Podcasts about brynjolfsson

Is it okay to use large language models in the research process? For what task, exactly, and to automate the task or to augment the researcher? In this episode, we try to explore whether and how LLMs could be used in five aspects of the research process - for paper writing, reviewing, data analysis, as a subject of research, or as a surrogate for research subjects. We also discuss whether they should be used at all, and what some long-term consequences could be of such a choice, and we develop a number of heuristic rules to help researcher make decisions about using LLMs for research. Episode reading list Kankanhalli, A. (2024). Peer Review in the Age of Generative AI. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 25(1), 76-84. Yang, Y., Duan, H., Liu, J., & Tam, K. Y. (2024). LLM-Measure: Generating Valid, Consistent, and Reproducible Text-Based Measures for Social Science Research. arXiv preprint, . Li, J., Larsen, K. R. T., & Abbasi, A. (2020). TheoryOn: A Design Framework and System for Unlocking Behavioral Knowledge Through Ontology Learning. MIS Quarterly, 44(4), 1733-1772. Larsen, K. R., Yan, S., & Lukyanenko, R. (2024). LLMs and Psychometrics: Global Construct Validity Integrating LLMs and Psychometrics. 45th International Conference on Information Systems, Bangkok, Thailand. Anthis, J. R., Liu, R., Richardson, S. M., Kozlowski, A. C., Koch, B., Evans, J., Brynjolfsson, E., & Bernstein, M. (2025). LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method. arXiv preprint, . Abbasi, A., Somanchi, S., & Kelley, K. (2025). The Critical Challenge of using Large-scale Digital Experiment Platforms for Scientific Discovery. MIS Quarterly, 49(1), 1-28.

AI has been dominating investing headlines for almost two years, but it's not just a buzzword. It's a powerful technology that's poised to revolutionize industries and economies on a global scale. Investors are asking how will AI reshape job markets, productivity and economic growth? Nicholas Fawcett, a senior economist in the BlackRock Investment Institute joins Oscar to explore what AI means for the broad economy and the different stages of AI's evolution.Sources: Productivity estimates based on Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond (2023), Dell'Acqua et al. (2023) , Cui et al. (2024); Capex spend from BlackRock Investment Institute, Reuters, October 2024; Agricultural data based on IPUMS USA, October 2024This content is for informational purposes only and is not an offer or a solicitation. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the listener. In the UK and Non-European Economic Area countries, this is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. In the European Economic Area, this is authorized and regulated by the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets. Reference to the names of each company mentioned in this communication is merely for explaining the investment strategy and should not be construed as investment advice or investment recommendation of those companies. For full disclosures go to Blackrock.com/corporate/compliance/bid-disclosuresSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erik Brynjolfsson, un importante economista specializzato in tecnologia dell'Università di Stanford, ha recentemente pubblicato un articolo in cui illustra i potenziali effetti economici dei nuovi sistemi di intelligenza artificiale.Brynjolfsson e i suoi colleghi hanno pubblicato quello che, per quanto ne sappiamo, è il primo studio empirico sugli effetti economici reali dei nuovi sistemi di intelligenza artificiale. Hanno analizzato cosa è successo a un'azienda e ai suoi lavoratori dopo aver incorporato una versione di ChatGPT nei flussi di lavoro.Tutti i miei link: https://linktr.ee/br1brownFonti:https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/05/02/1172791281/this-company-adopted-ai-heres-what-happened-to-its-human-workersTELEGRAM - INSTAGRAMSe ti va supportami https://it.tipeee.com/br1brown/

Erik Brynjolfsson is a researcher, author, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He joined WorkLab to offer business leaders an overview of how AI will transform productivity. Brynjolfsson is the first guest of season 4 of the WorkLab podcast, in which hosts Elise Hu and Tonya Mosley have conversations with economists, designers, psychologists, and technologists who explore the data and insights into why and how work is changing.   WorkLab 

From entering the tech space in his early teens with a keen interest in all things IT, to becoming the Global Head of Engineering and Transformation at Vodafone, Felipe Canedo joins Gareth to recall his journey to success in one of the biggest telecom companies in the world. On this week's episode, Felipe discusses his role in transforming Vodafone into a fully-fledged ‘tech company', as well as promoting an effective leadership style that centres around ‘moving people together to achieve a common goal'. The conversation shifts between candid reflections on Felipe's former life in Brazil, to a discussion on the world of AI and how software such as Chat GPT should be considered ‘a partner, not a replacement' to workers. When reminiscing over his career journey, Felipe concludes by offering sagely guidance to his younger self, advising young people to ‘believe in your dreams and chase them as soon as you get the chance'.   Time Stamps What good leadership means to Felipe (01:33) Felipe's tech origins (02:40) Moving to the UK (04:17) What is a Global Head of Engineering? (05:10) Creating a global community of developers (06:00) What Felipe misses about Brazil (09:30) How does the British tech industry compare to the Brazilian tech industry? (11:05) How to answer your own questions and find your own solutions (13:49) Becoming a senior manager (15:09) Coding at home (16:23) How ChatGPT is changing the game (17:01) The ways that AI will change telecoms (20:10) The ‘gloomy side' of AI (25:00) What is 5G? (26:06) How Vodafone has changed as a result of the pandemic (34:21) Navigating online meetings (38:37) Felipe's advice to his 21-year-old self (40:20) Outside of work interests (43:40) *Book recommendation- ‘Machine, Platform, Crowd' Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson- Machine, Platform, Crowd – Harnessing Our Digital Future: Amazon.co.uk: Mcafee, Andrew, Brynjolfsson, Erik: 9780393356069: Books* *Disclaimer: the views expressed in this episode are Felipe's own personal views and not necessarily those of Vodafone* 

Erik Brynjolfsson's paper “The Turing Trap: The Promise and Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence” argues that the “imitation game” of creating tech that mimics humans has increased productivity and living standards, but does not exist without costs. Those costs make up “The Turing Trap” which happens when humans not involved in creating AI cannot compete with the productivity and efficiency of the robots designed to do their jobs, and lose control of their economic and political futures. The Turing Trap sits at the center of contemporary labor force struggles, including the Great Resignation, the fight for “good jobs” and cratering male labor force participation. Michael Strain, who directs AEI's Economic Policy Studies, joins Dr. Brynjolfsson and I to discuss what economic policy can do to encourage more innovators aim higher and create machines that augment rather than replace human labor, and how that effort is crucial to the American Dream. Mentioned in the episode https://www.brynjolfsson.com/ (Erik Brynjolfsson) https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Thomas-More/dp/1512093386 (Utopia Paperback by Thomas More) https://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553293354 (Foundation Mass Market Paperback by Isaac Asimov) https://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Economic-Thinkers-Library/dp/1441743669 (Heilbronner's Worldly Philosophers) https://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/5075.html (Doug Hofstadter) https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/the-turing-trap-the-promise-peril-of-human-like-artificial-intelligence/ (The Turing Trap by Erik Brynjolfsson) https://www.aei.org/profile/michael-r-strain/ (Michael R. Strain) https://www.amazon.com/American-Dream-Not-Dead-Populism/dp/159947557X (The American Dream is Not Dead) https://www.city-journal.org/html/when-high-schools-shaped-americas-destiny-15254.html (The High School Movement) https://taxfoundation.org/tax-basics/pigouvian-tax/#:~:text=A%20Pigouvian%20tax%2C%20named%20after,sugar%20taxes%2C%20and%20carbon%20taxes. (Pigouvian Tax) https://taxfoundation.org/tax-basics/consumption-tax/ (Consumption Tax) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/taxreformact1986.asp (Tax Reform Act of 1986) https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/smart_taxes.pdf (Greg Mankiw Pigou Club)

Lexman interviews Erik Brynjolfsson, the CEO of Mosaic and co-author of "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of New Technologies." Brynjolfsson discusses the future of jobs and how new technologies are poised to change them.

Few economists think more creatively and also more rigorously about the future than Robin Hanson, my guest on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast. So when he says a future of radical scientific and economic progress is still possible, you should take the claim seriously. Robin is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the Overcoming Bias blog. His books include The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.In This Episode:* Economic growth over the very long run (1:20)* The signs of an approaching acceleration (7:08)* Global governance and risk aversion (12:19)* Thinking about the future like an economist (17:32)* The stories we tell ourselves about the future (20:57)* Longtermism and innovation (23:20)Next week, I'll feature part two of my conversation with Robin, where we discuss whether we are alone in the universe and what alien life means for humanity's long-term potential.Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Economic growth over the very long runJames Pethokoukis: Way back in 2000, you wrote a paper called “Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes.” You wrote, “If one takes seriously the model of economic growth as a series of exponential … [modes], then it seems hard to escape the conclusion that the world economy will likely see a very dramatic change within the next century, to a new economic growth mode with a doubling time perhaps as short as two weeks.” Is that still your expectation for the 21st century?Robin Hanson: It's my expectation for the next couple of centuries. Whether it's the 21st isn't quite so clear.Has anything happened in the intervening two decades to make you think that something might happen sooner rather than later … or rather, just later?Just later, I'm afraid. I mean, we have a lot of people hyping AI at the moment, right?Sure, I may be one of them on occasion.There are a lot of people expecting rapid progress soon. And so, I think I've had a long enough baseline there to think, "No, maybe not.” But let's go with the priors.Is it a technological mechanism that will cause this? Is it AI? Is it that we find the right general-purpose technology, and then that will launch us into very, very rapid growth?That would be my best guess. But just to be clear for our listeners, we just look at history, we seem to see these exponential modes. There are, say, four of them so far (if we go pre-human). And then the modes are relatively steady and then have pretty sharp transitions. That is, the transition to a growth rate of 50 or 200 times faster happens within less than a doubling time.So what was the last mode?We're in industry at the moment: doubles roughly every 15 years, started around 1800 or 1700. The previous mode was farming, doubled every thousand years. And so, in roughly less than a thousand years, we saw this rapid transition to our current thing, less than the doubling time. The previous mode before that was foraging, where humans doubled roughly every quarter million years. And in definitely less than a quarter million years, we saw a transition there. So then the prediction is that we will see another transition, and it will happen in less than 15 years, to a faster growth mode. And then if you look at the previous increases in growth rates, they were, again, a factor of 60 to 200. And so, that's what you'd be looking for in the next mode. Now, obviously, I want to say you're just looking at a low data set here. Four events. You can't be too confident. But, come on, you've got to guess that maybe a next one would happen.If you go back to that late ‘90s period, there was a lot of optimism. If you pick up Wired magazine back then, [there was] plenty of optimism that something was happening, that we were on the verge of something. One of my favorite examples — and a sort of non-technologist example, was a report from Lehman Brothers from December 1999. It was called “Beyond 2000.” And it was full of predictions, maybe not talking about exponential growth, but how we were in for a period of very fast growth, like 1960s-style growth. It was a very bullish prediction for the next two decades. Now Lehman did not make it another decade itself. These predictions don't seem to have panned out — maybe you think I'm being overly pessimistic on what's happened over the past 20 years — but do you think it was because we didn't understand the technology that was supposedly going to drive these changes? Did we do something wrong? Or is it just a lot of people who love tech love the idea of growth, and we all just got too excited?I think it's just a really hard problem. We're in this world. We're living with it. It's growing really fast. Again, doubling every 15 years. And we've long had this sense that it's possible for something much bigger. So automation, the possibility of robots, AI: It sat in the background for a long time. And people have been wondering, “Is that coming? And if it's coming, it looks like a really big deal.” And roughly every 30 years, I'd say, we've seen these bursts of interest in AI and public concern, like media articles, you know…We had the ‘60s. Now we have the ‘90s…The ‘60s, ‘90s, and now again, 2020. Every 30 years, a burst of interest and concern about something that's not crazy. Like, it might well happen. And if it was going to happen, then the kind of precursor you might expect to see is investors realizing it's about to happen and bidding up assets that were going to be important for that to really high levels. And that's what you did see around ‘99. A lot of people thought, “Well, this might be it.”Right. The market test for the singularity seemed to be passing.A test that is not actually being passed quite so much at the moment.Right.So, in some sense, you had a better story then in terms of, look, the investors seem to believe in this.You could also look at harder economic numbers, productivity numbers, and so on.Right. And we've had a steady increase in automation over, you know, centuries. But people keep wondering, “We're about to have a new kind of automation. And if we are, will we see that in new kinds of demos or new kinds of jobs?” And people have been looking out for these signs of, “Are we about to enter a new era?” And that's been the big issue. It's like, “Will this time be different?” And so, I've got to say this time, at the moment, doesn't look different. But eventually, there will be a “this time” that'll be different. And then it'll be really different. So it's not crazy to be watching out for this and maybe taking some chances betting on it.The signs of an approaching accelerationIf we were approaching a kind of acceleration, a leap forward, what would be the signs? Would it just be kind of what we saw in the ‘90s?So the scenario is, within a 15-year period, maybe a five-year period, we go from a current 4 percent growth rate, doubling every 15 years, to maybe doubling every month. A crazy-high doubling rate. And that would have to be on the basis of some new technology, and therefore, investment. So you'd have to see a new promising technology that a lot of people think could potentially be big. And then a lot of investment going into that, a lot of investors saying, “Yeah, there's a pretty big chance this will be it.” And not just financial investors. You would expect to see people — like college students deciding to major in that, people moving to wherever it is. That would be the big sign: investment moving toward anything. And the key thing is, you would see actual big, fast productivity increases. There'd be some companies in cities who were just booming. You were talking about stagnation recently: The ‘60s were faster than now, but that's within a factor of two. Well, we're talking about a factor of 60 to 200.So we don't need to spend a lot of time on the data measurement issues. Like, “Is productivity up 1.7 percent, 2.1?”If you're a greedy investor and you want to be really in on this early so you buy it cheap before everybody else, then you've got to be looking at those early indicators. But if you're like the rest of us wondering, “Do I change my job? Do I change my career?” then you might as well wait and wait till you see something really big. So even at the moment, we've got a lot of exciting demos: DALL-E, GPT-3, things like that. But if you ask for commercial impact and ask them, “How much money are people making?” they shrug their shoulders and they say “Soon, maybe.” But that's what I would be looking for in those things. When people are generating a lot of revenue — so it's a lot of customers making a lot of money — then that's the sort of thing to maybe consider.Something I've written about, probably too often, is the Long Bets website. And two economists, Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson, have made a long bet. Gordon takes the role of techno-pessimist, Brynjolfsson techno-optimist. Let me just briefly read the bet in case you don't happen to have it memorized: “Private Nonfarm business productivity growth will average over 1.8 percent per year from the first quarter of 2020 to the last quarter of 2029.” Now, if it does that, that's an acceleration. Brynjolfsson says yes. Gordon says no…But you want to pick a bigger cutoff. Productivity growth in the last decade is maybe half that, right? So they're looking at a doubling. And a doubling is news, right? But, honestly, a doubling is within the usual fluctuation. If you look over, say, the last 200 years, and we say sometimes some cities grow faster, some industries grow faster. You know, we have this steady growth rate, but it contains fluctuations. I think the key thing, as always, when you're looking for a regime change, is you're looking at — there's an average and a fluctuation — when is a new fluctuation out of the range of the previous ones? And that's when I would start to really pay attention, when it's not just the typical magnitude. So honestly, that's within the range of the typical magnitudes you might expect if we just had an unusually productive new technology, even if we stay in the same mode for another century.When you look at the enthusiasm we had at the turn of this century, do you think we did the things that would encourage rapid growth? Did we create a better ecosystem of growth over the past 20 years or a worse one?I don't think the past 20 years have been especially a deviation. But I think slowly since around 1970, we have seen a decline in our support for innovation. I think increasing regulations, increasing size of organizations in response to regulation, and just a lot of barriers. And even more disturbingly, I think it's worth noting, we've seen a convergence of regulation around the world. If there were 150 countries, each of which had different independent regulatory regimes, I would be less concerned. Because if one nation messes it up and doesn't allow things, some other nation might pick up the slack. But we've actually seen pretty strong convergence, even in this global pandemic. So, for example, challenge trials were an idea early voiced, but no nation allowed them. Anywhere. And even now, hardly they've been tried. And if you look at nuclear energy, electric magnetic spectrum, organ sales, medical experimentation — just look at a lot of different regulatory areas, even airplanes — you just see an enormous convergence worldwide. And that's a problem because it means we're blocking innovation the same everywhere. And so there's just no place to go to try something new.Global governance and risk aversionThere's always concern in Europe about their own productivity, about their technological growth. And they're always putting out white papers in Europe about what [they] can do. And I remember reading that somebody decided that Europe's comparative advantage was in regulation. Like that was Europe's superpower: regulation.Yeah, sure.And speaking of convergence, a lot of people who want to regulate the tech industry here have been looking to what Europe is doing. But Europe has not shown a lot of tech progress. They don't generate the big technology companies. So that, to me, is unsettling. Not only are we converging, but we're converging sometimes toward the least productive areas of the advanced world.In a lot of people's minds, the key thing is the unsafe dangers that tech might provide. And they look to Europe and they say, “Look how they're providing security there. Look at all the protections they're offering against the various kinds of insecurity we could have. Surely, we want to copy them for that.”I don't want to copy them for that. I'm willing to take a few risks.But many people want that level of security. So I'm actually concerned about this over the coming centuries. I think this trend is actually a trend toward not just stronger global governance, but stronger global community or even mobs, if we call it that. That is the reason why nuclear energy is regulated the same everywhere: the regulators in each place are part of a world community, and they each want to be respected in that community. And in order to be respected, they need to conform to what the rest of the community thinks. And that's going to just keep happening more over the coming centuries, I fear.One of my favorite shows, more realistic science-fiction shows and book series, is The Expanse, which takes place a couple hundred years in the future where there's a global government — which seems to be a democratic global government. I'm not sure how efficient it is. I'm not sure how entrepreneurial it is. Certainly the evidence seems to be that global governance does not lead to a vibrant, trial-and-error, experimenting kind of ecology. But just the opposite: one that focuses on safety and caution and risk aversion.And it's going to get a lot worse. I have a book called The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, and it's about very radical changes in technology. And most people who read about that, they go, “Oh, that's terrible. We need more regulations to stop that.” I think if you just look toward the longer run of changes, most people, when they start to imagine the large changes that will be possible, they want to stop that and put limits and control it somehow. And that's going to give even more of an impetus to global governance. That is, once you realize how our children might become radically different from us, then that scares people. And they really, then, want global governance to limit that.I fear this is going to be the biggest choice humanity ever makes, which is, in the next few centuries we will probably have stronger global governance, stronger global community, and we will credit it for solving many problems, including war and global warming and inequality and things like that. We will like the sense that we've all come together and we get to decide what changes are allowed and what aren't. And we limit how strange our children can be. And even though we will have given up on some things, we will just enjoy … because that's a very ancient human sense, to want to be part of a community and decide together. And then a few centuries from now, there will come this day when it's possible for a colony ship to leave the solar system to go elsewhere. And we will know by then that if we allow that to happen, that's the end of the era of shared governance. From that point on, competition reaffirms itself, war reaffirms itself. The descendants who come out there will then compete with each other and come back here and impose their will here, probably. And that scares the hell out of people.Indeed, that's the point of [The Expanse]. It's kind of a mixed bag with how successful Earth's been. They didn't kill themselves in nuclear war, at least. But the geopolitics just continues and that doesn't change. We're still human beings, even if we happen to be living on Mars or Europa. All that conflict will just reemerge.Although, I think it gets the scale wrong there. I think as long as we stay in the solar system, a central government will be able to impose its rule on outlying colonies. The solar system is pretty transparent. Anywhere in the solar system you are, if you're doing something somebody doesn't like, they can see you and they can throw something at you and hit you. And so I think a central government will be feasible within the solar system for quite some time. But once you get to other star systems, that ends. It's not feasible to punish colonies 20 light-years away when you don't get the message of what they did [until] 20 years later. That just becomes infeasible then. I would think The Expanse is telling a more human story because it's happening within this solar system. But I think, in fact, this world government becomes a solar system government, and it allows expansion to the solar system on its terms. But it would then be even stronger as a centralized governance community which prevents change.Thinking about the future like an economistIn a recent blog post, you wrote that when you think about the future, you try to think about it as an economist. You use economic analysis “to predict the social consequences of a particular envisioned future technology.” Have futurists not done that? Futurism has changed. I've written a lot about the classic 1960s futurists who were these very big, imaginative thinkers. They tended to be pretty optimistic. And then they tended to get pessimistic. And then futurism became kind of like marketing, like these were brand awareness people, not really big thinkers. When they approached it, did they approach it as technologists? Did they approach it as sociologists? Are economists just not interested in this subject?Good question. So I'd say there are three standard kinds of futurists. One kind of futurist is a short-term marketing consultant who's basically telling you which way the colors will go or the market demand will go in the short term.Is neon green in or lime green in, or something.And that's economically valuable. Those people should definitely exist. Then there's a more aspirational, inspirational kind of futurist. And that's changed over the decades, depending on what people want to be inspired by or afraid of. In the ‘50s, ‘60s, it might be about America going out and becoming powerful. Or later it's about the environment, and then it's about inequality and gender relations. In some sense, science fiction is another kind of futurism. And these two tend to be related in the sense that science fiction mainly focuses on an indirect way to tell metaphorical stories about us. Because we're not so interested in the future, really, we're interested in us. Those are futures serving various kinds of communities, but neither of them are that realistically oriented. They're not focused on what's likely to actually happen. They're focused on what will inspire people or entertain people or make people afraid or tell a morality tale.But if you're interested in what's actually going to happen, then my claim is you want to just take our standard best theories and just straightforwardly apply them in a thoughtful way. So many people, when they talk about the future, they say, “It's just impossible to say anything about the future. No one could possibly know; therefore, science fiction speculations are the best we can possibly do. You might as well go with that.” And I think that's just wrong. My demonstration in The Age of Em is to say, if you take a very specific technology scenario, you can just turn the crank with Econ 101, Sociology 101, Electrical Engineering 101, all the standard things, and just apply it to that scenario. And you can just say a lot. But what you will find out is that it's weird. It's not very inspiring, and it doesn't tell the perfect horror story of what you should avoid. It's just a complicated mess. And that's what you should expect, because that's what we would seem to our ancestors. [For] somebody 200 or 2000 years ago, our world doesn't make a good morality tale for them. First of all, they would just have trouble getting their head around it. Why did that happen? And [what] does that even mean? And then they're not so sure what to like or dislike about it, because it's just too weird. If you're trying to tell a nice morality tale [you have] simple heroes and villains, right? And this is too messy. The real futures you should just predict are going to be too messy to be a simple morality tale. They're going to be weird, and that's going to make them hard to deal with.The stories we tell ourselves about the futureDo you think it matters, the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about what the future could hold? My bias is, I think it does. I think it matters if all we paint for people is a really gloomy one, then not only is it depressing, then it's like, “What are we even doing here?” Because if we're going to move forward, if we're going to take risks with technology, there needs to be some sort of payoff. But yet, it seems like a lot of the culture continues. We mentioned The Expanse, which by the modern standard of a lot of science fiction, I find to be pretty optimistic. Some people say, "Well, it's not optimistic because half the population is on a basic income and there's war.” But, hey, there are people. Global warming didn't kill everybody. Nuclear war didn't kill everybody. We continued. We advanced. Not perfect, but society seems to be progressing. Has that mattered, do you think, the fact that we've been telling ourselves such terrible stories about the future? We used to tell much better ones.The first-order theory about change is that change doesn't really happen because people anticipated or planned for it or voted on it. Mostly this world has been changing as a side effect of lots of local economic interests and technological interests and pursuits. The world is just on this train with nobody driving, and that's scary and should be scary, I guess. So to the first order, it doesn't really matter what stories we tell or how we think about the future, because we haven't actually been planning for the future. We haven't actually been choosing the future.It kind of happens while we're doing something else.The side effect of other things. But that's the first order, that's the zeroth-order effect. The next-order effect might be … look, places in the world will vary in to what extent they win or lose over the long run. And there are things that can radically influence that. So being too cautious and playing it safe too much and being comfortable, predictably, will probably lead you to not win the future. If you're interested in having us — whoever us is — win the future or have a bright, dynamic future, then you'd like “us” to be a little more ambitious about such things. I would think it is a complement: The more we are excited about the future, and the future requires changes, the more we are telling ourselves, “Well, yeah, this change is painful, but that's the kind of thing you have to do if you want to get where we're going.”Long-term thinking and innovationIf you've been reading the New York Times lately or the New Yorker, the average is related to something called “effective altruism,” is the idea that there are big, existential problems facing the world, and we should be thinking a lot harder about them because people in the future matter too, not just us. And we should be spending money on these problems. We should be doing more research on these problems. What do you think about this movement? It sounds logical.Well, if you just compare it to all the other movements out there and their priorities, I've got to give this one credit. Obviously, the future is important.They are thinking directly about it. And they have ideas.They are trying to be conscious about that and proactive and altruistic about that. And that's certainly great compared to the vast majority of other activity. Now, I have some complaints, but overall, I'm happy to praise this sort of thing. The risk is, as with most futurism, that even though we're not conscious of it, what we're really doing is sort of projecting our issues now into the future and sort of arguing about future stuff by talking about our stuff. So you might say people seem to be really concerned about the future of global warming in two centuries, but all the other stuff that might happen in two centuries, they're not at all interested. It's like, what's the difference there? They might say global warming lets them tell this anti-materialist story that they'd want to tell anyway, tell why it's bad to be materialist and so to cut back on material stuff is good. And it's sort of a pro-environment story. I fear that that's also happening to some degree in effective altruism. But that's just what you should expect for humans in general. Effective altruists, in terms of their focus on the future, are overwhelmingly focused as far as I can tell on artificial intelligence risk. And I think that's a bit misdirected. In a big world I don't mind it …My concern is that we'll be super cautious and before we have developed anything that could really create existential risk … we will never get to the point where it's so powerful because, like the Luddites, we'll have quashed it early on out of fear.A friend of mine is Eric Drexler, who years ago was known as talking about nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is still a technology in the future. And he experienced something that made him a little unsure whether he should have said all these things, he said, which is that once you can describe a vivid future, the first thing everybody focuses on is almost all the things that can go wrong. Then they set up policy to try to focus on preventing the things that can go wrong. That's where the whole conversation goes. And then people are distancing themselves from it. He found that many people distanced themselves from nanotechnology until they could take over the word, because in their minds it reflected these terrible risks. So people wanted to not even talk about that. But you could ask, if he had just inspired people to make the technology but not talked about the larger policy risks, maybe that would be better? It might be in fact true that the world today is broken so much that if ordinary people and policymakers don't know about a future risk, the world's better off, because at least they won't mess it up by trying to limit it and control it too early and too crudely.Then the challenge is, maybe you want the technologists who might make it to hear about it and get inspired, but you don't want everybody else to be inspired to control it and correct it and channel it and prepare for it. Because honestly, that seems to go pretty bad. I guess the question is, what technology that people did see well ahead of time, did they not come up with terrible scenarios to worry about? For example, television: People didn't think about television very much ahead of time. And when it came, a lot of people watched it. And a lot of people complained about that. But if you could imagine ahead of time that in 20 years people are going to spend five hours a day watching this thing. If that's an accurate prediction, people would've freaked out.Or cars: As you may know, in the late 1800s, people just did not envision the future of cars. When they envisioned the future of transportation, they saw dirigibles and trains and submarines, even, but not cars. Because cars were these individual things. And if they had envisioned the actual future of cars — automobile accidents, individual people controlling a thing going down the street at 80 miles an hour — they might have thought, “That's terrible. We can't allow that.” And you have to wonder… It was only in the United States, really, that cars took off. There's a sense in which the world had rapid technological progress around 1900 or so because the US was an exception worldwide. A lot of technologies were only really tried in the US, like even radio, and then the rest of the world copied and followed because the US had so much success with them.I think if you want to pick a point where that optimistic ‘90s came to an end, it might have been, speaking of Wired magazine, the Bill Joy article … “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.” Talking about nanotech and gray goo… Since you brought up nanotech and Eric Drexler, do you know what the state of that technology is? We had this nanotechnology initiative, but I don't think it was working on that kind of nanotech.No, it wasn't.It was more like a materials science. But as far as creating these replicating tiny machines…The federal government had a nanotechnology initiative, where they basically took all the stuff they were doing that was dealing with small stuff and they relabeled it. They didn't really add more money. They just put it under a new initiative. And then they made sure nobody was doing anything like this sort of dangerous stuff that could cause what Eric was talking about.Stuff you'd put in sunscreen…Exactly. So there was still never much funding there. There's a sense in which, in many kinds of technology areas, somebody can envision ahead of time a new technology that was possible if a concentrated effort goes into a certain area in a certain way. And they're trying to inspire that. But absent that focused effort, you might not see it for a long time. That would be the simplest story about nanotech: We haven't seen the focused effort and resources that he had proposed. Now, that doesn't mean had we had those efforts he would've succeeded. He could just be wrong about what was feasible and how soon. But nevertheless, that still seemed to be an exciting, promising technology that would've been worth the investment to try. And still is, I would say.One concern I have about the notion of longtermism, is that it seems to place a lot of emphasis on our ability to rally people, get them thinking long term, taking preparatory steps. And we've just gone through a pandemic which showed that we don't do that very well. And the way we dealt with it was not through preparation, but by being a rich, technologically advanced society that could come up with a vaccine. That's my kind of longtermism, in a way: being rich and technologically capable so you can react to the unexpected.And that's because we allowed an exception in how vaccines were developed in that case. Had we gone with the usual way vaccines had been developed before, it would've taken a lot longer. So the problem is that when we make too many structures that restrain things, then we aren't able to quickly react to new circumstances. You probably know that most companies, they might have a forecasting department, but they don't fund it very much. They don't actually care that much. Almost everything they do is reactive in most organizations. That's just the fact of how most organizations work. Because, in fact, it is hard to prepare. It's hard to anticipate things.I'm not saying we shouldn't try to figure out ways to deflect asteroids. We should. To have this notion of longtermism over a broad scope of issues … that's fine. But I hope we don't forget the other part, which is making sure that we do the right things to create those innovative ecosystems where we do increase wealth, we do increase our technological capabilities to not be totally dependent on our best guesses right now.Here's a scary example of how this thinking can go wrong, in my mind. In the longtermism community, there's this serious proposal that many people like, which is called the Long Reflection.The Long Reflection, which is, we've solved all the problems and then we take a time out.We stop allowing change for a while. And for a good long time, maybe a thousand years or even longer, we're in this period where no change substantially happens. Then we talk a lot about what we could do to deal with things when things are allowed to change again. And we work it all out, and then we turn it back on and allow change. That's giving a lot of credit to this system of talking.Who's talking? Are these post-humans talking? Or is it people like us?It would be before the change, remember. So it would be people like us. I actually think this is this ancient human intuition from the forger world, before the farming era, where in the small band the way we made most important decisions was to sit down around the campfire and discuss it and then decide together and then do something. And that's, in some sense, how everybody wants to make all the big decisions. That's why they like a world government and a world community, because it goes back to that. But I honestly think we have to admit that just doesn't go very well lately. We're not actually very capable of having a discussion together and feeling all the options and making choices and then deciding together to do it. That's how we want to be able to work. And that's how we maybe should, but it's not how we are. I feel, with the Long Reflection, once we institutionalize a world where change isn't allowed, we would get pretty used to that world.It seems very comfortable, and we'd start voting for security.And then we wouldn't really allow the Great Reflection to end, because that would be this risky, into the strange world. We would like the stable world we were in. And that would be the end of that.I should say that I very much like Toby Ord's book, The Precipice. He's also one of my all-time favorite guests. He's really been a fantastic guest. Though, the Long Reflection, I do have concerns about.Come back next Thursday for part two of my conversation with Robin Hanson. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT and a principal research scientist at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, talks about his new book, "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies." In it, he argues that technological change is transforming the way work is done and will continue to do so through the next century. Brynjolfsson discusses the impact of new digital technologies on the economy, including 3D printing, artificial intelligence and the sharing economy. He also discusses how the changing nature of work affects society as a whole.

Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion of why our fears that artificial intelligence would take human jobs haven't yet come to fruition. We also cover how humans and AI can work together and how AI is changing work already. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss the latest on robotic process automation and address why we're working at all in the age of machines. Check out Prof. Brynjolfsson's paper: The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence

Tar maskinerna våra jobb? I samhällsdebatten har det blivit ett faktum att jobben försvinner på grund av automatiseringen. Men nu kommer kritiken. Aaron Benanav och Jason E Smith hävdar i sina böcker att vi lever i en produktivitetsparadox: trots automatiseringen ökar inte produktiviteten i produktionen. Avindustrialiseringen och jobben som försvinner gör det av andra skäl än ny teknik. Hur förändrar det en radikal samhällsstrategi för att ge ett trovärdigt framtidsprojekt? Vad innebär det för accelerationismen, den helautomatiska lyxkommunismen, ekomodernismen, teknopopulismen och Green new deal-politiken som vänstern lyft fram? Vilka subjekt kan genomföra en förändring om industrijobben minskar? Dave från Centrum för marxistiska samhällsstudier Stockholm gästar podden och diskuterar dessa frågor. Läs mer: Red may: Smart machines and service work med Jason E Smith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb8I1E0VKpo The Dig: Don't blame the robots - med Aaron Benanav https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/1043245989/the-dig/dont-blame-robots-with-aaron-benanav Aufhebunga bunga: It's Not Robots, It's Capitalism med Aaron Benanav och Liz Pancotti https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/149-its-not-robots-its-capitalism-ft-aaron-benanav/id1229278776?i=1000492333411 Scocconomics, Avsnitt: "Trickle down" & "Trickle up" https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/935202361/scocconomics/trickle-up E. Brynjolfsson & A. McAfee, The Second Machine Age (2014), W. W. Norton & Company. M. Ford, Rise of the Robots (2016), Basic Books. A. Benenav, Automation and the Future of Work (2020), Verso. J. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work (2020), Reaktion Books. P. Cockshott & D. Zachariah, Conservation Laws, Financial Entropy and the Eurozone Crisis (2014), E-conomics https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2014-5/html

I denne episoden av LØRN bokbad snakker, Silvija Seres, med forfatter, Tarjei Heggernes. Tarjei jobber på Høgskulen på Vestlandet og BI, og er opptatt av anvendelse av teknologi i forretningsdrift og pedagogikk. Heving av digital kompetanse har blitt en hjertesak for Heggernes, som den siste tiden har skrevet tredje utgave av boka Digital Forretningsforståelse som handler om å utvikle et program i digital kompetanse for renovasjons- og gjenvinningsbransjen.— Eg meiner vi har eit kjempestort ansvar overfor både dei unge som skal ut og endre arbeidslivet, utan at dei heilt veit kva det skal endrast til, og for dei vaksne som er i jobb, for at dei skal forstå korleis det digitale vil endre måten å jobbe på, og ikkje minst til å hjelpe dei så sjå sin eigen rolle i framtidas arbeidsliv, forteller han i episoden. Dette lørner du:Faglitteratur Digitalisering på arbeidsplassenStyreverden Økonomi Lederrollen Anbefalt litteratur:Bøkene til Brynjolfsson og McAfee (Second Machine Age, Machine Platform Crowd) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SOLO POD - Prominent venture capitalist, Kai-Fu Lee, estimates that automation and AI will bring about at least 25% NET job losses over the next two decades. While predicting *exactly* how this would translate across job types in the future is next to impossible—might there be a “mindset” we can all adopt to approach it?   In this episode, Julian turns to an unlikely source for inspiration… ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  YouTube CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  ~ Show Notes: https://www.trendifier.com/podcastnotes  TRENDIFIER Website: https://www.trendifier.com  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io  Music Produced by White Hot

In this episode I argue that we need clear terminology for thinking about the future. I use McAfee & Brynjolfsson's Machine, Platform, Crowd to tease out the difference between prediction and thinking about the future. Clarifying our terms could actually help (which I will attempt in a future episode).

I started these conversation series to further the underlying philosophy of this publication - helping the spread of good rival ideas. I want to speak to brilliant people with experience, who also have interesting things to say about Nigeria's political economy and society in general. In the first episode, I spoke with Affiong Williams - Founder/CEO of Reelfruit. I learned a lot from Affi and it was hard to condense our conversation into the bits that made the cut. Her take on economic complexity, and how social systems and expectations can change culture are quite refreshing takes. She is an advocate of epistemic humility, and she practices what she preaches. But make no mistake, she is a deep and profound thinker.You can listen to our conversation above or read the transcript(it’s looong) below. You can also listen on Stitcher here. I owe an immeasurable amount of gratitude to Quadbee, who is the producer and editor of these series.TRANSCRIPTTobi: Affiong, it's nice to have you.Affiong: Thank you.Tobi: So I want to start with human capital...because, there was something you said on Twitter a while back and I think I ran a poll on that idea, that some African countries do have a lot more human capital than Nigeria. So can you try to unpack what you mean by that because, obviously, when you look at the data you can see it differently sometimes but as an entrepreneur, you experience human capital daily - so can you unpack a bit of that?Affiong: This tweet you're referring to was borne out of my visit to Zimbabwe a country that was once known for quite a superior educational system and maybe good leadership under the early days of Robert Mugabe but also has been known in the last twenty years as a place where the economy has been completely topsy-turvy and they face one crisis of hyperinflation after the other etcetera. But in my visit to Harare, what I noticed was... (And I'll use the specific example), was that in the lodge we were staying where we were about thirty people. There were only three people were managing it, only three people managing in terms of cleaning, the lodge manager, maybe four or five and the cooks who would come in to make breakfast etcetera. But in terms of facilitating the entire lodge which was like ten room lodge with about like thirty guests, I would say, I've realized in Nigeria there is absolutely no way three people could manage complexities of giving people stellar, sort of warm service and as well as keep the grounds as pristine as it were and it got me thinking about this learning that I've uncovered in my years of just operating as an entrepreneur but also reading about development that a lot of education is in firms not in schools. And even though Zimbabwe has had a history of good education like Nigeria...we want to brag has had in the past, the idea is that the economy was way more diversified and specialized in things like tourism so you found that people are much more equipped to handle...to be more productive than in countries where there's not been any specialization or the economies are less diversified.So, that, for me was sort of the link that the diversification of an economy makes human beings more productive, much more than 1) the educational sector, and 2) that the inverse is true. The less diversified a country is in terms of its learnings, what it can do, what it's good at, the less productive people are. If you look at Zimbabwe, a hotel manager there could probably manage the equivalent of a mid-sized hotel in Nigeria or a large hotel in Nigeria whereas the reverse will not be true. A hotel manager in Nigeria is just not quipped to do the same in another country and offer the same type of service and Zim is known for its stellar...the development of its tourist industry and actually it receives tourists from across the world. So the industry has had to become more competitive and be able to sell tourism from across the world; whereas Nigeria has not, so you can see the quality of our hotel etcetera just being under par.People may dispute this but I posit that the more complex and the more diversified your economy is, the more people learn and get to know. - AWAnd it is easy to make this comparisons with countries like America which is a first world nation with all the resources in the world but if you look at more comparable countries like Kenya or Ghana, when you compare sectors like...for instance, and I'll use Ghana as an example - food processing - because Ghana has learnt to build this industry for export and self-diversified companies, you find that a factory manager in Ghana will be better on average than a factory manager in Nigeria. And people may dispute this but I posit that the more complex and the more diversified your economy is, the more people learn and get to know. You look at the banks in Nigeria and I’ll use India as an example, a bank manager in India, a middle manager can do mergers and acquisitions. That's because the economy allows for it. The economy is diversified enough where companies are buying each other up, and that skill and that learning is necessary for the competitiveness and growth of that bank. In Nigeria, people who've been in banking for ten years still push paper and I know that as an entrepreneur who have bank relationship managers working for me, and they haven't even learnt how to do that seamlessly. Every time you want to do some complex different deal, there's reporting to head office, there's all these issues that even a middle manager someone with ten years [of] experience in the bank cannot solve at that level. And that speaks to the diversification and complexity of the economy, we're simply not doing mergers and acquisition at a rate in Nigeria that can forces that learning on everybody. So those people are less productive than if you compare them with an Indian banker or... not to talk of an American banker or even a South African bank where you have such a diversified and sophisticated economy. So, for me, human capital is very much driven by the firms in the country and the make-up of firms in the country and you find that in Nigeria, it stagnates because our companies were not getting new industries really coming in to improve and increase that learning.And Nigerians love to talk up how smart and how they do well abroad and how given the right tools etc., and that's true. But that's also a factor of what those countries offer. it's not really inherent to being Nigerian or being here because you find that that logic almost collapses...Tobi: There's a place premium to it.Affiong: Exactly. So it's where you are that unearths that potential versus inherently in you. And you see that with human capital deficiencies in Nigeria; and I didn't have that small country, smaller GDP perspective until I went to Zim and I was like, “wow!”, these people by virtue of having a more diversified economy know more and could produce more in their industries and businesses. Somebody told me something that in India, even on the factory floor, what one person does in India you need three people to do it here and I think that's telling. That the capacity of one person to solve and make decisions around three processes increased over there just because the economy demands that.Tobi: It's an interesting point you're making because a lot of the problems we talk about in development centers on productivity. And firms have to be productive for us to be able to call an economy developing so to speak. A lot of the effect, the aggregate effects that gets measured transmits out of firms...but you made two points that I want us to speculate on a bit.Affiong: Okay.Tobi: One is economic complexity. And from I think Ricardo Hausmann and co., they actually say that economic complexity is a better predictor...Affiong: Yeah.Tobi: Of development...Affiong: Yeah.Tobi: But there is this other school of development that says you have to specialize. Oh, you have to...Affiong: Competitive advantage, yes.Tobi: Yeah, you have to find your comparative advantage, you have to, oh, do agriculture or its manufacturing or whatever [else]. But you are saying from experience that complexity actually works. So how do we get policymakers to absorb that message? How do you craft policy for complexity, really?Affiong: That's a great question. I feel like I should preface by saying I'm by no means an economist, I just enjoy talking about and thinking about it. This I could do for free. I geek out on development especially and firm productivity and things like that. But the schools of thought are... from what I've read and understand, I think...the way I see it and please for the audience this is a very layman’s way of thinking...that when you look at something like economic complexity and doing different things and countries that are successful do things they're not previously good at. It's somewhat walking backwards, somewhat looking at developed economies and saying, "well, they're very diverse in their output", but they also started somewhere and built up. So I do think there is ...comparative advantage is almost like a first-level sort of step for policymakers to begin to say "well, where should we deploy resources and deploy thinking and deploy attention to". It's easier to sort of start with what you have and maybe the comparison to countries that have really been good at starting with what they have, that have been able to create what they didn't have is the wrong comparison in terms of policy because if you look at America or Asia or all these countries that are highly specialized, are highly diverse, they all started somewhere. Compare that to a country like Nigeria where we haven't yet really kicked off industrialization in anywhere. It may be too big a job to say start crafting policy for diversity. I would say that the negatives of focusing on comparative advantage is what you see in Nigeria - ban, protect a small pie, we talked about, oh, agriculture is our thing so let's ban import because that's what we have comparative advantage in production in.So it is a dangerous hill to die on as it were if you are not able to really multiply your comparative advantage. What you end up doing is saying, “oh this is a small pie let's protect it”, and all the policies are somewhat skewed [against] actually widening the pie. So my thinking is that there's still room for countries like Nigeria to focus on their comparative advantage. So if I'm looking at, like, an example is petroleum or oil and gas. There is still billions of dollars in unlocked investment in oil and gas that is trapped by bad policy. So it's saying…well, we produce oil and gas but we can still derive a lot more value from that for long as shale and all these renewables don't stand in the way. Although I think despite that, there's still room for investment. On agriculture - if you're saying you're the largest grower of cassava in the world. There's still room to be hyper productive at growing cassava which will create jobs. We're not even talking about processing, just producing cassava that can be used for different resources, producing enough high-quality cassava to export, all sorts of things. So there is room for policy attention to go to actually developing your comparative advantage and I think that then spurs you to start getting into more complex policy around say wanting to be the financial services capital of Africa, which you don't have skills to do that yet. But yes, you can sort of engineer that through policy. That's probably a harder reach for government and people. We're still stuck on what we're doing but I don't think that it's bad to focus on what you're good at. But I do think that there is room to unearth a lot of value in that. So yeah.Tobi: Okay. So, I worry about timing though, because obviously when we talk about comparative advantages, the go-to example is always Asia. East Asia. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam now. But what I mean about timing, which to me is a bit of an argument in favour of freer markets…(I don't want to say free markets because that attracts a lot of angry letters)... is that the rules of global trade has changed a lot. Asia industrialized at the time when there were a lot of permissiveness in trade and trade regimes around the world today has changed. And also if we want to do comparative advantage now, however bad it is [the economy], some companies here have built-in competencies, learning over years, you will be sort of redirecting resources and human capital away from those people to few chosen sectors. So I'm wondering will that be a way to go. Can we really do comparative advantage? Has the time not passed?Affiong: From my understanding or from my perception is that the things we're talking about in terms of comparative advantage, the sectors or industries, (they) are still very largely agrarian sector. They're sectors that one would assume human capital at the lowest level can absorb [a lot more capacity] versus a large redirection of specialized skills to actually play in the sector. So if you look at agriculture for instance, I'll take agric because we are largely an agrarian society and that's where fifty percent of jobs are created. Increasing agriculture input is not necessarily... yes there is huge technological, in terms of machinery component to it but a lot of it is fertilizer and if you look at Asia, a lot of it was people who were not doing anything getting on the farm. We have a lot of people who are not doing anything who can get on the farms and be a little bit more productive. We're not talking about people who are going to go on to start agribusinesses and do those kinds of things. But if we focus on that comparative advantage, I think we can drive up human capital that would otherwise not be doing anything and I think that that might be a benefit. I read the book how Asia works and sort of household farming, going into smallholder farming with people farming on their own, in their homes, outside their lots and then moving them into some sort of small holder...being a little bit more productive than what they were doing...which puts them into jobs and make them employed. I think that opportunity may still exist and I think when you start driving up that kind of productivity you hopefully can attract more human capital from outside to sort of buildup on that. Then start the processing for factories, do more complex manufacturing and things like that. I think there is still a window of time and maybe Nigeria's population has a lot to do with it as well that for domestic consumption there's huge opportunity to make the price of every commodity cheaper by growing more so that more people consume it and increase consumption. That could be some sort of out [for] job creation. I'm not a big fan of produce what you consume but I think in my view, consumption of almost every sort of product is low compared to even African averages and that's because the price is high and bringing these prices down by increasing productivity would help drive local demand of them and hopefully that will then bring more people into employment, make them more productive that way. I hope that theory is... sort of makes sense in a way.LaughsYeah, I'm making a case for increased…focusing on comparative advantage and the impact of that on really using a level of docile, docile is not the right word, but stagnated human capital which are people who are not employed, can't do much but if you've got them farming more, they're generally becoming more productive. Yeah, that's my thinking around that.Tobi: Alright, let's talk about perception a bit because you mentioned earlier that I don't know maybe because of our size we think “oh, Nigeria is awesome, we have this huge stock of human capital and any day now we are going to zoom ahead”...Affiong: Yeah, unleash it and take our rightful place on the African continent.Tobi: What's the biggest perception difference you've observed in the business landscape in Nigeria. What do you think Nigerian business owners, entrepreneurs or professionals are mostly wrong about that they think they are right about?Affiong: That's a very very good question. I think its human nature for everybody to overrate our capacity, that is what we do. We are not logical about what we can realistically achieve. Studies, everything, proves this. But in Nigeria, what I think a lot of entrepreneurs are wrong about is that idea that there's something innate in the capacity of Nigerians to sort of make a plan or make things happen. I think we are very wrong about a lot of times why firms or businesses fail in Nigeria and a lot of it is around lack of structure. I mean, yes, there are market issues and there are lots of issues but I'm going to focus on this - the need to sort of build in systems and processes vis-a-vis firm failure and I think a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs think that kind of disorder or not building that order within companies is not necessary to their success because Nigeria is a very disorderly place and things don't happen. But I think a lot of firms damn it and die when there are no systems built-in businesses were basically - capacity and decision-making (etc.) is filtered down and processes are filtered down from the top to the bottom. So you find in a lot of businesses [that] the CEO knows a lot and owns a lot but there is no(t) emphasis on management and middle management being equally (skilled up) upskilled, being able to make decision, being able to do stuff… so there's literally only very few resources being aimed at growing a business - which is the CEO, usually his or her networks and things like that versus upskilling the management team to be growth led.There is this idea that systems and processes don't matter but i think they contribute. I don't have empirical evidence to prove it but I think they contribute more to the failure of businesses than we give credit to. Yes, market realities are real but it's a slower way to grow a business if you start looking at...There [are] different stages of growth in a business. You don't need a full management team in day one but when you need that and that system is not put in play, I think you're already regressing as a business and you just don't know it. Then things start to unravel and you point fingers at the market or the economy or you point fingers at competition or import etc. whereas there wasn't that sort of universal firm learning that comes from everybody - [having] more people being involved in the growth and capacity of the business. And you see businesses at all sizes where there's a disproportionate amount of the responsibility of the business to grow on one person versus the entire firm. That is also [a] lack of systems and processes (and making everybody's job at a particular level to see the business grow from their departmental perspective) that's missing and I think it leads to regression of businesses. Some entrepreneurs don't [consider it important] because it's not a cost per say that come out of the business, and in fact the cost is hiring (these) people to do it, [so] it's not measured as a real or a lack thereof of a strong team and processes in the business. It’s not measured as importantly as it should in a business. That’s something I think we are all still very wrong about. Yeah.Tobi: I like where you went with that. So let's talk about management a bit.Affiong: Yeah.Tobi: There was this study I read, and I'll try and put up links for context, by I think John Van Reneen and Nicholas Bloom. Their argument is that management also determines the wealth of nations, that is, how firms are managed is an underrated factor. In fact, there was another study where they found that management is a better predictor of a firm's success than every other factor, even technology. But obviously here, management is something we don't really talk about as such. It is endogenous. So what's your experience been like with other business owners, how do we improve management and how do we increase our awareness in that area?Affiong: That's very very interesting, and I think quite a study to bring up because I tend to agree with that. People will say "well, if you're in a great industry and have terrible management you'll still be successful" and I think that might be true. But it's true for very few. It’s true when you are maybe the only player, there's two of you and there is not much competition for the market. But when there's a lot more competition for a market like we're seeing in a more globalized world, the quality of the people who are in firms matter and accelerate or decelerate the growth of the company. Now, I'll use myself as a case study, I have a really strong management team, I have managerial heads in all facets of the business and all departments of the business and that has helped us grow tremendously - from a sales perspective, from being invested ready, from being able to handle numerous things at a go, from our ability to launch new products (be)cause there are just people who are responsible for getting these things done and understand it and the collective output of that means that things are done better. If we want to enter a new territory, for instance, it's not one person doing it, I have somebody from finance looking at the numbers, somebody from admin calling agents to figure of the space, my production team figuring out product integrity, my sales manager finding the stores that we're going to go in to and we can execute that in two to three months - of people putting their collective outputs together to get that done. Now, if that management team was not as strong or not as defined, it will be one person trying to be all those things and we will invariably make a poorer decision; and if we make a poorer decision, you'll either fail at that or you're operating sub-optimally, which then impacts, for me, revenue, which then impacts the signal of whether the business as legs or not.So might find that there is market, but because there is less execution capacity in your firm, you can't actually achieve that market. But what does it look like? It looks like your firm is a non-growing firm, and not doing well primarily because you alone cannot do everything and the people around the table are not equipped to actually access the market available - and then as you learn within the firm to do these things, you can replicate them much easier. So I kind of find that, tied my previous point, that decentralization of output and expectation of output and productivity obviously helps the firm grow faster, make better decisions; and those businesses are more likely to demonstrate investment readiness, demonstrate that they can scale, demonstrate better unit economics (etc.) because there's just a talent or pool of people who are equipped in each of their departments to make and optimize the decision making - make the best decision etc.Tobi: That's interesting. You talked about processes, but I want to push on the personnel aspect of it. Obviously you have a great management team but what do you have to get right to build a great management team because, well, when you talk to people, what they say is that "oh, managerial talent is actually scarce and that it's our culture to be sloppy management wise". We're going to talk about culture in a bit, but what do you have to get right to build a great management team?Affiong: That's a fantastic question because I also struggle with that. I say “do I have a good management team because I have sort them out, and can that be devoid of a growing company?” This is, for me, one of the big things. I also find that a lot of Nigerian companies are not growing and they are sort of stagnant, sort of peaked in terms of learning. So sometimes the need or the ability for the firm to attract people and keep them and sustain them and even pay them is limited when the company is not growing. So if you're not growing as a company, can you attract people to grow the company with you which is how they learn and get better at doing well? If you're a company that's not doing a lot of things and doing more things, people's learning pretty much stagnates, right? It's like government agency…LaughsSo I'll say what are the inputs in a growing company? In a growing company people are learning more, people are learning things they've not done before, so there's a lot of external learning coming in, there's a lot of self-learning; which then becomes process because we've learned what to do. We didn't know what to do before, we've learnt it and now we’ve agreed that’s the right thing to do - sort of install it as a process and people repeat it. For me, a growing company is necessary to [not only] keep attracting really good pool of management, but also the pool of people who are curious and who are excited by growing a company. It's somewhat a chicken and egg thing. (People who are curious about doing things they've not done before.) Because that's what a growing firm is, you are learning to do stuff you've never done before. That's how you grow, and then being able to apply that curiosity in a company that is growing - so that they are learning to do things they've not done before - is my idea of how you get a good managerial team or how you can bring in the talent. It is not just for today but for tomorrow when you're not doing [well]. When we started for instance, we were selling 2 products in Lagos. We're now selling 6, actually our SKU is about 16 right now in Lagos and 12 other states… Tobi: Wow.Affiong: and in over 300 stores. So the learning to be able to scale up and do that comes from the fact that we're growing but also comes from the fact that there are people who can actually achieve that successfully and those people started up not working in 12 States but have now grown to the capacity to be able do that. So, it's a chicken and egg thing.LaughsI don't know where I fit in. Can you grow without people who are not curious about growth and cannot execute things they didn't know? That's a tough one. I don't know all the right answer.LaughsTobi: It's interesting you mentioned growth…Affiong: Yeah.I think that people don't know - and even I myself irrespective of - how much having money to survive and stay in business is what ultimately leads to growth of companies. - AWTobi: Because we're zooming out a bit. Now, people would say "well, it's tough to build a growing business in Nigeria". It's almost a cliché hearing that. So what I want to know is...okay, we hear that X or Y isn't helping. As a business owner, what does it take to build a growing company? Does government have to get out of the way or help in a certain way? What are the things that has to go right to have a growing company that then attracts quality managerial talent?Affiong: That's a great question and I have a very loaded answer. I'm not going to focus on the banal part of government policy and initiatives. I think businesses are very limited in how much they can grow outside of government policies but let's sort of control for that. I think we underrate the need for capital. I think that people don't know - and even I myself irrespective of - how much having money to survive and stay in business is what ultimately leads to growth of companies. People will tell you - and I find a lot of the advice to entrepreneurs quite asinine and platitudinal…Tobi: That money doesn't matter.Affiong: "Oh, you don't need money at every level"...oh, yeah, I do. I always need money because money is one resource that can unlock others. I say that not facetiously in the sense that money does not solve all problems. But when you start a business, in my opinion, you're assuming a product-market fit. You're making a lot of assumptions around your customer wants, around your product's ability to solve that customer's problems or service, and you may not get it right in the first time. It doesn't mean that you cannot solve that customer’s problem, where you can then generate the value that we see in [a] growing company. But those pivots, those mini pivots that happen in companies, they are not free. Innovation is not free. Changing of business model is not cheap. And that's where capital comes in. Capital helps you overcome some of those mistakes you make or right those wrong assumptions you made that ultimately lead to growth. When I started my business, I'll use myself again as an example, and I'm very wary of using anecdotes but this is an opinion conversation…Tobi: Please go ahead.LaughsAffiong: it's not one that requires all that fact. But the first two products we launched are not our best selling products today. Our best-selling product is a product that we got out of putting two products in the market, the customer rejecting one and telling us what they wanted. Now launching that next product requires significant investment for me to get new packaging, get new suppliers, get new staff, get all these things and had I not had the capital to do that, you would have said "well, there's no market for dried fruits because these two product, out of them, one was rejected". But really, what capital helped me do is bridge the gap to learn more about what the customer wanted and be able to provide for them and then scale that and then launch new products. So money is important. Capital is important. And I think that...People always say "oh don't give an entrepreneur too much capital in the beginning". I'm sorry, very few entrepreneurs get too much capital in the beginning. And, even if you give an entrepreneur a lot more capital than they are able to absorb in the beginning, you're increasing their chances of actually figuring out where the value is, where the customer”s need really is so that they can solve that problem and that's how firms grow. So, for me, we talked a lot about training, and we talk a lot about product-market fit and understanding your customer; that's not free, that's not cheap. It takes money to survive to do it. You have to be in existence, ou have to have enough working capital, you have to serve them different iterations of this product. And in my view, capital is, as simple and basic as it is, one of the big things that would help firms grow.Tobi: It's a very great point. It's sad some of our capital control measures, because...again, talking about Asia, take a country like China. When China started industrializing, a lot of the capital came from Chinese overseas. In Taiwan, in Korea, in Japan... but here, you find that even government is fighting against remittances and stuffs like that and we don’t have enough capital.Affiong: No, we don't. We absolutely do not and a lot of the capital that's coming in is quite conditioned and I think sometimes also... (complex). We simply do not have enough capital that is needed to spur any sort of growth in enterprise, at even a modest rate I would say.Tobi: What other things do you need to build a growing [business]? I read a blog of yours, once, where you mentioned networking. What role does that play?Affiong: I think it plays a huge role especially in a country like Nigeria where access to opportunity is not democratized (anywhere), but it certainly is more unequal here than in other parts of the world. So in a country where a lot of the resources and opportunities are in the hands of a few, to sort of gain access to that where you are not from that class or cadre, I think networking is absolutely vital. And I think the power of networking is proven globally, it is not just about Nigeria. Take any example, you can't just walk into anywhere and say you have a product/service or whatever and say “you to want to sell it” where you don't need some network, some sort of reputational stamp of approval or something like that to get you through those doors. So networking is simply trying to to do that, and, say leapfrog some of the challenges you face in running a business where the decision rests in the hands of a few people. For me, expanding your network and going outside of your traditional network of family and friends and knowing people who know people, and knowing people who are not in your circle increases your chances of success as a company to raise funding, raise awareness, raise purchases etc.It's sort of very difficult to measure in terms of firm success but I think one of those underrated things that really really help businesses, and people in general, the world over at that.Tobi: So networking in this case functions as a bit of a social capital?Affiong: Yes, it's leveraging your social capital to sort of grow your business directly through getting financing, through getting buyers. Yes, it's sort of a resource. A standalone resource that adds to the growth of your business is how I look at it.Tobi: But how does this square with merit? What you hear is that there has to be a level playing field for businesses to compete fairly. But if successful businesses are better networked, isn't that problematic for, let me say, our idea of merit?Affiong: I think that idea is unfounded. I think the idea of equality is a nice virtue that people think is what leads to the success of societies and I don't think that that's true. I don't think it's played out in history. I think there's a lot of circumstance that leads people down the path that they get on to and if you trace back people's history especially successful people. I know you have this very interesting comment which I leverage (a lot) on privilege analysis. And what people do is, if you see people doing successful things, you go backwards and say they are privileged…Tobi: Yes.I think that if people are allowed to thrive individually as humans are meant to do, using all the resources at their arsenal, society wins more than it loses. -AWAffiong: And I think that’s true. You find that success is certainly not equally distributed, and I think you find successful people are more likely to be successful. You find that people who are better networked and experienced tend to build better businesses. It's an amalgamation of people's histories and where they are coming from. It's not that you just said, "Everybody run", and you open the playing field and everybody has an equal footing in terms of what they can do. And, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that... especially for entrepreneurial success, you don't need to so many entrepreneurs to be successful to build a successful economy. I look at America, the most successful economy in the world, with three hundred million people who are all most(ly) working in private institutions, very small percentage are successful. So for me, equality in terms of entrepreneurial success is not something you can control for and I don't think it is fair to punish people who have the means to build bigger businesses - that would absorb more people, create more income and productivity for the country - to try and taper that or to try temper that because you want to build an equal playing field. It is like dragging people down to the mean and I don't think that creates the kind of success that benefits society as a whole. So I say "everybody, work with the privilege you have" because that is not something you can easily trade. People don't give up their privilege or people cannot automatically say because I have this kind of access I going to give it away and expunge it [or] I will exchange it for somebody else to have. It’s a very difficult thing to do and you cannot erase centuries of history that has led people to where they are today to try control for equality. I don't think it makes much sense. I think that if people are allowed to thrive individually as humans are meant to do, using all the resources at their arsenal, society wins more than it loses. It’s not a perfect system but I think it's the best.Tobi: Interesting point on priviledge. My favourite example of that point is Bill Gates. You hear today how his middle school was selected in his district for a pilot computer program and how that is some kind of privilege and what you don't hear is, he was not the only kid in that school… Affiong: Yeah, in that school, exactly...every other kid had access to that computer…LaughsTobi: And people just sort of discount the hours he had to work, all the nights of misery, of uncertainty and hard work that people put into this. Another thing I discovered and I would like to know your insight on that is, on this privilege issue, people think that group traits transmits individually like “oh, if you're born into a certain income class (X percent of the income distribution) it means you enjoy privileges that come with that regardless of whatever you do” and often I find that that's not true. There are lots of rich dumb kids who are failures. Absolute failures, who I wouldn't want to be in a second regardless of their privilege. In our social discuss, we're importing a lot of that and maybe my experience is limited to social media, so I want us to lean into that here a bit.Affiong: I think there is certainly and I would say at this point, also an attack of individual virtue and individualism in a way. Where it seems, like you say, people discount the individual components that make people successful and they want to tag it as a privilege of wealth or a privilege of going to Ivy League schools or one privilege or another which is a very simplistic way to look at it. You find that everybody's route to success has a mixture of lottery of birth, economy you're born in, the time in which government policy favoured you or your parents or not. There is a huge very complex mix of things that make people - that lead and support people's success.But there is also, like you mentioned, thousands other people who grew up in those similar conditions. The individual trait of wanting to, of striving or building or doing something is one that is discounted. And I think that there is a general attack on individualism, free thought and individual thought. Even in societies where there is a lot of success, people want to demerit their own individual input to their success and sort of collectivize it as a way of diminishing that. In those societies where everybody else had access, there are also failures. So it's not just that the society was the reason you did well, it's that there is something about you as individual who has been able to build whatever success that you have. So this social discourse around collectivism and collectivizing people's successes and things like that is a worrying kind of phenomenon happening because I think it is us going against who people are as individuals. It is going against the way human beings are made and are built and I think it's worrisome to start punishing and tagging people who are individually successful has being [this] sort of greedy barons (as it were) for being successful or feeling bad for being successful, feeling bad for building a lot of wealth, because somehow they are meant to collectivize their wealth, or somehow they also stepped on other people to be able to get wealthy. So there's sort of very dangerous and insidious ideas around individual productivity and individuals building that I think are being disproportionately spread in a way where they are being accepted much more than I think they should be, and not being critiqued.I certainly don't subscribe to privilege identification of any kind. I think it's actually an insidious thing to do to point at people and say “declare your privilege, declare your privilege”. It is tagging people in a negative way that I don't subscribe to. I think does not do anything for anyone really. So, I say, as individuals we'll always look for all the resources at our disposal to get to whatever level of self actualization we're trying get on and that should not be diminished in any way. I don't care if you're a billionaire or you're having 100 Naira in your pocket. That is human, that's what we do and shouldn't be discouraged.Tobi: So, now, how much do you think categorical disadvantages like gender or social class matter? If we're talking about individuals like you said, what you find is that individual still fits, however defined - however poorly defined sometimes - into certain categories. Of course, you're a woman in business, you hear things like X is difficult for a woman in business whereas for a man they don't face the same barriers or challenges or maybe things around sexual solicitation. So, how much do you think that matters in terms of striving and success?Affiong: Like you said, equality in general doesn't exist and I think that that's the general premise. That even if you control for gender and look at men, there is huge inequalities in men. (In one gender where you sort of look at different strata, for instance.) So, for me, this idea of gender equality is....let me be careful here...I am not dismissing at all there are categorical disadvantages for women in business and women as a whole. But, again, what do we compare it to? We often compare it to men. We don't compare it to categorical differences that men face as a gender, that there are differences between men. So, the men versus women view is the most obvious way to look at the disadvantages for women. But I generally think that we need to look at that from the perspective of the history of women and [ask] when did women start moving out of the home as a primary occupation into business and does that explain why there are differences in the number of women represented in the industry versus not? Because if you take a different look at it, I think you'll find huge successes, I think you'll find that in a generation of women or someone like my grandmother not being educated, in only 200 years her granddaughter can become the CEO of a business. But if you look at it from the perspective of “well, let's try equal the playing field where we have 50/50 men and women”, that's not really solving the problem in my opinion. The problem is wanting to encourage more women - that women are moving into formal careers and rising to the top - versus saying that the dearth of women in top management is because of some patriarchy or some system that is blocking women. It's that just from the get-go men got into those roles more and more women are getting into those roles [too]. It depends on how you look at it, you might see that what we're actually seeing is an advancement of women versus women [in] the world today still being disadvantaged. And that's true. I think trying to uncover the root cause is very complex and not based on one thing and certainly not based on the fact that men are advancing at the expense of women is a hundred percent true. And that is the simplistic discuss that you're hearing that “okay, men are patriarchal, they are all-boys club etc.” Well then, how do you explain for women being more university graduates than men in developed economies? Women are getting more degrees, women are advancing, more women in management. The way to look at it to solve the problem matters and I think it's more sensationalist to look at it one way versus another.Now, bringing it back to myself as a woman in business, I can't categorically say and I'm not going to speak for every woman because that's silly to do and my experience is very unique. But I can't categorically say that my gender has hindered my progress as an entrepreneur. I've never gotten a "No, you are a woman so therefore you cannot get progress". I don't know that there are many women starting businesses who have heard that. Now, are there other challenges women face, maybe the impact of motherhood, the impact of social conditioning to make women maybe not...? Social conditioning is even a stretch for me to actually apply to this scenario but whatever experience women face as a collective (their collective experiences growing up which is actually very individualistic [because] it is not all collective) matter but they matter for men too. Men success is not equal. It's...you know, two men that grow up in the same household don't automatically become successful because they grow up in the same household. Two women who grow up in the same household don't automatically just ascend to the same levels because they grow up in the same household. There is something that we're trying to, I think, aggregate which should be disaggregated to actually find ways to advance with it. Now again back to me, no one has ever said "you're a woman so you will not succeed because you're a woman and I don't do business with women". That never happened to me. I don't know how many women that's happened to. And when I look at the impact of challenges that affected me as a woman, say sexual misconduct - Yes, I've had people say inappropriate things to me as a woman and I take that as a challenge that is it different from another challenge that a man faces where... that is a hindrance to his success in business? We have to weigh those up. There are those challenges that affect women but do they disproportionately affect them to the challenges affecting men's success? I don't know that that's the case. I can't say, I can't say that...Tobi: What about the implicit bias? Like maybe there might not be explicit stuff [and] nobody is going to tell you because you are a woman. But some think that there are implicit biases against women that, oh, because you're a woman I can implicitly conclude that I'm not going to offer you that promotion because I imagine that five years from now you're going to get married and have a child. What about implicit bias, do you think that plays a huge role and can it really be corrected? Is it a problem we can solve, really?Affiong: I've read some studies around this and I'm not going to say that my reading is up-to-date on it but if you look at even the studies around senior management and why women are dropping out of management, a lot of it has to do with motherhood - becoming mothers, suspending their career advancement. But a lot of it is...if a woman who has an MBA and is a mother, was working and halfway becomes a mother and decides to quit and become a mother full-time, it's a choice. And it's her choice because she wants to really be [a mother]. There are various reasons people make those kinds choices but I guess the point I'm trying to drive at is that the dearth of the female management is that women at the stage of becoming mothers don't go back into work or take part time jobs etc. So for me, if you look at that you're saying "are women being punished for being mothers or are women choosing - that they enjoy motherhood so they want to do that?" The narrative is that "no, women cannot go back to work because they're mothers". That's not true or that what should be an ideal solution to allow women to have children and are not overburdened by childcare to make that choice and women who choose to actually stay and not want to go back to work are doing so because it is their own desirous outcome. For me, that's something to unpack and I think we're seeing more flexibility around women being able reintegrate in the workplace versus their careers ending because of having children.Again, I can't say how much that bias of “let me not give a woman a chance because in five years she'll be a mother” is? Maybe it's a bias that is probably more widely held in a different age or category of person. It's hard to test. Does it exist? Probably. Does it exist to the extent that people think that it does? I'm not sure, I'm not sure. I think you're finding a lot of self-selection out of [going up]. I think women are self-selecting out of going up because of motherhood and the demands of motherhood. And if that is to change, we should unpack that as the issue, not necessarily say that, it's because men are stopping women from going up in their careers. So that makes sense. I mean, where would you pinpoint the solution? Where would you pinpoint where to investigate…Tobi: Exactly.Affiong: And how to solve the problem? I think it's looking at that time where you become a mother and your career takes second place. And again, we assume that there is no payoff for people who are deciding to choose that path. The narrative is that it is completely "oh, a do-or-die affair"Tobi: You ought to find satisfaction in work.Affiong: Exactly...and because every woman is made to be this career sort of [person]. Every woman who is working in career is meant to get up to the total ranks and become the boss therefore having a child is not [or] choosing "motherhood" as it were is not success. For some people it is, absolutely. And some people the payoff and trade-off of being a mother is absolutely a form success. I recently become a mother and while I'm an absolute workaholic, I can appreciate why women would want to focus on motherhood. And it's not a failure that they want to do that, and it's not patriarchy or misogyny or a man stopping them from doing that. It's a choice. It's a valid choice for a woman to do. So where women don't want to make that choice and want to advance is where I say let's find solutions for. But not automatically paint it as a huge deal in the world that women choose motherhood. They love being mothers, if they didn't we would not exist as a race, right? Like if women didn't actually enjoy the journey of motherhood. So I think that that's more nuanced than people like to understand.Tobi: Yeah, this is an interesting area, so I'm just going to ask you straight up. Are you a feminist?Affiong: Ah, am I a feminist? Yes I am. I would say that. Do I believe in the equality of sexes which is the traditional definition of feminism? I say I am. I do believe in that. What I don't believe is that equality is that anything a man can do, a woman can do. There is not equality amongst the female gender, there is not equality amongst the male gender in terms of the playing field or in terms of people's access, networks, everything. So this view of feminism that anything a man can do a woman [can] that defines equality as like "oh, I must pick myself up and get what a man does, has, says" (etc.) is equality... is not...it fails to me. It's not real. And I can barely stand by that. Now, what I believe should be equal is access. Whatever a woman wants to do, her gender should not prevent her from doing as a man.But I don't believe that the male standard is what "success" looks like so if women are not equal, (if) they're not exactly on the level as men. Men are not on the level as men; women are not on the same level. So that sort of generic ideology of equality falls flat for me when you think about it logically and it's not a measure that you can even attain because you cannot control everybody's individual experiences.What you can try and democratize is access - to education. I don't believe no woman should not have access to education, and neither should any man. Access to working, access to things, access to people making their lives better. I believe equality of access is what I'll say I understand feminism to be and I'll consider myself a feminist.Now, new age feminism.LaughsNo. If that is what the decision is, I'll hundred percent say "No, I'm not". I don't even call it feminism, I think it's more...let's not even go into what I think it is because I have strong views about that.Tobi: Laughs...Affiong: Don't get me in trouble. But, yeah…Equality of access is, for me, the best chance...even that is hard to assimilate. it's really hard when you think about it...Tobi: Yeah.Affiong: you can't control for all the things that makes a person's experience in this world.Tobi: You see a lot of, of course, discuss around gender issues these days and I've been trying to really tease out what it is that we as a society are going for actually. But you see a lot of anger. I don't know how much that helps, but...Affiong: Laughs...yeah.Tobi: certainly there's a lot to be angry about. But I don't know how much anger helps in that area. But one idea I want to put forward and I would like to hear your views here is gender issues and economic development generally. Like, when I see people, protesting or campaigning to end rape for example. Of course rape is a huge huge problem that no society should tolerate but I also wonder on the other side about state capacity…Affiong: Uh hmm.Tobi: You know?Affiong: I doTobi: How does a police force that cannot stop petty crimes investigator rape? how can a police force that can not prevent murders or investigate... properly investigate and prosecute rape? People talk about passing laws where we have laws that are not enforced and where you can easily wiggle your way out of [crime].So shouldn't a lot of this activism be focused on development generally because I think a lot of social progress is positively correlated with income growth?Affiong: Yeah, exactly.Tobi: You'll be surprised.Affiong: And that is a hill I'll die on because I talked today about a lot of lending a voice to causes and social media making it easy for people to join causes and say they support things on a very very superficial level. It's easy to say I support no sexual abuse to women and I completely agree. Only a deviant will support sexual abuse or rape of women or any other cause or out of school kids. But the reality is that a lot of these things are a byproducts of poor societies. You find these ills are more common in societies that are not economically advancing (that are getting poorer). And like you said, for me, in the history and development of a country, the way you solve problem is not...let me take this back to the size of government.When you have a society where people are too poor to send their kids to school, it doesn't matter what you legalize around the need for education. People simply can't afford it. - AWThe size of government for Nigeria relative to its GDP and the complexity of the economy is completely inflated. You have over-regulation where you should have less government and let industries thrive. Look at China. Like you said, a lot of things where allowed that will not be allowed today in China but those things that were allowed, allowed economic progress and allowed for the wealth of that nation to be possible, right? And it's the same thing when you take it to any social cause. A lot of it is rooted...you call it culture, you call it tribalism, but it is really a competition for resources. Who wants to say that children should stay out of school? But when you don't have a country that is rich enough to build schools (good schools for people), are they better off in schools where they're not learning anything? It's easy to say "well, everybody should be in school". Yes it is, but when you're churning out kids that cannot do anything or cannot learn anything or when you have a society where people are too poor to send their kids to school, it doesn't matter what you legalize around the need for education. People simply can't afford it. So I think with all these causes, there is a very crucial stage of economic development that actually solves a lot of the problems, and it's not more laws. Right now you'll say "well, they're signing a law against this sort of victory". It's not a victory. If you go to the police station and somebody who perpetrates [a crime] can simply pay off his way or somebody who doesn't have access to a lawyer cannot get justice or the fact that the police do not even have the capacity or, Jesus Christ, the petrol to drive to come and see what you're talking about...Tobi: Or even basic investigation… Affiong: Yes, exactly. So for me, a lot of focus should really be on how do we get Nigeria richer? A lot of gender issues are byproducts of poverty. It's not a byproduct of patriarchy or people's cultures. It's that if women got richer…there's a stat that says if women go to school till...(we talk about Nigeria's population or overpopulation, for instance), if women go to school up till high school they have like two or three fewer kids. If women get better education they are likelier to choose who they marry and get in better domestic situation. All these things that are underpinned on just income, education. Those two simple things that are as basic as having more money in your pocket to give you the agency to make more decisions and being literate that improve the outcomes of women and protect them from all these social issues that they're exposed to. But we make a lot of fuss around the symptoms and not the underlying issues. You talked about rape being a huge problem. It is a problem but what would stem that problem is, I think, often invariably linked to increased wealth.Tobi: Yeah.Affiong: If you punish more people who rape, probably less people would rape. But to punish more people who rape, you need a whole host of things to happen.Tobi: You need to be able to catch rapist for one.Affiong: So I do agree that a lot more focus should be on those basic foundations. I believe I live that through my values in terms of being an entrepreneur. My thesis is that if you give people, especially women... I'll shamelessly plug that my company is over 65% female employees and my management team is a 100% women. And my thesis is if you give women opportunity to earn their own money they have more agency with their lives. I'm not going to sit here and say I support a million causes, I support that cause, I believe in that. I believe that if women get better educated and work for themselves and earn their own money, their outcomes in life are better. And that's my thesis and I'm going to stick to that for as long as I can. I may be criticized for not saying "oh, I don't support this kind of mission or social"... I believe human beings are limited in what they can support and I am somebody who believes in depth over breadth anyway. So I want my life's work to unearth that and multiply that as much as possible. I'm not going to say I can be all things to all people. I don't think people can and I think if you focus on core issues, your outcomes are better. So that's my view. That's my hypothesis and I am walking that talk as an entrepreneur in business, and in person.Tobi: That's interesting. Another point that I want to mention is, of course, we see a lot of funding into social impact programs for women. I was reading a post lately (again, I'm going to put up links for listeners). It was a field study on fertility which is a huge problem in Africa. Nigeria is about five children per woman which we don't have enough income to cover that much. So what they found from the experiment was that fertility interventions and education were more effective within groups where the men were targeted as opposed to the women. What that tells me is that fertility decisions are not made individually. Couples make that decision. But what you see is that a lot of the social intervention programs target women specifically. They don't target families or couples and that's usually celebrated. You think that's a problem? Or how can we resolve that tension?Affiong: I'm not going to say that I know too much about it. I remember reading one study or was it a summary of the interventions of women in the North, who are getting injections and how they have to lie about where they're going because they can't take pills because if their husbands sees them taking their pills, that is a problem and they have to make an excuse to go get injections. Now, where they can't do that, then the intervention completely fails. Because they will get pregnant if you don't take these injections very regularly. So, what's the better solution if you want family planning to be truly adopted and not done in secret? (This is obviously a must on the most vulnerable way women have no rights in these domestic situations.) I would say it makes sense to get men on board and to get them to see the value in family planning because there [in the North], women barely have rights and women disproportionately suffer from having the burden of having too many children. Not just health-wise, income [wise], in most outcomes. A woman who has more children is worse off than a woman who had less where resources are scarce is my view. And to target the man means to help to ease the burden of women. Maybe it feels like more resources are going towards men than women but if the beneficiary is a woman, I don't care how you achieve it. If you really care about women's progress (however you achieve it, if that is the outcome and the aim), that should be what counts not necessarily that the interventions must directly benefit them because sometimes it's counter-intuitive but they [women] are more likely to be benefited if you take an intervention that targets the man. And this might be the case in this situation.Tobi: Let's talk about poverty a bit...Affiong: Okay.Tobi: One of your, should I say mentors or people you admire, Esther Duflo, recently won…Affiong: Yes, I stan.Tobi: [Esther Duflo] recently won the Nobel prize and there's been a lot of coverage around that area. Earlier we talked about employment and things like that. But what do you think is the best way to address the poverty issue? I know you do a lot of work in that area.Affiong: I think the best way is not to assume that there is a best way. And if I leverage the work of Esther Duflo, the biggest take for me from her book, Poor Economics (which was my 2017 book of the year), [is] it opened my mind to how hard poverty is to solve. The idea that (even economic growth) capitalism has solved poverty more than any other system, it still has its shortcomings in terms of its ability to actually rid the world of poverty. Poverty will always exist and that's the first thing but, for me, all the interventions and the mini studies showed that it's very difficult to isolate a driver of poverty and think that when you eradicate that driver or when you add an intervention, you're going to see outcomes that you can replicate. The biggest for me was microfinance. So everybody touts microfinance...Tobi: Massive failure... Affiong: ...has it helps the poor come out of it. No, the studies have shown that what it does is, it just gives people more trading capital. It doesn't make people richer. They just have more money to trade and…Tobi: And more debts in some cases.Affiong: And yes, in many ways, it really burdens people with a lot of debts. So if you look up microfinance and say you're giving finance to the poorest most risky customers at the most exorbitant interest rate. That hasn't changed their lives. Giving them more cash doesn't necessarily mean that they have amassed or built more wealth. That just, to me, shows how hard it is to solve poverty. If we say "well, we have scarce resources, gun to head, what would I pick?" I will pick economic growth. I will say do that,&#

If one question has driven mankind’s quest for innovation, it very well might be this: How can we get more from less?For most of our time on this planet, the answer was simple: We couldn’t. As my guest Andrew McAfee points out, for just about all of human history – particularly the Industrial Era – our prosperity has been tightly coupled to our ability to take resources from the earth. We got more from more.That tradeoff yielded incredible positive contributions in nearly every field: Technology, industry, medicine. But there’s one glaring area – one of those “aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play” areas – where the trade wasn’t so incredibly positive. Of course, that’s the environment.As global industry rode the combination of human’s infinite ingenuity and Mother Nature’s finite resources – we all reaped the benefits. But we also saw the costs: Exponential global warming. Perhaps it’s not an exact straight line, but the connection is clear to all but a few climate deniers.Luckily, we know the solutions: Consume less; Recycle; Impose limits; Live more closely to the land.Or do we? What if, instead, these central truths of environmentalism haven’t been the force behind whatever improvements we’ve made and, more importantly, aren’t the drivers that will solve the existential task at hand: Saving the planet?Instead, as McAfee argues in his new book, the answer is dematerialization – we’re getting more output while using fewer resources. We’re getting, as his title suggests: “More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next.”McAfee argues that the two most important forces responsible for the change are capitalism and technological progress, the exact two forces “that came together to cause the massive increases in resource use of the Industrial Era.” Combined with two other key attributes – public awareness and responsive government – we can and do “tread ever more lightly on our planet.”Some background: Put simply, Andrew McAfee studies how digital technologies are changing the world. He is Co-Founder and Co-Director of “The MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy” and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. One of his previous books, with MIT colleague and sometime co-author Erik Brynjolfsson was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal top ten bestseller; his books in total have been translated into more than 15 languages; and he and Brynjolfsson are the only people named to both the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics.McAfee knows his prescription to save the planet is controversial. He knows it will frustrate – if not outrage – most of his friends… assuming they’re still willing to call him friend. But as us non-academics say about people like McAfee: He’s done the math. He’s researched the data. And like it or not, he’s ready for the conversation.

Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan School professor, explains how rapid advances in machine learning are presenting new opportunities for businesses. He breaks down how the technology works and what it can and can’t do (yet). He also discusses the potential impact of AI on the economy, how workforces will interact with it in the future, and suggests managers start experimenting now. Brynjolfsson is the co-author, with Andrew McAfee, of the HBR Big Idea article, “The Business of Artificial Intelligence.” They’re also the co-authors of the new book, “Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future.

Is a network -- whether a crowd or blockchain-based entity -- going to replace the firm anytime soon? Not yet, argue Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson in the new book Machine, Platform, Crowd. But that title is a bit misleading, because the real questions most companies and people wrestle with are more "machine vs. mind", "platform vs. product", and "crowd vs. core". They're really a set of dichotomies. Yet the most successful systems are rarely all one or all the other. So how then do companies make choices, tradeoffs in designing products between humans and machines, whether it's sales people vs. chatbots, or doctors vs. AIs? How can companies combine the fundamental building blocks of businesses -- such as network effects, platforms, crowds, and more -- in a way that lets them get ahead on the chessboard against the Red Queen? And then finally, at a macro level, how do we plan for the future without falling for the "fatal conceit" (which has now, arguably flipped from radical centralization to radical decentralization) ... and just run a ton of experiments to get there? We (Frank Chen and Sonal Chokshi) discuss all this and more with Brynjolfsson and McAfee, who also founded MIT's Initiative on the Global Economy -- and previously wrote the popular The Second Machine Age and Race Against the Machine. Maybe there's a better way to stay ahead without having to run faster and faster just to stay in place like Alice in a tech Wonderland.

Profs. Kochan and Brynjolfsson discuss the modern technological wave of innovations and how to potentially shape and design the technologies for future shared prosperity.

More than a decade after the first Internet boom, U.S. productivity growth has stagnated and the economy has been unable to break out of 2 percent expansion. This situation is testing even the most optimistic of forecasters, but in contrast to our recent guest Robert Gordon, MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson is unbowed. Brynjolfsson -- who's also director of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy, and co-author of the book "The Second Machine Age" -- joins Daniel Moss and Scott Lanman to explain why he thinks the current wave of advances in technology means we don't have to worry about secular stagnation after all.

In this extra-long podcast, we review the important new book from MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, THE SECOND MACHINE AGE: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. The first half is a detailed, Cliffs-Notes version of the book’s arguments for those that have not read it; others may want to skip to […]

Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT and co-author of The Second Machine Age talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book, co-authored with Andrew McAfee. He argues we are entering a new age of economic activity dominated by smart machines and computers. Neither dystopian or utopian, Brynjolfsson sees this new age as one of possibility and challenge. He is optimistic that with the right choices and policy responses, the future will have much to celebrate.

Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT and co-author of The Second Machine Age talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book, co-authored with Andrew McAfee. He argues we are entering a new age of economic activity dominated by smart machines and computers. Neither dystopian or utopian, Brynjolfsson sees this new age as one of possibility and challenge. He is optimistic that with the right choices and policy responses, the future will have much to celebrate.