Working from home (WFH) has been around for decades. The share of WFH three or more days per week was under 1% in 1980, growing modestly with the rise of the internet to 2.4% in 2010 and 4.0% in 2018. Then came Covid-19, forcing tens of millions around the world to work from home and triggering a mass workplace experiment that broke through the technological and cultural barriers that had prevented WFH adoption in the past. Economists Jose Maria Barrero (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México), Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University), and Stephen J. Davis (University of Chicago) have been track ..read more

In June of 2023, McKinsey published “The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier.” Based on its analysis of 63 business use cases, and estimates of its effect on the productivity of the global workforce, McKinsey’s study projected that generative AI could add an additional $6.1 trillion to $7.9 trillion annually, boosting the overall impact of artificial intelligence on the global economy by an annual $17.1 trillion to $25.6 trillion. The McKinsey study found that while generative AI use cases could have an impact on most enterprise business functions, four in parti ..read more

“It’s natural to ask whether large language models like LaMDA (short for Language Model Dialogue Application) or GPT-3 are really smart — or just double-talk artists in the tradition of the great old comedian Prof. Irwin Corey, ‘The World’s Greatest Authority,’ wrote UC Berkeley cognitive and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik in ‘What AI Still Doesn’t Know How to Do,’ a July, 2022 WSJ essay. “But I think that’s the wrong question. These models are neither truly intelligent agents nor deceptively dumb. Intelligence and agency are the wrong categories for understanding them.” “Instead, th ..read more

“Humans have a good track record of innovation,” wrote Arjun Ramani and Zhengdong Wang in an essay which systematically explains “Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve.” “The mechanization of agriculture, steam engines, electricity, modern medicine, computers, and the internet — these technologies radically changed the world. Still, the trend growth rate of GDP per capita in the world's frontier economy has never exceeded three percent per year.” “Yet many people are optimistic that artificial intelligence is up to the job. AI is different from prior tech ..read more

Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, general purpose technologies (GPTs) have been the defining technologies of their times. Their ability to support a large variety of applications can, over time, radically transform economies, and social institutions. GPTs have great potential from the outset, but realizing their potential takes large tangible and intangible investments and a fundamental rethinking of firms and industries, including new processes, management structures, business models, and worker training. As a result, realizing the potential of a GPT takes considerable time, ofte ..read more

“Quietly but powerfully, projects have displaced operations as the economic engine of our times,” wrote Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez in “The Project Economy Has Arrived,” a December, 2021 article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). Nieto-Rodriguez is a Fellow and past global chair of the Project Management Institute and the author of the Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook: How to Launch, Lead, and Sponsor Successful Projects, on which the HBR article is based. While that shift has been a long time coming, we still have a ways to go, he added. “According to the research firm the S ..read more

On July 13 I participated in an online panel on Board Governance: Risks and Opportunities in a Complex World, sponsored by eCornell, Cornell University’s executive education unit. The panel was organized and moderated by LizAnn Eisen, acting professor of the practice at the Cornell Law School, and former corporate partner at Cravath. In addition to me, panel members included Bill Priestap, former assistant director of the FBI, head of the FBI Counterintelligence Division and now founder of the risk consulting startup Trenchcoat Advisors; Noah Phillips, former commissioner at the FTC and now an ..read more

“The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out,” wrote technologist, entrepreneur and VC investor Marc Andreessen in the opening sentence of his article, Why AI Will Save the World  posted in his personal website. The article argues that not only will AI not destroy the world, but that it might in fact help save it. While a computer sciences student at the University of Illinois, Andreessen was the leader of the team that developed the Mosaic browser in the early 1990s, the first easy-to-use graphical web browser that could be ported to a wide range of comput ..read more

After decades of promise and hype, artificial intelligence has finally become the defining technology of our era. Over the past few decades, the necessary ingredients have come together to propel AI beyond universities and research labs into the broader marketplace: powerful, inexpensive computer technologies; advanced algorithms, models, and systems; and huge amounts of all kinds data. Like the steam engine, electricity, computers, and the internet, AI will have a historically transformative impact across economies and societies. But, over the past two centuries we’ve learned that historicall ..read more

In September of 2018, McKinsey published a report on the impact of AI on the world economy. The report’s overriding finding was that AI has the potential to incrementally add 16 percent or up to $15.4 trillion by 2030 to annual global economic output, — an average contribution to productivity growth of about 1.2 percent. McKinsey’s 2018 report was published before the advent of generative AI and related technologies lik large language models (LLMs) and chatbots like ChatGPT that have been taking AI to a whole new level in the past few years. In June of 2023, McKinsey published, “The Economic P ..read more