The Man Who Saw AI Coming

More than a decade ago, the economist Erik Brynjolfsson made a prediction: AI would change everything.Humans began using tools millions of years ago. They cultivated grain and domesticated animals, and then developed written languages, iron tools, the printing press, gunpowder. Progress was slow and local until the mid-1700s, when modern society roared into being alongside machines and engines. Invention built on invention. Then, in recent decades, the pace of human progress slowed again. Productivity growth, the academic measure of how much better people are getting at generating outputs from inputs, collapsed.“We are at a technological plateau,” in the midst of a “great stagnation,” the public intellectual Tyler Cowen argued in 2010. “Apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953.” Shortly after, the economist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University released a best seller arguing that our era of unprecedented growth and life-changing innovation had come to an end.Cowen and Gordon had the numbers on their side, but Brynjolfsson thought they were wrong. Along with the economist Andrew McAfee, he published two books arguing that the digital revolution was just getting started. AI was already besting human beings at cognitive tasks. Soon, it would make self-driving cars and hyper-smart computers look like nothing more than “warm-up acts,” the pair wrote in The Second Machine Age. Productivity growth would pick up, Brynjolfsson believed. Living standards would improve. Another new society would roar into being.Last month, I visited Brynjolfsson at Stanford, where he teaches, with a few questions in mind: How had he known what AI would be capable of years before the release of ChatGPT and Claude Code? And what did he think it would do now? Would society trend toward debilitating mass unemployment or the joyful end of work?I was not the only person seeking answers from the seer. Brynjolfsson is teachi