Eric Lonergan

The @nytimes piece today by @ByrneEdsal13590 highlights a concern I share: “If we stay on the current path, the risk of extreme concentration — both economic and political — is very real.” In work with @zhitzig, we ask why AI may shift the balance between dispersed knowledge and centralized control.

@M_C_Klein @Citrini7 If unemployment is high I am pretty sure the appetite for unemployment-reducing policy will return quick.

I spent 100 hours over the past week researching, writing and editing the piece we just put out. It’s a scenario, not a prediction like most of our work. But it was rigorously constructed, dismissing it outright requires the kind of intellectual laziness that tends to get expensive. And we’ve released it for free. Hopefully you enjoy it. citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

Since my op-ed in the @FT was published on Monday (ft.com/content/4b51d0…), there’s been a growing debate about whether we’re beginning to see evidence that AI is boosting productivity. First, let me be clear that the aggregate productivity data by itself is far from definitive. Even with the new revisions, there is certainly a lot of noise in US productivity numbers. No doubt lots of other factors are at work. That said, my growing confidence that AI is powering higher productivity draws on evidence from a variety of sources: 1. The stunning capabilities of AI. If anything, I think the past decade of impressive improvements in machine learning and generative AI are still underrated. We are in the early stages of a massive economic transformation: digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/research-area/… 2. A growing number of micro studies document double-digit productivity gains in specific applications. @alexolegimas has a great catalog in his blog post: aleximas.substack.com/p/what-is-the-… 3. My discussions with power users who use AI for coding, customer service, research and other applications, as well as more and more business executives, convince me that the facts on the ground are (finally) changing. 4. Data from our Canaries in the Coal Mine paper show employment changes in occupations most affected by AI: digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/ca… 5. And now, inklings in the aggregate productivity data are also telling the same story. These are all consistent with the hypothesis that AI is beginning to have a positive impact on productivity. The FT put a more definitive headline on my recent piece than I would have liked, but my bet (longbets.org/868/) is that we're likely to see more and more evidence as time goes on, barring some other shocks (e.g. macro mismanagement, trade wars, etc). As each quarter goes by and we see more data, I continue to update my views. No doubt, I'm currently out of sync with a lot of mainstream economists on this topic, but that’s ok by me.

I spent 100 hours over the past week researching, writing and editing the piece we just put out. It’s a scenario, not a prediction like most of our work. But it was rigorously constructed, dismissing it outright requires the kind of intellectual laziness that tends to get expensive. And we’ve released it for free. Hopefully you enjoy it. citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

Also, my Berkeley talk on Citizenship and the Politics of Grievance from December is up. Its long. Lots of slides. Trying to think through how to talk about the nation without becoming an ethnic nationalist: youtube.com/watch?v=fLWhiu…