Erik Brynjolfsson Quotes & Sayings

Some people think it's a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits. There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It's possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don't share in that gain. — Erik Brynjolfsson

The kind of job where you have to hustle and hustle and where you're not sure whether you will have enough clients next month, where you have less job security, is becoming much more common. — Erik Brynjolfsson

When I first started doing work on how the Internet is affecting commerce, like a lot of people, I was really excited by this nearly perfect market. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Kodak employed 145,300 people at one point, one-third of them in Rochester, New York, while indirectly employing thousands more via the extensive supply chain and retail distribution channels required by companies in the first machine age. — Erik Brynjolfsson

second conclusion is that the transformations brought about by digital technology will be profoundly beneficial ones. — Erik Brynjolfsson

When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance. — Erik Brynjolfsson

The era of bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is over and we are headed for the power-law distribution of economic opportunities. Education per se is not going to make up the difference. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Computers get better faster than anything else ever. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Indeed, as noted by economist Menzie Chinn, there is no visible relationship between top tax rates and overall economic growth, at least in the ranges the U.S. experienced.39 — Erik Brynjolfsson

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power-the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny — Erik Brynjolfsson

Technology has made it easier for different firms to coordinate their activities with one another, and they don't have to be part of one company. They can get the benefits of scale without the inertia of scale. — Erik Brynjolfsson

The Nature of Technology, — Erik Brynjolfsson

Technology has always been destroying jobs, and it has always been creating jobs. — Erik Brynjolfsson

There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks, and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them. They could be software robots; they could be physical robots. — Erik Brynjolfsson

technologies like payroll processing software, factory automation, computer-controlled machines, automated inventory control, and word processing have been deployed for routine work, substituting for workers in clerical tasks, on the factory floor, and doing rote information processing. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Technology is not destiny. — Erik Brynjolfsson

The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs. — Erik Brynjolfsson

The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay increased from seventy in 1990 to three hundred in 2005. — Erik Brynjolfsson

G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers. Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it. — Erik Brynjolfsson

But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines. — Erik Brynjolfsson

The heart of science is measurement. — Erik Brynjolfsson

We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data. — Erik Brynjolfsson

Because the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation. — Erik Brynjolfsson

What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to try to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine. — Erik Brynjolfsson