Technology Academics Policy - Erik Brynjolfsson Provides the Optimist's Guide to the Economy

MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson provides his learned perspective on the future of U.S. productivity in a recent Bloomberg podcast, "54: The Optimist's Guide to the Economy." Given the widely-held belief that "U.S. productivity growth has stagnated and the economy has been unable to break out of 2 percent expansion," Professor Brynjolfsson explains why he thinks the current wave of advances in technology means we don't have to worry about stagnation. Below are excerpts from Professor Brynjolfsson and "The Optimist's Guide to the Economy:" Opening Thoughts I think much better days are ahead of us. And my optimism comes not from extrapolating what happened with productivity recently. It comes from going out and visiting companies. The Promise of Artificial Intelligence When we [co-author Andrew McAfee] wrote the book [The Second Machine Age, 2014], humans could see better than machines; now, in many tasks, machines are much better, for instance at recognizing street signs or interpreting images in big databases like ImageNet.