YouSaid · the spoken record

Erik Brynjolfsson

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118
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2020-11-25
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2020-11-25
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  1. “Of course, that has some risks and weaknesses, but you can also, if you want to exhaust all the different ways you could beat a video game, you could just simulate all the options.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, well, you already mentioned that these training algorithms are getting much better at using smaller amounts of data. We also are just capturing a lot more data than we used to, especially in China, but all around us. So those are both important. In some applications, you can simulate the data. Video games, some of the self-driving car systems are simulating driving.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I know we make it to the point where it's consumed basically all of human knowledge are all digitized human knowledge. Yeah.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The advances in making it work more efficiently have also improved a couple of orders of magnitude or more. So you multiply together a hundredfold improvement in computer power, a hundredfold or more improvement in data, 100-fold improvement in techniques of software and algorithms. And soon you're getting into a millionfold improvements.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The progress has been staggering. If you look at image recognition, as you mentioned, I think it's a function of at least three things that are coming together. One, we just talked about faster chips, not just Moore's Law, but GPUs, TPUs, and other technologies. The second is just a lot more data. I mean, we are a wash in digital data today in a way we weren't 20 years ago. Photography, I'm old enough to remember, it used to be chemical. And now everything is digital. I took probably 50 digital photos yesterday. I wouldn't have done that if it was chemical. And we have the Internet of Things and all sorts of other types of data. And we walk around with our phone. It's just broadcasting a huge amount of digital data that can be used as training sets. And then last but not least, as they mentioned at OpenAID, there have been significant improvements in the techniques. The core idea of deep neural nets has been around for a few decades.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “As much as it used to. But these other dimensions are becoming important, more important, and we're seeing progress in them.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And for most of us, you know, having the iPhone be twice as fast, you know, it's nice, but having it the battery lifelong, that would be much more valuable. And the fact that a lot of the progress in chips now is reducing energy consumption is probably more important for many applications than just the raw speed. Other dimensions of Moore's Law are in AI and machine learning. Those tend to be very parallelizable functions, especially deep neural nets. And so instead of having one chip, you can have multiple chips or you can have GPU, a graphic processing unit that goes faster and now special chips designed for machine learning like tensor processing units. Each time you switch, there's another 10x or 100x improvement above and beyond Moore's law. So I think that the raw silicon is an improvement.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Some version, yes. It is. One version that has become more important, something I call Kumi's law, which is named after John Cumi, who I should mention was also my college roommate, but he identified the fact that energy consumption has been declining by a factor of two. And for most of us, that's more important. The new iPhones came out today as we're recording this. I'm not sure when you're going to make it available. Very after.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “The remarkable thing is you allude in the second part of your question is that we've been able to come up with a new S curve on top of the previous one and do that generation after generation with new materials, new processes, and just extend it further and further. I don't think anyone has a really good theory about why we've been so successful in doing that. It's great that we have been, and I hope it continues for some time, but it's one beginning of a theory is that there's huge incentives when other parts of the system are going on that clock speed of doubling every two to three years. If there's one component of it that's not keeping up, then the economic incentives become really large to improve that one part. It becomes a bottleneck. And anyone who can do improvements in that part can reap huge returns so that the resources automatically get focused on whatever.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's very profound, but it seems that a lot of people don't appreciate that half of it as well either. And that's why all exponential functions eventually turn into some kind of S-curve or stop in some other way, maybe catastrophically. And that's happened with COVID as well. I mean, it went up and then it sort of, you know, at some point, it starts saturating the pool of people to be infected. There's a standard epidemiological model that's based on that. It's beginning to happen with Moore's Law or different generations of computer power. It happens with all exponential curves.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, first, let me just unpack that first point. I talked about exponential curves, but no exponential curve continues forever. It's been said that if anything can't go on forever, eventually it will stop. That's very good.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Exponentially growing curves. And I was like, holy shit, look at this. In each industry, it was just taking off. And you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to extend that and say, wow, this means that this was in the late 80s and early 90s that, you know, if it goes anything like that, we're going to have orders of magnitude, more computer power than we did at that time. And of course, we do.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, no, I think we can all learn from Elon. I think going to first principles, I talked about two ways of getting more of a grip on the exponential function. And one of them just comes from first principles. You know, if you understand the math of it, you can see what's going to happen. And even if it seems counterintuitive that a couple of dozen of COVID cases can become thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of them in a month, it makes sense once you just do the math. And I think Elon tries to do that a lot. In Ferris, I think he also benefits from hanging out in Silicon Valley. And he's experienced it in a lot of different applications. So, you know, it's not as much of a shock to him anymore. But that's something we can all learn from. In my own life, I remember one of my first experiences really seeing it was when I was a grad student and my advisor asked me to plot the growth of computer power in the US economy in different industries. And there are all these, you know,”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Lot of stuff, you know, I think there are parts of the world, most of the world that is not exponential, the way humans learn, the way organizations change, the way our whole institutions adapt and evolve, those don't improve at exponential paces. And that leads to a mismatch oftentimes between these exponentially improving technologies or, let's say, changing technologies because some of them are exponentially more dangerous and our intuitions and our human skills and our institutions that just don't change very fast at all. And that mismatch, I think, is at the root of a lot of the problems in our society, the growing inequality and other dysfunctions in our political and economic systems.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, you can learn the math, but the truth is our brains, I think, tend to be learned more from experiences. So we just start seeing it more and more often. So hang around Silicon Valley, hang around AI and computer researches. I see this kind of exponential growth a lot more frequently. And I'm getting used to it, but I still make mistakes. I still underestimate some of the progress in just talking to someone about GPT-3 and how rapidly natural language has improved. I think that as the world becomes more exponential, we'll all start experiencing it more frequently. The danger is that we may make some mistakes in the meantime using our old kind of caveman intuitions about how the world works.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And more exponential, mainly because of digital technologies. So, more and more often our intuitions are out of whack. And that can be good in the case of things creating wonders, but it can be dangerous in the case of viruses and other things.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Early March, but I was worried because I knew I could see, or I suspected, I guess, that doubling would continue. And it did, and pretty soon we had thousands of times more cases. Most of the time when I use that quote, I try to, you know, it's motivated by more optimistic things like Moore's Law and the Wonders of having more computer power. But in either case, it can be very counterintuitive. I mean, if you walk for 10 minutes, you get about 10 times as far away as if you walk for one minute. You know, that's the way our physical world works. That's the way our brains are wired. But if something doubles for 10 times as long, you don't get 10 times as much. You get a thousand times as much. And after 20, it's a billion. After 30, it's 20, it's a million after 30, it's a billion. And pretty soon after that, it just gets to these numbers that you can barely grasp. Our world is becoming more.”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, that quote, I remember posting that it's actually a reprise of something Andy McAvey and I said in the second machine age, but I posted it in early March when COVID was really just beginning to take off. And I was really scared. There were actually only a couple dozen cases, maybe less at that time, but they were doubling every like two or three days. And, you know, I could see, oh my God, this is going to be a catastrophe. And it's going to happen soon. But nobody was taking it very seriously, or not a lot of people were taking it very seriously. In fact, I remember my last in-person conference that week. I was flying back from Las Vegas. And it was the only person on the plane wearing a mask. And the flight attendant came over to me. She looked very concerned. She kind of put her hands on my shoulder. She was touching me all over, which I wasn't thrilled about. And she goes, you know, do you have some kind of anxiety disorder? Are you okay? And I was like, no, you know, it's because of COVID. And she says,”

    2020-11-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #141 – Erik Brynjolfsson: Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source