Erik Brynjolfsson
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Erik Brynjolfsson. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Erik Brynjolfsson's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The number that should terrify you is not the one about AI. It's the one about electricity.
thirty years. That's how long it took the electric motor to show up in the productivity statistics after factories started buying them. thirty years of massive investment, visible machinery, and aggregate numbers that refused to move. The economists of that era had a phrase for it, though they wouldn't coin it until much later. They called it a paradox.
I didn't know this history when I stood in that room in Trivandrum watching twenty engineers each produce what twenty used to produce together. I knew what I was seeing — a twenty-fold multiplier, real and repeatable. I knew it in my body, the way you know something that
