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  1. Organizational Theory for the AI Era, Seen Through a "Theory of AI-Driven Firm Boundaries"

    Discussions about AI agents tend to turn into talk about how organizations and managers inside companies should work. I suspect that is because the "organization" is what executives and businesspeople deal with every day. However, how a company's internal organization works is determined by how the company itself exists in the first place…

  2. How the AI Winners Change Over Time

    Among the AI-related startups currently attracting investment are those in AI physical infrastructure: power generation, transmission, power conversion and cooling technologies, permitting and labor, and, on the breakthrough side, OPUs and quantum. And outside of startups, NVIDI…

  3. Not "Cutting Headcount with AI" but "Expanding TAM with AI"

    In recent discussions of AI startups, the talk of automation and efficiency, such as "with AI you can generate the same revenue with a fraction of the people," tends to draw the most attention. For Silicon Valley companies, which face high labor costs and compete in huge markets, being able to generate large revenue with a small team…

  4. AI, Employment, Elite Overproduction, and How Education Will Change

    AI performance has advanced greatly over the past year. Along with it, I have been thinking more about the future of education and employment. What I am thinking about in particular is what changes society and universities are likely to see when AI reshapes employment. In this article, there are three broad areas that I think will "change"…

  5. Translating Everyday Language into Policy Language

    The rise of emotional discourse, and discourse that carries the pain of lived experience, is an important signal that institutions or distribution are failing somewhere in society, whether through pain, distrust, a sense of unfairness, or damage to dignity. Yet…

  6. Weaving a Public Story for Startups

    What a startup means differs depending on your position and perspective. For a founder, it may be a means of self-realization or financial return. For an investor, a startup is a kind of financial product. From the viewpoint of society and government, on the other hand, it is a means of increasing the public good of society as a whole. This time, in particular, …

  7. Dark Supply Capacity

    The term "supply capacity," long used in the power and energy sector, has recently come to be used across much broader policy areas, such as labor, logistics, food, healthcare and long-term care, and science and technology. In fact, labor shortages, logistics stagnation, rising costs of oil-related goods and construction, healthcare and…

  8. Thinking About the Second- and Third-Order Consequences of AI

    When a big change happens, second-order and third-order consequences follow. The automobile was once a big change. Looking back now, its spread seems obvious, but at the beginning of the 20th century, many regarded the automobile as a hobby of the wealthy few, and not many people were confident that it would become a mass-market product…

  9. What Happens When Expert Skills Become Cheap, and What Is Happening Now

    Until the late 1970s, complex financial analysis was the work of specialists. …

  10. What Happens When Software and Intelligence Become Cheap

    (See here for a list of my other AI-related articles.) Around 1830, obtaining a small amount of light at night required about three hours of labor. By around 1992, however, it is said to have taken less than a second of labor. The technological progression from candles to incandescent bulbs to fluorescent lamps made light dramatically cheaper…