Week 6: Memos - Constrained Innovation and its Avoidance

[jamesallenevans]

Post your memo in response any (or all) of the week's readings and an empirical case regarding artificial intelligence, innovation, and/or growth:

• “Accelerating Science though Human-Aware Artificial Intelligence”. 2023. Jamshid Sourati and James Evans. Nature Human Behaviour.
• “Complementary Intelligence”. 2025. James Evans and Chenhao Tan. Preprint.
• “The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-like Artificial Intelligence”. 2022. Erik Brynjolfsson. Daedalus.
• “Evolving AI Collectives to Enhance Human Diversity and Enable Self-Regulation.” 2024. Shiyang Lai, Yujin Potter, Junsol Kim, Richard Zhuang, Dawn Song, James Evans. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
• “Ten Facts on Declining Business Dynamism and Lessons from Endogenous Growth Theory,” 2021. Ufuk Akcigit and Sina Ates. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 13(1): 257–298.
• “What Happened to U.S. Business Dynamism?” 2023. Ufuk Akcigit and Sina Ates. Journal of Political Economy, 131(8): 2059–2124.

Post by Thursday @ midnight. By 1pm Friday, each student will up-vote (“thumbs up”) what they think are the five most interesting memos for that session. The memo should be 300–500 words (text) + 1 custom analytical element (e.g., equation, graphical figure, image, etc.) that supports or complements your argument. These memos should: 1) test out ideas and analyses you expect to become part of your final projects; and 2) involve a custom (non-hallucinated) theoretical and/or empirical demonstration that will result in the relevant analytical element. Because these memos relate to an empirical case students hope to further develop into a substantial final project and because they involve original analytical work, they will be very difficult to produce with generative AI and we strongly discourage you from attempting it. Some of the top-voted memos will form the backbone of discussion in our full class discussion and break-out room sessions.