Erik Brynjolfsson

If you were managing a business just over a century ago, you would have had to face the fact that a wave of technological change was about to transform the way you did everything. The internal combustion engine would rearrange every aspect of society and long-term plans that ignored this development would become worthless. Today’s business managers find themselves in the same predicament, except the new technology is AI and we are entering the second phase of the second machine age. In this talk, Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and the world’s foremost expert on how rapid advances in technology will impact businesses and the economy, explains how machine learning has evolved to a point where intelligent agents, autonomous robots and other devices can learn to do things on their own with little or no need for human programming. This will have radical consequences as advancements in AI over the next decade will far exceed developments of the past. This discussion builds on Brynjolfsson’s best-selling book, “The Second Machine Age,” but goes well beyond it, drawing on recent advances in machine learning. He focuses on how decision makers must address and react to this new wave of technology.

We are in the early stages of not one, but three, fundamental revolutions driven by profound advances in technology. Machines are transforming the role of human decision making; digital platforms are allowing a wider range of products and services to be sold and brokered to global audiences; and crowdsourcing is having an almost magical effect on the exchange of ideas, opening the door to new levels of inclusion, diversity of thinking and innovation. Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab Erik Brynjolfsson explains what has changed since the dawn of the digital age and how organizations can evolve with the times by strategically balancing human work with machine work and moving from products to platforms. In this presentation, based on his best-selling book “Machine, Platform, Crowd,” Brynjolfsson combines his earlier thesis on the advent of the second machine age with further research on the effects of digital platforms to paint a full picture of the “new economy” and how to harness its power rather than be defeated by change. He explains how technologies poised to evolve our abilities are already here and outlines what we can soon expect as the pace of digital change accelerates.

Emerging technology touches every aspect of the world economy. But, according to director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Erik Brynjolfsson, a pioneer in new ways of measuring the value of goods, services and worker skills to provide metrics for the economic contributions of countries, companies, and individuals, a lot of value is going unmeasured. In this eye-opening presentation, he makes the case for replacing the traditional measurement of gross domestic product (GDP). Traditionally, GDP is based on goods and services that are bought and sold within the economy. But, Brynjolfsson explains, those measures don’t take into account many aspects of the digital economy that have no price such as attending a Zoom meeting and using free apps on a smartphone. He outlines the novel concept of GDP-B, or gross domestic product, plus a measurement of the benefits of something that doesn’t have a direct cost. Audiences will learn about the tool developed by Brynjolfsson’s Stanford team to measure which parts of their company’s product line create value and which don’t, separate from what customers are paying for, enabling leaders to understand the full value of their contributions to the economy.

More than half of the workforce will be impacted by emerging technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI). But, according to Erik Brynjolfsson, senior fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, the future of work should be one of reorganization, not replacement. In this revealing presentation, Brynjolfsson explains that while new AI systems – especially generative AI programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E that create novel text and images – will have wide ranging impacts on every industry, mass layoffs shouldn’t be the result. He’ll show that reorganizing tasks over replacing human workers will need to be a priority since companies will still gain value from people with creative, interpersonal and problem-solving skills, which can lead to much more productivity. Leaders will gain a roadmap to optimal restructuring, allowing them to see emerging technology and digital transformation as an opportunity, not an obstacle.