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MIT IDE co-director, Andrew McAfee (pictured) and Stanford Digital Economy Lab’s Erik Brynjolfsson discuss The E.U./U.S. Tech Gap—and much more– with panel moderator Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist At DLD23 Munich, held January 12 -14, book co-authors McAfee and Brynjolfsson exchanged ideas about AI– especially the capabilities of Chat GPT. Watch the lively session and […]

It is widely assumed that party identification and loyalty can distort partisans’ information processing, diminishing their receptivity to counter-partisan arguments and evidence. Here we empirically evaluate this assumption. We test whether American partisans’ receptivity to arguments and evidence is diminished by countervailing cues from in-party leaders (Donald Trump or Joe Biden), using a large-scale survey […]

The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions. To that end, we conducted an experiment in 16 countries across 6 continents (N = 33,480) to investigate predictors of susceptibility to misinformation and interventions to combat misinformation. In every country, participants with a more analytic cognitive style and stronger accuracy-related motivations […]

Denizens of Silicon Valley have called Moore’s Law “the most important graph in human history,” and economists describe the Moore’s Law-powered I.T. revolution as one of the most important sources of national productivity. But data substantiating these claims tend to either be abstracted – for example by examining spending on I.T., rather than I.T. itself […]

“Computing performance doubles every couple of years” is the popular re-phrasing of Moore’s Law, which describes the 500,000 – fold increase in the number of transistors on modern computer chips. But what impact has this 50 – year expansion of the technological frontier of computing had on the productivity of firms? This paper focuses on […]

The general-purposeness of today’s computers comes from technical achievements, but also from a mutually-reinforcing economic cycle, where product improvement and market growth fuel each other. This article argues that technological and economic forces are now pushing computing away from being general purpose and towards specialization. This fragmentation process, driven by the breakdowns in Moore’s Law […]