PERSON
Erik Brynjolfsson
The MIT economist who coined the productivity paradox, the J-curve, and the Turing Trap—three lenses that together explain why AI’s transformative gains arrive later than the technology itself, and why the distribution of those gains depends on choices we are already making.
Erik Brynjolfsson has spent thirty-five years preparing for the AI transition by studying every technology transition that preceded it. He encountered the
productivity paradox—Robert Solow’s 1987 observation that the computer age was visible everywhere except in the statistics—not as an abstraction but as the defining puzzle of his career. His resolution: the paradox was three problems at once, a timing problem, a measurement problem, and an organizational problem. Technology arrives at the speed of a delivery truck. The
complementary investments—the restructuring of teams, the retraining of workers, the redesign of processes—arrive at the speed of institutional learning, which is to say slowly and against resistance. Every major technology transition follows the same arc, which Brynjolfsson formalized as the
Productivity J-Curve: an initial dip during which investment costs are real and returns are invisible, followed by gains that eventually surpass anything the pre-technology trend would have reached. In 2022 he named the