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1 episodes · 21 quoted claims
Economist Erik Brynjolfsson wrote a Financial Times editorial arguing that an AI-driven productivity takeoff has already arrived.
“Erik Brynjolfsson, who wrote an editorial in the Financial Times just a while back saying, the the AI productivity takeoff is already here.”
Economist Robert Solow observed that the computer age showed up everywhere except in productivity statistics, a remark McAfee says applied to AI until recently.
“we see evidence of the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu said in an MIT Technology Review interview that AI has not produced a productivity benefit.
“He was just in an interview at MIT Tech Review saying that there's not any productivity benefit from AI.”
A Financial Times chart described by McAfee shows three AI scenarios, including one where AI ends scarcity and brings perpetual abundance.
“Either AI is going to end scarcity and bring us into an era of perpetual abundance.”
The waterfall method is an upfront, planning-heavy approach to executing large projects.
“waterfall is an upfront planning heavy method about executing big projects successfully”
Clay Shirky described the waterfall method as a pledge by everyone involved not to learn anything while doing the work.
“Waterfall is a pledge on the part of everybody involved not to learn anything while doing the actual work.”
About ten years before the talk, Steve Jurvetson told McAfee that SpaceX would provide cheap internet from space, before SpaceX had launched its first Starlink satellite.
“SpaceX is going to bathe the world in abundant, cheap Internet connectivity from space. They had not yet launched their first Starlink satellite.”
Steve Jurvetson told McAfee that agile software development began about twenty-five years earlier and is now used to build both hardware and software in his investment ecosystem.
“the agile way that we started to build software about twenty five years ago, that's now the agile way that we build everything”
Steve Jurvetson said companies in his ecosystem innovate in a couple of years on things that planning-heavy incumbents take close to a decade to do.
“We innovate every couple years on things that take them close to a decade to do.”
Work Helix has found in every company it studied that a small number of people use AI heavily while most use it sparingly.
“the distribution of AI use follows a very, very particular shape. There's a small number of people who are using it a lot, and then most of the people are using it sparingly.”
Economists have three tests for a general purpose technology: it improves quickly, spawns complementary innovations, and spreads across the economy.
“Economists have come up with three ways to identify what they would call a general purpose technology, which is economists speak for a gigantic big deal for the economy”
McAfee estimates that writing software is at least a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than it was ten years earlier.
“it's at least a couple orders of magnitude cheaper to write software today than it was ten years ago.”
McAfee says evidence from software work shows people with powerful AI do somewhat less communicating, collaborating and coordinating.
“It turns out that as people get access to this incredibly powerful new AI, they tend to do a little bit less of the communicating, collaborating, coordinating work.”
McAfee says evidence shows the best people get more time for exploratory and innovative work when AI takes over coordination tasks.
“those folk have more time freed up for exploratory work, for innovation, for envelope pushing, which is exactly what we want them to do.”
McAfee said some users of the AI technology OpenClaw gave it too much autonomy, such as access to a credit card for shopping.
“this this wild new technology, open claw, where people were letting it maybe have a little bit too much autonomy”
McAfee says the credibility revolution in economics has made it much easier than twenty years ago to test whether an intervention such as AI caused a metric to improve.
“It's part of a thing called the credibility revolution, where our ability to say, hey, you tried something, did it cause the KPI to move in the direction that you want?”
McAfee says the companies he studied for his book The Geek Way are outcome-focused rather than process-focused organizations.
“The the geek companies that I studied and that I wrote the geek way about, these are very much outcome focused organizations.”
McAfee says SpaceX has crashed many uncrewed rockets because launching without people aboard is a reversible, two-way-door decision.
“SpaceX has launched a lot of rockets, they have and crashed a lot of rockets because they realized that in many ways, launching a rocket is a two way door.”
McAfee says many companies reduced entry-level hiring because they expected AI to automate routine work junior staff did.
“The reason that a lot of companies pulled back on their entry level hiring is because they anticipated a whole lot of automation via AI”
McAfee argues that people learn difficult knowledge work through apprenticeship, helping experts with routine tasks.
“That's how you learn to do difficult knowledge work is by helping somebody who's good at that with the routine stuff.”
McAfee says willingness to try AI falls off with age, so cutting entry-level hiring removes the most enthusiastic future AI power users.
“As people tend to get older, we tend to be more set in our ways and less willing to try crazy new things like AI.”