Economist Jones Presents AI Automation Growth Findings
Charles I. Jones, Stanford economist, visited Yale this week to present new research on AI, automation, and economic measurement. In joint work with Christopher Tonetti, he argues automation shifts tasks from human labor to rapidly improving machines but overall growth may be constrained by hard-to-automate "weak links"; with Philip Trammell he proposes using changes in the statistical value of life rather than GDP to measure lifetime well-being.
Key Points
- 1Argues automation shifts tasks from slowly improving humans to rapidly improving machines, driving economic growth.
- 2Highlights 'weak links'—hard-to-automate tasks—that can slow overall growth despite widespread automation advances.
- 3Recommends using changes in statistical value of life to better measure lifetime well-being over GDP.
Scoring Rationale
High-quality academic findings with broad growth implications, but limited by model assumptions and not exact future predictions.
Sources
Public references used for this report.
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