Erik Brynjolfsson — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Erik Brynjolfsson — On AI. 15 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Automation vs Augmentation (Brynjolfsson)
The distinction at the heart of the Turing Trap — between AI systems designed to replace human workers (automation) and systems designed to amplify human capabilities (augmentation) — with the same technology pointing in different directi…
Complementary Investments
The organizational, human-capital, process, and institutional investments required for a general-purpose technology to produce its full productivity gains — the intangible infrastructure that determines whether a technology transforms an e…
Intangible Capital (Brynjolfsson)
The organizational knowledge, human skills, institutional processes, and relational networks that constitute the majority of modern firm value and the bulk of AI-era productive capacity — and that remain systematically invisible to standar…
Organizational Redesign (Brynjolfsson)
The category of complementary investment that Brynjolfsson identifies as the primary determinant of whether AI produces transformative gains or incremental improvements — the reengineering of teams, hierarchies, workflows, and coordinatio…
Platform Economics
The analytical framework governing multi-sided markets where value is created by participants and captured by intermediaries — now the defining economic structure of the AI-enabled creation ecosystem.
The Great Decoupling
Brynjolfsson and McAfee's term for the divergence, beginning in the late 1970s, between American productivity growth (rising) and median wage growth (stagnant) — a break in the postwar pattern that technology, institutions, and distributi…
The Productivity J-Curve
The mathematical shape that transformative technologies trace through productivity statistics — an initial dip below the baseline followed by a rise that eventually exceeds it, with the curve's depth and duration determined by the speed of comp…
The Productivity Paradox
Robert Solow's 1987 observation — you can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics — which Brynjolfsson spent his career resolving into three distinct problems: timing, measurement, and organization.
The Race Between Education and Technology
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's 2008 framework — adopted by Brynjolfsson as the single most important lens for understanding labor market implications of AI — for how the distribution of technological gains depends on whether education k…
The Turing Trap
Brynjolfsson's 2022 diagnosis of the systemic bias in AI development toward replacing rather than amplifying human workers — a trap set by the Turing Test's implicit goal of human-indistinguishable machines, reinforced by tax codes, rese…
Turing Test
Alan Turing's 1950 proposal to replace the unanswerable question "can machines think?" with a testable question about conversational indistinguishability — the most-cited fictional device in the philosophy of AI.
The Economics of Transformative AI (2025)
The December 2025 volume co-edited by Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, and Anton Korinek — sixteen studies from leading economists examining how AI of sufficient power would reshape innovation, market structure, employment, inequality, and human…
The Orange Pill
Edo Segal's 2026 book on the Claude Code moment and the AI transition — the empirical ground and narrative framework on which the Festinger volume builds its diagnostic reading.
