Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's

conversation. We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever

done going back to 2006. Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Today is January 16, 2014, and my guest is Eric Brinjulfson. He is the Schussle Family Professor

of Management Science, Professor of Information Technology, and the Director of the MIT Center

for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. With Andrew McAfee, he is the author of

the second machine age, work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies.

Eric, welcome to Econ Talk. Thanks, Russ. It's great to have a chance to talk to you.

Now, you argue that technology has really taken off in the last few years. What are some examples

that you think are either have happened already, they're significant or are about to happen,

and why are they important? Yeah, frankly, it's caught me off guard at times because just a few years

ago, I was teaching my students about things that machines could do well and things that they

couldn't do well, and one of my favorite examples was driving a car through traffic, and I said,

there's no program or algorithm for that. That's something with too much sensory perception and

uncertainty. And then lo and behold, about a year ago, I was riding down Route 101 in a driverless

car, so I was proven wrong, and I try to be a little bit of an optimist about technology,

but it's not just Google's car. It's also IBM's Watson that plays jeopardy and beats humans,

and if you know anything about the game, jeopardy, there's all sorts of unstructured questions and

puns, there's geography, there's math, there's poetry, there's popular culture. It's quite a

smorgasbord of information. For the first time in history, we can talk to our machines,

...