Upcoming Paper Jam: AI and Our Economic Future
We'll be meeting for Paper Jam #19 on Friday, July 17 at 1pm UTC. We'll be discussing:
Charles I. Jones
AI and Our Economic Future (2026) [link]
This one is a departure proposed by a member of Paper Jams. Our papers so far have come from the human-factors-of-software world; this is an economist's essay. But it picks up exactly where our recent conversations have drifted: LLMs are happening, developers are at the leading edge of it — and then what?
Jones — a professor of economics at Stanford University — asks what it means for the economy as a whole if machines can eventually do every task a human can. One central point he makes is about weak links: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and growth stays bottlenecked by the tasks we haven't automated yet. He also discusses questions of abundance / growth-acceleration and whether this time, things really might be different.
Paper Jams is a monthly one-hour video call where a small group discusses an academic paper on the human factors of making software. We follow the Chatham House Rule, and the conversation goes wherever the group takes it.
Interested? Subscribe to Paper Jams to get invited to the call.
