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EB Erik Brynjolfsson On The Indicator (Planet Money)

“Almost all of the benchmarks are about how well a machine by itself, with no human help, can solve a problem. It's considered cheating if the human helps. I think that's the wrong mindset. We should be building benchmarks where humans and machines are encouraged to work together, and the tool designers are encouraged to make tools that work well with humans rather than without humans.”

The Indicator (Planet Money) · Money & Markets · November 2026

“Almost all of the benchmarks are about how well a machine by itself, with no human help, can solve a problem. It's considered cheating if the human helps. I think that's the wrong mindset. We should be building benchmarks where humans and machines are encouraged to work together, and the tool designers are encouraged to make tools that work well with humans rather than without humans.” — Erik Brynjolfsson, The Indicator (Planet Money)

Context

Brynjolfsson says he is less sure than Acemoglu that the labs want to replace people, but that the technology needs steering toward complementing workers. He points to how AI benchmarks measure machines working alone.

Transcript

The Indicator (Planet Money) Around 07:03 into the episode
Speaker 3

This is not a track. Again, just like we look at what they're saying, they're saying AGI is the burning desire. AGI is where they're aiming. AGI is just around the corner. That's just a code word for saying make the models more and more human-like.

Adrian Ma

…human-level capability. Now, Eric says he's not quite as convinced as Daron that the frontier AI labs are focused on replacing humans, but he said that the technology still needs to be steered to more broadly complement humans. One way to do that, he said, was to have better benchmarks and metrics.

Speaker 3

It is remarkable how good a lot of these engineers are at hitting a benchmark once you put it out there. And we have something called the Stanford AI Index, which is 420 pages filled with all of these benchmarks. Almost all of them are how well can a machine by itself with no human help solve a problem? It's considered cheating if the human helps. I think that's the wrong mindset. We should be building benchmarks where humans and machines are encouraged to work together and the tool designers are encouraged to make tools that work well with humans rather without humans. Right now, one of the frustrations, for instance, of radiologists is they have these black box imaging machines that recognize medical images, but they can't explain what they're doing very well or how they come to their conclusions. It would be better if they were designed from the beginning to work with the humans.

Adrian Ma

Eric and Darren also weighed in on how AI might affect other jobs, including paralegals, game designers, and novelists. But for now, we'll end on their advice for those of you just starting out. Okay, so in the, I guess, the minute that we have left or so, Kara asks, how do we speak to college-aged…

Speaker 3

I mean, I would say the flexibility is very important. The general principles that Eric and I talked about, it's much better to work alongside AI than compete against AI. But also, I think the young generation, the new generation has to learn to shoulder the responsibility of being becoming…

Speaker 1

Big plus one to that. When people hear AI, they should be thinking amplified intention, that we actually have more power

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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