Quote of the Issue
"Nations and their economies grow in large part because they increase their collective knowledge about nature and their environment, and because they are able to direct this knowledge toward productive ends." - Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth
Some self promotion: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere. I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! 🆙↗⤴📈
Discover the surprising case for how conservatism can help us achieve the epic sci-fi future we were promised.
America was once the world’s dream factory. We turned imagination into reality, from curing polio to landing on the Moon to creating the internet. And we were confident that more wonders lay just over the horizon: clean and infinite energy, a cure for cancer, computers and robots as humanity’s great helpers, and space colonies. (Also, of course, flying cars.) Science fiction, from The Jetsons to Star Trek, would become fact.
But as we moved into the late 20th century, we grew cautious, even cynical, about what the future held and our ability to shape it. Too many of us saw only the threats from rapid change. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great Downshift in technological progress and economic growth, followed by decades of economic stagnation, downsized dreams, and a popular culture fixated on catastrophe: AI that will take all our jobs if it doesn’t kill us first, nuclear war, climate chaos, plague and the zombie apocalypse. We are now at risk of another half-century of making the same mistakes and pushing a pro-progress future into the realm of impossibility.
But American Enterprise Institute (AEI) economic policy expert and long-time CNBC contributor James Pethokoukis argues that there’s still hope.
With groundbreaking ideas and sharp analysis, Pethokoukis provides a detailed roadmap to a fantastic future filled with incredible progress and prosperity that is both optimistic and realistic. Through an exploration of culture, economics, and history, The Conservative Futurist tells the fascinating story of what went wrong in the past and what we need to do today to finally get it right. Using the latest economic research and policy analysis, as well as insights from top economists, historians, and technologists, Pethokoukis reveals that the failed futuristic visions of the past were totally possible. And they still are. If America is to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, take full advantage of emerging tech from generative AI to CRISPR to reusable rockets, and launch itself into a shining tomorrow, it must again become a fully risk-taking, future-oriented society. It’s time for America to embrace the future confidently, act boldly, and take that giant leap forward.
The Essay
🤖 How will AI help us, exactly?
How will artificial intelligence/machine learning/generative AI boost technological progress, make workers more productive, and accelerate economic growth? Well, businesses are still trying to figure all that out. Still early days and all.
But here’s one example: In a study from last April, “Generative AI at Work,” economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey R. Raymond found that the productivity of call center workers improved by 14 percent when using an AI system, with less-skilled newbies seeing over 30 percent gains. Additionally, customers were more satisfied when interacting with these AI-enabled operators, leading to lower employee turnover.
The specifics: A Fortune 500 company, specializing in business-process software for small- and medium-sized US firms, started using an AI system with 5,000 chat-based technical support agents, primarily located in the Philippines. The AI was a generative model combining a version of ChatGPT and additional machine learning algorithms, tweaked for customer service contexts. The model was trained on a vast number of customer-agent chats, tagged with specific outcomes and features such as call resolution, call duration, and agent performance. The goal here was for the AI to identify conversational patterns that could predict call resolution and call duration. The AI systems provided the agents with a) real-time response suggestions to customer queries and b) links to the company's internal documentation about relevant technical issues, with suggestions based on conversation history.
As the paper concludes:
We provide suggestive evidence that the AI model disseminates the potentially tacit knowledge of more able workers and helps newer workers move down the experience curve. In addition, we show that AI assistance improves customer sentiment, reduces requests for managerial intervention, and improves employee retention.
(By the way, when economists talk about “tacit knowledge” they mean the knowledge that workers carry around their noggins — such as the skills, insights, and expertise that they accumulate through experience on the job — that can’t be easily written down and transferred to other workers.)
“Generative AI at Work” is an important study that suggests all the many little ways that GenAI might help businesses as an important general-purpose technology. It’s on those countless small and dispersed improvements that a productivity revolution is built.
AI as a superduper research assistant
That said, call and contact center productivity doesn’t get the heart racing, you know? Here’s what does: Scientists using AI to become more productive.
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