Latest Erik Brynjolfsson Quotes from Interviews

• In the global millennium goals, we're on track to beat and eliminate severe poverty. So there are lots of positive trends. I think the world in 25 years could be a much better version of the world we have today. But the role of humans would still be fundamentally at the center of that.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Thinking, Track, Goal

  Source: www.npr.org

• For a long time, the humans are going to be better than the machines and so different parts of the job will be leveraged. In a way that's happened for centuries, and we've adapted. And it's made the people who had parts of their jobs automated more valuable and more productive to the extent that they are essential for the other components of their jobs.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Long, People, Different

  Source: www.npr.org

• Going a little further into the future, we'll start literally connecting to machines. Some of my colleagues at MIT here - some of them are working on a neural mesh that connects directly to your brain, and they've already done it with some disabled people and allowed them to move objects just by thinking.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Moving, Thinking, People

  "Erik Brynjolfsson: In A Race With Machines, Can We Keep Up?". "TED Radio Hour" with Guy Raz, wvpublic.org. April 21, 2017.

• It's most useful to think about not jobs but tasks. And within any given job, there are lots of different tasks. If you're a radiologist maybe reading the images machines can be able to do that better, maybe making the broader diagnosis and communicating it to the patients.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Reading, Thinking, Different

  "Erik Brynjolfsson: In A Race With Machines, Can We Keep Up?". "TED Radio Hour" with Guy Raz, kucb.org. April 21, 2017.

• Computers get better, faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at like driving a car through traffic.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Powerful, Military, Car

  "The key to growth? Race with the machines". TED conference, www.ted.com. February 2013.

• The economy in the next 20 to 25 years is going to change more than they did in the last 20, 25 years. And that's because exponential trends are affecting a bigger and bigger share of the economy. So we have some huge disruptions in store, and I can't predict exactly what the innovations are going to be. If I did, I would have already invented them. But I think they'll be comparable to the innovations we saw in the past 20, 25 years if not greater.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Past, Thinking, Innovation

  "Erik Brynjolfsson: In A Race With Machines, Can We Keep Up?". "TED Radio Hour" with Guy Raz, wvpublic.org. April 21, 2017.

• Machines already are much smarter than us at so many things. I mean, try to multiply two 10-digit numbers with each other or, you know, sift through a thousand documents. So there's lots of things that machines are better at including in mental task than us. There's many more that they're not as good at, but the direction is pretty obvious and the progress is clear.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Mean, Progress, Trying

  Source: www.npr.org

• Before information age, living standards basically were flat. Since then, they've been growing 2 percent a year were about 30 times richer. So technology, machines is really, you know, arguably the most important thing that's happened to humanity in terms of our living standards. You could look to the introduction of digital computers in the 1950s.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Technology, Humanity, Important

  Source: www.npr.org

• Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs. But right now the pace is accelerating. It's faster we think than ever before in history. So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.

  Erik Brynjolfsson

  Jobs, Technology, Thinking

  Source: www.cbsnews.com