Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson
Brynjolfsson in 2013
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for	Productivity paradox The Long Tail Bundling of Information Goods Cyberbalkanization
Scientific career
Fields	Information Systems Economics Technological Change
Institutions	Stanford University
Notable students	Shuman Ghosemajumder Lorin Hitt Yu (Jeffrey) Hu Michael D. Smith Marshall Van Alstyne Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang

Erik Brynjolfsson is an American academic, author and inventor. He is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and a Senior Fellow^[1] at Stanford University where he directs the Digital Economy Lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, with appointments at SIEPR,^[2] the Stanford Department of Economics and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research^[3] and a best-selling author of several books.^[4] From 1990 to 2020, he was a professor at MIT.

Brynjolfsson is known for his contributions to the world of IT productivity research and work on the economics of information, the economics of AI, and the digital economy more generally.^[5] According to Martin Wolf, "No economist has done more to promote the revolutionary implications of information technology than MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson."^[6]

Erik Brynjolfsson was born to Marguerite Reman Brynjolfsson and Ari Brynjolfsson, a nuclear physicist. He attended Wayland High School, in Wayland, Massachusetts, where he was the Valedictorian.^[7]

In 1984, he earned his A.B., magna cum laude, and his S.M. in applied mathematics and decision sciences at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in Managerial Economics in 1991 from the MIT Sloan School of Management.^[8]

At the age of 23, he taught courses on Building Expert Systems and on Applications of Artificial Intelligence at Harvard Extension School with Tod Loofbourrow.^[8] In 1987, he co-founded the Expert Systems subgroup of the Boston Computer Society^[9] and shortly thereafter, co-authored a series of articles on the topic.^[10]

Brynjolfsson served on the faculty of MIT from 1990 to 2020, where he was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business.^[11] Previously, he was at Harvard from 1985 to 1995 and Stanford from 1996 to 1998.^[12]

In 2001 he was appointed the Schussel Family Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.^[13] In February 2020, Stanford announced that Brynjolfsson would join its faculty in July, 2020.^[14] He lectures and consults worldwide, and serves on corporate boards.

Brynjolfsson is of Icelandic descent.^[15]

At Stanford, Brynjolfsson teaches a graduate course on "The AI Awakening: Implications for the Economy and Society"^[16] which has included guest lectures by Mira Murati, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Alexandr Wang, Mustafa Suleyman and others.^[17]

At MIT, he taught the popular course 15.567, The Economics of Information: Strategy, Structure, and Pricing, at MIT.^[18] He hosts a related blog, Economics of Information.

Along with Tom Mitchell, Brynjolfsson co-chaired two committees for the National Academies of Sciences, one on "Automation and the US Workforce"^[19] and one on "AI and the US Workforce".^[20] He also directed the analysis of AI for the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment.^[21]

Brynjolfsson has testified^[22] about AI for the United States Congress and participated in AI Summits at the White House.^[23]

In 2016, he co-founded the AI Index and serves on its Steering Committee^[24] and was a co-author of the original (2016) report^[25] for the One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence.

His research has been recognized with nine "best paper" awards by fellow academics, including the John DC Little Award for the best paper in Marketing Science.^[26] Along with Andrew McAfee, he was awarded the top prize in the Digital Thinkers category at the Thinkers 50 Gala on November 9, 2015.^[27] In 2011, he was elected Distinguished Fellow of the Information Systems Society in recognition of outstanding intellectual contributions to the Information Systems discipline.^[28]

In 2015, he received the Herb Simon Award for his work on digital economics,^[29] and in 2020 he was recognized with an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Turku for his research on the effects of information technology and AI on innovation, productivity and future work.^[30] Brynjolfsson was one of the inaugural fellows of the AI2050 initiative.^[31]

Brynjolfsson is widely cited for studying the economics of information systems^[32] and the economics of AI.^[33] He was among the earliest researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles.^[34][35] For instance, along with Paul Milgrom, he wrote the lead article ("Complementarities in Organizations")^[36] in the NBER Handbook of Organizational Economics. Similarly, along with Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson, he wrote the lead article ("AI and the Modern Productivity Paradox")^[37] in the NBER volume on the Economics of Artificial Intelligence.

Brynjolfsson has done research on digital commerce, the Long Tail, bundling and pricing models, intangible assets and the effects of IT on business strategy, productivity and performance.^[38] In several of his books and articles, Brynjolfsson has argued that technology is racing ahead, and called for greater efforts to update our skills, organizations and institutions more rapidly.^[39]

Brynjolfsson is the author of several books, including Wired for Innovation with Adam Saunders, and Race Against the Machine, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies and Machine, Platform, Crowd with Andrew McAfee.

The Second Machine Age was described as "pioneering a fundamentally new economics, one based not on the old reality of scarcity but on a new reality of abundance that we are only just beginning to comprehend."^[40]

At the urging of Robert Solow, the Nobel Laureate who first called attention to the gap between the computerization and productivity,^[41] Brynjolfsson wrote an influential review of the "IT Productivity Paradox".^[34]

In separate research, he documented a correlation between IT investment and productivity. His work provides evidence that the use of Information Technology is most likely to increase productivity when it is combined with complementary business processes and human capital.^[35]

A subsequent article coined the term the Productivity J-Curve to describe how these intangible investments might initially lead to stagnant or even lower productivity followed by a take-off.^[42]

Working with Avinash Collis, Felix Eggers, and others, Brynjolfsson developed new methods for measuring the digital economy using "massive online choice experiments".^[43] The insight from this work is that even when goods like Wikipedia or email have zero price, and therefore may have little or no direct contribution to GDP as it is conventionally measured, they may still contribute significantly to well-being and consumer surplus.^[44] Brynjolfsson's method seeks to measure the consumer surplus from these goods and assess how it changes over time.

Brynjolfsson gave a TED talk on the economic implications of AI in the opening session of TED in 2013 where he argued that the key to economic growth was to use AI to augment human capabilities rather than replace them.^[45] Brynjolfsson was called a “techno optimist” after this debate,^[46] though he prefers the moniker “mindful optimist”^[47] noting that he concluded his TED talk with the words “Technology is not Destiny.  We shape our Destiny.”

In 2018, he gave an Invited Talk at the International Conference on Learning Representations on “What Can Machine Learning Do? Workforce Implications” where he challenged AI researchers to create systems that augment and extend human capabilities, rather than merely imitate them.^[48]

In 2022, he wrote an influential article coining the term "The Turing Trap", arguing that too often technologists, business executives and policymakers focus on using AI to automate and replace humans, which can limit the benefits of the technology and increase inequality, and that they should look for opportunities to augment human capabilities.^[49]

Brynjolfsson has been the founder of three companies (Foundation Technologies, Inc. Flexplay Technologies, Inc. and Workhelix, Inc) and has been awarded multiple U.S. patents.^[50] He also served on the Boards of Directors of two publicly-traded companies, Computer Science Corporation (2010-2015) and CSK Holdings, Inc. (2005-2008).^[50]

At age 23, Brynjolfsson designed the game software Dragonfire II. As an inventor, he's been awarded 11 patents for forecasting of skills and tasks, as well as optical storage media.^[51]

Brynjolfsson co-founded Workhelix, Inc, a venture-backed firm that helps companies assess their opportunities for using generative AI and other technologies.^[52] It applies the “task-based approach”, a methodology developed by Brynjolfsson, Tom M. Mitchell and Daniel Rock for analyzing various technologies’ ability to augment or automate individual tasks. ^[53]

Brynjolfsson was the co-founder of the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC), a global tournament for entrepreneurs harnessing technology to ensure a more equitable future. IIC winners have collectively generated over $170 million in revenue, raised over $1 billion in capital, created more than 7,000 jobs, and served 350 million people.^[54]

• Brynjolfsson, E., & Saunders, A. (2010). Wired for Innovation. How Information technology in reshaping the economy. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. USA.
• Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2011). Race against the machine: How the digital revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the economy. Brynjolfsson and McAfee.
• Brynjolfsson, Erik and McAfee, Andrew (January, 2014) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, W.W. Norton & Company, ISBN 978-0-393-23935-5
• McAfee, A., & Brynjolfsson, E. (2017). Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our digital future. WW Norton & Company.

• Brynjolfsson Erik and Mitchell, Tom (December, 2017) What can machine learning do? Workforce implications Science.

• Brynjolfsson Erik, Syverson, Chad and Rock Daniel (2019) Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox: A Clash of Expectations and Statistics National Bureau of Economic Research.
• * Bresnahan, Timothy, Brynjolfsson, Erik and Hitt, Lorin (February, 2002) "Information Technology, Workplace Organization and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm Level Evidence" 'Quarterly Journal of Economics'', Vol. 117, pp. 339–376.
• * Bakos, Yannis and Brynjolfsson, Erik (December, 1999) "Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits and Efficiency", Management Science,' Vol. 45, No. 12, pp.1613–1630.

• Brynjolfsson's Web Site with links to research papers.
• The Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
• Economics of Information Blog
• Profile in Business Week, September 29, 2003. ("If e-business had an oracle, Erik Brynjolfsson would be the anointed.")
• Profile in Optimize, October, 2005. (Brynjolfsson ranked second in research study of "most influential academics of business technology")
• Profile in Supply Chain Management, January, 2006.
• CIO Insight^{[permanent dead link]} Interview, "Expert Voice: Erik Brynjolfsson on Organizational Capital" October, 2001.
• Profile in Informationweek, April 17, 2000. ("When it comes to explaining the relationship between IT and worker productivity—bandwagon jumpers like Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan notwithstanding—the generally acknowledged expert in the field is Erik Brynjolfsson ...")
• Erik Brynjolfsson at TED
  • TED Talk on the impact of technical change (TED2013)