PERSON
Jason Furman
The economist who spent eight years watching technology land on real households as President Obama’s chief economist—and who refuses both the robot-apocalypse fear and the technology-is-fine complacency, insisting instead that the same machine yields radically different human outcomes depending on the institutions we build around it.
Jason Furman’s deepest worry about artificial intelligence runs in a direction almost no one expects from an economist who has documented its disruptions with such care. His worry is not that we will get too much of it. It is that we will get too little—that the productivity gains a stagnating economy desperately needs will arrive too slowly, or not at all, while we squander the moment in paralysis or in the wrong battles. This counter-intuitive starting point is the signature move of a thinker who refuses the comfortable positions on offer and insists on following the data wherever it leads. Furman chaired the Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017 as President Obama’s chief economist, and he brings to the AI debate the discipline of someone who has watched bold technological predictions collide with actual households. He finds that the productivity paradox is real—the gap between AI’s apparent
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