Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics Interviews Highlights - Philip Fernbach - Cognitive Scientist - Co-Director, Ctr. for Research, Consumer Financial Decision Making - Co-author, “The Knowledge Illusion”
"I admit to being just a dyed-in-the-wool kind of techno-optimist. I don't know why that is, but I'm just very hopeful and optimistic about the future. And I know people are scared of like superintelligence taking over and everything. I just don't think that we're close to anything like that yet. It's not impossible, and it's something that I think we should take very seriously, but I really see AI as being this incredibly powerful, wonderful thing that is going to unlock incredible huge amounts of economic value. Maybe an optimist bordering on idealistic, but I kind of believe in this idea of abundance. And the idea of abundance is we sort of have this zero-sum perspective about economic activity, where if some people have a lot of wealth, other people can't.
But if you look at the size of the world economy – and you can actually go on Wikipedia and look at estimations of this going back to something like 2000 BC – the size of the economy in terms of economic activity is an exponential function, and it's like a perfect exponential function.
What exponential function means, as opposed to a linear function, it grows in a percentage basis, not an absolute way over time, which means that to double from one to two is going to take a certain amount of time, but then the same amount of time, not to go from two to three, but to go much higher.
The problem is not actually the generation of economic activity. It's allocation of that activity. And I really believe we're on the cusp of that. And AI is one big reason because if you can get rid of a lot of labor, of drudgery, and jobs that people don't want to do, and you can run a factory with a bunch of robots where people don't have to intervene that makes food or makes products or extracts resources...you can unlock a huge amount of economic activity. So, that has the potential, I think, to usher in an era of great abundance."
Philip Fernbach is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Leeds School of Business. He’s published widely in the top journals in cognitive science, consumer research and marketing, and received the ACR Early Career Award for Contributions to Consumer Research. He’s co-author with Steve Sloman of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, which was chosen as a New York Times Editor’s Pick. He’s also written for NYTimes, Harvard Business Review, and his research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Washinton Post, National Public Radio, and the BBC. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown and his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Williams College. He teaches data analytics and behavioral science to undergraduate and Masters students.