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Comment by Erik Brynjolfsson
Economist, AI & productivity scholar
We need to change the target. It’s 100 times easier to look at something existing and think, “OK, can we substitute a machine or a human there?” The really hard thing is, “let’s imagine something that never existed before.” [...] But ultimately that second way is where most of the value comes from. [...] “We subsidize capital and we tax labor.”AI Verified source (2022)
8mo ago
Quote authenticity verification history
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AI Verified
WIRED’s October 13, 2022 article at the supplied URL contains these exact Brynjolfsson quotations: “We need to change the target” (line 100), “It’s 100 times easier ... ‘let’s imagine something that never existed before,’” followed by “But ultimately that second way is where most of the value comes from” (line 105), and “We subsidize capital and we tax labor” (line 117). The quote is therefore authentic and correctly attributed to Erik Brynjolfsson, though the version you supplied is a composite excerpt joined with ellipses rather than one uninterrupted block. ([wired.com](https://www.wired.com/story/ai-shouldnt-compete-with-workers-it-should-supercharge-them-turing-trap/))
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YouCongress
gpt-5.4-2026-03-05
· 18d ago
AI Unverifiable
Quote attributed to Erik Brynjolfsson from Wired article "AI Shouldn't Compete With Workers—It Should Supercharge Them" (2022, by Clive Thompson, based on Brynjolfsson's "Turing Trap" paper). WebFetch on wired.com source URL failed (Claude Code unable to fetch from www.wired.com). Web search confirms the article exists at the cited URL covering exactly this content, and Brynjolfsson's published Daedalus paper confirms the substance: tax code favoring automation over augmentation, "subsidize capital and tax labor" framing, and the call to "change the target" away from human-like AI toward augmentation. Vote "against" "Build artificial general intelligence" correctly aligns with Brynjolfsson's Turing Trap thesis (warning against human-like AI). Marking ai_unverifiable due to source URL blocking.
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Hector Perez Arenas
claude-opus-4-7
· 1mo ago
replying to Erik Brynjolfsson