the pie bigger. It creates wealth and health. But it can also be uneven. Not everyone automatically benefits. It's possible for some people, even a majority of people, to get left behind while a small group benefits. What most economists would say, well, let's make the pie bigger, but let's make sure we adjust the system so that we compensate the people who are hurt. And since the pie is bigger, we can make the rich richer. We can make the middle class richer, we can make the poor richer. Mathematically, everyone could be better off. But again, we're not doing that. And again, people are saying this isn't working for us. And again, instead of fixing the distribution, a lot of people are beginning to say, hey, technology sucks. We've got to stop it. Let's throw rocks at the Google bus.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bigger, it's possible for everyone to be better off. You can make the winners better off, but you can also compensate those who don't win. And so they end up being better off as well. What happened was that we didn't fulfill that promise. We did have some more increased free trade in the 80s and 90s, but we didn't compensate the people who were hurt. And so they felt like the people in power were reneged on the bargain. And I think they did. And so then there's a backlash against trade. And now both political parties, but especially Trump and company, have really pushed back against free trade. Ultimately, that's bad for the country. Ultimately, that's bad for living standards. But in a way, I can understand that people felt they were betrayed. Technology has a lot of similar characteristics. Technology can make us all better.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that there's a real political risk. I'm not a political scientist, but you don't have to be one. Unfortunately, demagogues have harnessed that in a way that is pretty destructive to the country. And an analogy I see is what happened with trade, almost every economist thinks that free trade is a good thing, that when two people voluntarily exchange almost by definition, they're both better off if it's voluntary. And so generally trade is a good thing. But they also recognize that trade can lead to uneven effects, that there can be winners and losers in some of the people who didn't have the skills to compete with somebody else or didn't have other assets. And so trade can shift prices in ways that are averse to some people. So there's a formula that economists have, which is that you have free trade, but then you compensate the people who were hurt. And free trade makes the pie bigger. And since the pie”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the center of what I worry about. And let me break it down to two parts. You know, there's a moral and ethical aspect to it. We need to relieve this suffering. I mean, I share the values of, I think most Americans. We like to see shared prosperity or most people on the planet. And we would like to see people not falling behind and they have fallen behind, not just due to COVID, but in the previous couple of decades, median income has barely moved, you know, depending on how you measure it. And the incomes are the top 1% have skyrocketed and are part of that is due to the ways technology has been used. Part of this has been due to, frankly, our political system has continually shifted more wealth to those people who have the powerful interests. So there's just, I think, a moral imperative to do a better job and ultimately we're all going to be wealthier if more people can contribute, more people have the wherewithal. But the second thing is...”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I thought that was kind of interesting. I think a lot of people are discovering that these tools that thanks to technologists have been developed over the past decade, they're a lot more powerful than we thought. I mean, of all the terrible things we've seen with COVID and the real failure of many of our institutions that I thought would work better. One area that's been a bright spot is our technologies. Bandwidth has held up pretty well and all of our email and other tools have just scaled up kind of gracefully. So that's been a plus. Economists call this question of whether it'll go back hysteresis. The question is when you boil an egg after it gets cold again, it stays hard. And I think that we're going to have a pheromone amount of hysteresis in the economy. We're going to move to this new, we have moved to a new remote work system, and it's not going to snap all the way back to where it was before.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great question. My hypothesis is yes, a lot of it will. Of course, some of it will go back, but a surprising amount of it will stay. I personally, you know, for instance, I moved my seminars, my academic seminars to Zoom. And I was surprised how well it worked. So it works. Yeah. I mean, obviously we are able to reach a much broader audience. So we have people tuning in from Europe and other countries, just all over the United States for that matter. I also actually found that it in many ways is more egalitarian. We use the chat feature and other tools and grad students and others who might have been a little shy about speaking up. We now kind of have more of ability for lots of voices. And they're answering each other's questions. So you kind of get parallel. Like if someone had some question about some of the data or a reference or whatever, then someone else in the chat would answer it. And the whole thing just became like a higher bandwidth, higher quality.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the pandemic hit, that grew steadily and hit 50%, roughly half of Americans working at home. So a complete transformation. And of course, it wasn't even. It wasn't like everybody did it. If you're an information worker, professional, if you work mainly with data, then you're much more likely to work at home. If you're a manufacturing worker working with other people or physical things, then it wasn't so easy to work at home. And instead, those people were much more likely to become laid off or unemployed. So it's been something that's had very disparate effects on different parts of the workforce.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been remarkable. And it's horrible how many people have suffered, the amount of death, the economic destruction. It's also striking just the amount of change in work that I've seen. In the last 20 weeks, I've seen more change than there were in the previous 20 years. There's been nothing like it since probably the World War II mobilization in terms of reorganizing our economy. The most obvious one is the shift to remote work. And I and many other people stopped going into the office and teaching my students in person. I did a study on this with a bunch of colleagues at MIT and elsewhere. And what we found was that before the pandemic, in the beginning of 2020, about one in six, a little over 15% of Americans were working remotely.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you need, it's a classic public good. There you need the government to be involved in. And the U.S. government used to be investing much more in R&D. But we have slashed that part of the government really foolishly. And we're all poorer, significantly poorer as a result. Growth rates are down. We're not having the kind of scientific progress we used to have. It's been sort of a short-term Eating the seed, corn, whatever metaphor you want to use, where people grab some money, put it in their pockets today, but 5, 10, 20 years later, they're a lot poorer than they otherwise would have been.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we should do basic research. Let me just be clear if everybody did more research. And I would make distinction between applied development versus basic research. So applied development, like how do we get this self-driving car feature to work better in the Tesla? That's great for private companies because they can capture the value from that. If they make a better self-driving car system, they can sell cars that are more valuable and then make money. So there's an incentive. There's not a big problem there. And smart companies, Amazon, Tesla and others are investing in it. The problem is with basic research. Like coming up with core basic ideas, whether it's in nuclear fusion or artificial intelligence or biotech there, if someone invents something, it's very hard for them to capture the benefits from it. It's shared by everybody, which is great in a way, but it means that they're not going to have the incentives to put as much effort into it.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You become much more efficient, you become fair, invest in RD and research, which is close to a free lunch is what we have. Erstwhile MIT colleague, Bob Sola, got the Nobel Prize not yesterday, but 30 years ago for describing that most improvements in living standards come from tech progress. And Paul Romer later got a Nobel Prize for noting that investments in R&D and human capital can speed the rate of tech progress. So if we do that, then we'll be healthier and wealthier.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, because they are taking costs from me and all the people around me. And if they charged a congestion tax, they would take that same amount of money and it would streamline the roads. Like when you're in Singapore, the traffic just flows because they have a congestion tax. They listen to economists. They invited me and others to go talk to them. And then I'd still be paying. I'd be paying a congestion tax instead of paying in my time. But that money would now be available for healthcare, be available for infrastructure, or be available just to give to people so they could buy food or whatever. So it's just, it saddens me when you sit when you're sitting in a traffic jam. It's like taxing me and then taking that money and dumping in the ocean, just like destroying it. So there are a lot of things like that that economists, and I'm not like doing anything radical here. Most good economists, I probably agree with me point by point on these things. And we could do those things in our whole economy.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economists agree as well. If we taxed carbon, we could raise hundreds of billions of dollars. We could take that money and redistribute it through an earned income tax credit or other things so that overall our tax system would become more progressive. We could tax congestion. One of the things that kills me as an economist is every time I sit in a traffic jam, I know that it's completely unnecessary. This is complete wasted time.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to see more Paguvian taxes. What that means is you tax things that are bad instead of things that are good. So right now we tax labor, we tax capital, which is unfortunate because one of the basic principles of economics, if you tax something, you tend to get less of it. So, you know, right now there's still work to be done and still capital to be invested in. But instead, we should be taxing things like pollution and congestion. And if we did that, we would have less pollution. So a carbon tax is almost every economist would say it's a no-brainer, whether they're Republican or Democrat, Greg Manku, who is head of George Bush's Council of Economic Advisors or Dick Schmolenzi, who is another Republican economist degree, and of course a lot of Democratic”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I definitely think our whole tax system, our political and economic system, has gotten more and more screwed up over the past 20, 30 years. I don't think it's that hard to make headway and improving it. I don't think we need to totally reinvent stuff. A lot of it is what I've elsewhere with Andy and others called economics 101. There's just some basic principles that have worked really well in the 20th century that we sort of forgot in terms of investing in education, investing in infrastructure, welcoming immigrants, having a tax system that was more progressive and fair at one point tax rates were on top incomes were significantly higher and they've come down a lot to the point where in many cases they're lower now than they are for poorer people. And we could do things like earned income tax credit to get a little more”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it helps. I mean, there are lots of self-motivated people, but there are also people that, you know, maybe need a little guidance or help. And I think it's a really hard question for someone who is losing a job in one area to know what is the new area I should be learning skills in. And we could provide a much better set of tools and platforms that Map said, okay, here's a set of skills you already have. Here's something that's in demand. Let's create a path for you to go from where you are to where you need to be.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Universal basic income, he suggested, or instead of an unconditional basic income, how about a conditional basic income where the condition is you learn some new skills? We need to reskill our workforce. So let's make it easier for people to find ways to get those skills and get rewarded for doing them. And that's kind of a neat idea as well.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, an interesting point to make is do we think that Bill Gates would have founded Microsoft if tax rates were 70%? Well, we know he would have because they were tax rates of 70% when he founded it, you know, so I don't think that's as big a deterrent. And we could provide more buying power to people. My own favorite tool is the earned income tax credit, which is basically a way of supplementing income of people who have jobs and giving employers an incentive to hire even more people. The minimum wage can discourage employment, but the earned income tax credit encourages employment by supplementing people's wages. The employer can only afford to pay them $10 for a task, the rest of us kick in another $5 or $10 and bring their wages up to $15 or $20 total. And then they have more buying power than entrepreneurs are thinking, how can we cater to them? How can we make products for them? And it becomes a self-reinforcing system where people are better off. And Rang and I had a good discussion where he suggested instead of...”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been designed and evolved in a way that's, I think, very unfair to a lot of hardworking people. I see super hardworking people who aren't really seeing their wages grow over the past 20, 30 years. some other people who have been super smart and or super lucky have had billions or hundreds of billions. And I don't think they need those hundreds of billions to have the right incentives to invent things. I think if you talk to almost any of them, as I have, they don't think that they need an extra $10 billion to do what they're doing. Most of them probably would love to do it for only a billion or maybe for nothing.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Robots can't do most of that. We need to have better child care. We need better health care. We need to take care of people who are mentally ill or older. We need to repair our roads. There's so much work that require at least partly, maybe entirely a human component. So rather than write all these people off, let's find a way to repurpose them and keep them engaged. Now that said, I would like to see more.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lost their jobs and were just given checks, alcoholism, depression, divorce, all those social indicators, drug use all went way up. People just weren't happy just sitting around collecting a check. Maybe it's part of the way they were raised. Maybe it's something innate in people that they need to feel wanted and needed. So it's not as simple as just writing people a check. You need to also give them a way to have a sense of purpose. And that was important to me. And the second thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we are far from the end of work. I don't buy the idea that there's just like not enough work to be done. I see, like our cities need to be cleaned up.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the thing that he really made the centerpiece of his campaign was UBI. And I was originally kind of a fan of it. And then as I studied it more, I became less of a fan, although I'm beginning to come back a little bit. So let me tell you a little bit about my evolution. You know, as an economist, we have looking at the problem of people not having enough income. And the simplest thing is, well, why don't we write them a check, problem solved? But then I talked to my sociologist friends, and they really convinced me that just writing a check doesn't really get at the core values. Voltaire once said that work solves three great ills, boredom, vice, and need. And, you know, you can deal with the need thing by writing a check, but people need a sense of meaning. They need something to do. And when say steel workers or coal miners,”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me answer the question about his broader approach first. I mean, I just love that. He's really thoughtful analytical. I agree with his values. So that's awesome. And he read my book and mentions it sometimes. It makes me even more exciting.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paid a fair amount, maybe not as much as some of us think they should be, but they have some tasks they're still for machine learning, but for now at least, most of the tasks economists didn't end up being in that category. And I should say I didn't create that data. We just took the analysis, and that's what came out of it. And over time, that scatterplot will be updated as the technology improves. But it was just interesting to see the pattern there. And it is a little troubling insofar as if you just take the technology as it is today, it's likely to worsen income inequality on a lot of dimensions.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's all four corners have some occupations. But there is a definite pattern, which is the lower wage occupations tend to have more tasks that are suitable for machine learning, like cashiers. I mean, anyone's gone to a supermarket or CVS knows that they not only read barcodes, but they can recognize an Apple and an orange and a lot of things that cashiers, humans used to be needed for. At the end of the spectrum, there are some jobs like Airline Pilot that are among the highest paid in our economy, but also a lot of them are suitable for machine learning. A lot of those tasks are. And then, yeah, you mentioned economists. I couldn't help peeking at those. And they're...”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get more specifically to your question, the kinds of tasks that machines tend to be good at are a lot of routine problem solving, mapping inputs X into outputs Y. If you have a lot of data on the X's and the Y's, the inputs and the outputs, you can do that kind of mapping and find the relationships. They tend to not be very good at even now find motor control and dexterity, emotional intelligence and human interactions. thinking outside the box, creative work. If you give it a well-structured task, machines can be very good at it, but even asking the right questions, that's hard. There's a quote that Andrew McAfee and I use in our book, Second Machine Age. Apparently Pablo Picasso was shown an early computer and he came away kind of unimpressed. He goes, well, I don't see all the fusses. All that does is answer questions.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Showing that machine learning can do as well as humans on many kinds of diagnostic imaging tasks. But other things that radiologists do, they sometimes administer conscious sedation. They sometimes do physical exams. They have to synthesize the results and explain it to the other doctors or to the patients. In all those categories, machine learning isn't really up to snuff yet. That job, we're going to see a lot of restructuring. parts of the job they'll hand over to machines, others humans will do more of. That's been more or less the pattern all of them. So to oversimplify a bit, we see a lot of restructuring, reorganization of work. And it's real going to be a great time. It is a great time for smart entrepreneurs and managers to do that reinvention of work. I'm not going to see mass unemployment.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So awesome, yeah. Thank you. So, what we found was that there was no occupation in our data set where machine learning just ran the table and did everything. And there was almost no occupation where machine learning didn't have like a significant ability to do things. Like take radiology. A lot of people, I hear it saying, you know, it's the end of radiology. And one of the 27 tasks is read medical images. Really important one. Like it's kind of a core job. And machines have basically gotten as good or better than radiologists. It was just an article in Nature last week, but they've been publishing them for the past few years.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, absolutely. Well, this is a really important question because I think we're very far from artificial general intelligence, which is AI that can just do the full breadth of what humans can do. But we do have human level or superhuman level narrow intelligence, narrow artificial intelligence. And obviously my calculator can do math a lot better than I can. And there's a lot of other things machines can do better than I can. So which is which? We actually set out to address that question with Tom Mitchell. I wrote a paper called What Can Machine Learning Do that was in Science. And we went and interviewed a whole bunch of AI experts and kind of synthesized what they thought machine learning was good at and wasn't good at. And we came up with what we called a rubric, basically a set of questions you can ask about any task that will tell you whether it's likely to score high or low on suitability.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other one is that gray filter is behind us. That would be good planets don't even evolve life or if they don't evolve life, they don't involve intelligent life. Maybe we've gotten past that. And so now maybe we're on the good side of the great filter.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think Robin Hanson has a good way of maybe others, they have a good way of thinking about this. There are no other intelligence creatures out there that we've been able to detect, one possibility is that there's a filter ahead of us. And when you get a little more advanced, maybe in 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years, things just get destroyed for some reason.”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good old nuclear weapons that could be devastating or even existential and new things yet to be invented. So that's a branch that I think it's pretty significant. And there are those who think that one of the reasons we haven't been contacted by other civilizations is that once you get to a certain level of complexity and technology, there's just too many ways to go wrong. There's a lot of ways to blow yourself up and people, or I should say species, end up falling into one of those traps, the great filter”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the year 200 BC on a lot of dimensions, things that we consider barbaric today. And it may be that if I thought about it more deeply, I would also be morally evolved. Maybe I'd be a vegetarian or do other things that right now, whether my future self would consider kind of immoral. That's a tricky problem getting the AI to do what we want, assuming it's even a friendly AI. I mean, I should probably mention There's a non-trivial other branch where we destroy ourselves, right? I mean, there's a lot of exponentially improving technologies that could be ferociously destructive, whether it's in nanotechnology or biotech and weaponized viruses, AI, and other things that... Nuclear weapons, of course”
2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source