Erik Brynjolfsson
Erik Brynjolfsson
Erik Brynjolfssonis an American academic, and Schussel Family Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, known for his contributions to the world of IT Productivity research and work on the economics of information more generally...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
CountryUnited States of America
bump danger dark kinds level option people physical shared social talking
There's a dark side. In the physical world, I bump into all kinds of people by chance. But online, if recommenders were perfect, I can have the option of talking to only people who are just like me. There's a danger that if we don't have some level of shared interaction, it can be destructive to our social cohesion.
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The big payoff for the future will be in helping knowledge workers to be more inventive and creative, and to get those innovations into the marketplace. That's where a wealthy nation like the United States is ultimately going to have to seek its competitive advantage.
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When I first started doing work on how the Internet is affecting commerce, like a lot of people, I was really excited by this nearly perfect market.
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Some people think it's a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits. There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It's possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don't share in that gain.
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The kind of job where you have to hustle and hustle and where you're not sure whether you will have enough clients next month, where you have less job security, is becoming much more common.
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Technology has always been destroying jobs, and it has always been creating jobs.
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When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance.
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We're just being flooded with content. And people are increasingly relying on recommenders to help them sort through it all.
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These phenomena are pushing the trend toward more obscure products. And that will feed back to what products get created in the first place.
everybody produced recognize
G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers. Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.
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Technology has made it easier for different firms to coordinate their activities with one another, and they don't have to be part of one company. They can get the benefits of scale without the inertia of scale.
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Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.
data entering use
We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.
jobs becoming where-you-come
The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer.