Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson (born 1962) is one of the world’s most cited economists on technology and work. After two decades at MIT, where he co-wrote the influential books Race Against the Machine (2011) and The Second Machine Age (2014) with Andrew McAfee, he moved to Stanford in 2020 to direct the Digital Economy Lab at the Institute for Human-Centered AI.

The Turing Trap

Brynjolfsson’s signature idea in the AI era is “the Turing Trap,” from his 2022 Daedalus essay: the field’s obsession with machines that imitate humans steers investment toward substituting for workers, when AI that augments people — extending what they can do rather than copying them — creates far more economic value and shares it more widely. When machines merely replace labor, he warns, workers lose bargaining power and the gains concentrate with whoever owns the technology.

Unlike many labor-focused critics, his conclusion is acceleration, not restraint. His field experiments with generative AI at work — including a landmark 2023 study of AI assistants in a call center, which found the largest gains among the least experienced workers — underpin his forecast that AI can double productivity growth in the coming decade. He expects “a lot of disruption and change, but not mass unemployment.”

His optimism is explicitly conditional: the same technology aimed at pure imitation of humans could hollow out the middle class, which is why he keeps pushing policymakers and CEOs toward augmentation. It could be the best decade on Earth, he says — or one of the worst — depending on the choices made now.