The future of innovation, with Andrew McAfee

After years of disappointing productivity growth, are we about to experience an AI-powered breakout? On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey welcomes Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of (most recently) The Geek Way, to discuss the current state and future prospects of technological and economic dynamism. They start off by reviewing recent developments in AI and discussing whether LLMs will lead soon to superhuman machine intelligence. They then dive into the potential of current LLM technology to substitute for white-collar knowledge work, emphasizing the tortuous, trial-and-error process of technological diffusion and the distinction between eliminating tasks and eliminating jobs. Here McAfee points out how the new style of business organization he calls the "Geek Way" can accelerate this discovery process. Finally, Lindsey and McAfee review the political barriers to innovation erected by today's interest-group "vetocracy" and the daunting severity of the problem in western Europe.