34 Quotes by Erik Brynjolfsson

Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment.

The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer.

When I first started doing work on how the Internet is affecting commerce, like a lot of people, I was really excited by this nearly perfect market.

We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.

Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.

We're just being flooded with content. And people are increasingly relying on recommenders to help them sort through it all.

There's a dark side. In the physical world, I bump into all kinds of people by chance. But online, if recommenders were perfect, I can have the option of talking to only people who are just like me. There's a danger that if we don't have some level of shared interaction, it can be destructive to our social cohesion.

The big payoff for the future will be in helping knowledge workers to be more inventive and creative, and to get those innovations into the marketplace. That's where a wealthy nation like the United States is ultimately going to have to seek its competitive advantage.

These phenomena are pushing the trend toward more obscure products. And that will feed back to what products get created in the first place.