A fundamental question about AI is when it contributes to human development and when it substitutes for it.

How its use affects labour markets, productivity, and more generally, human capacity is one of the questions of our time. In this episode I am joined by Youngjin Yoo, Professor of Information Systems and Innovation at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

We discuss what makes digital technology different from what came before. That includes Youngjin’s idea of computational value, where AI’s value is assembled at the moment of use rather than designed in advance. It also includes endogenous utility, where you and the product improve together, and how that differs from addiction. We ask whether AI will create genuinely new demand for human work, or whether that demand will simply be met by more AI, and whether handing it more of our thinking means handing over control. Running through it all is one question: if AI gives you a competitive advantage, is choosing not to use it a real choice?

As a leading voice on digital innovation, Youngjin has published over 170 peer-reviewed articles, cited more than 33,000 times, in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Organization Science, the Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Communications of the ACM. His research has attracted funding from the US National Science Foundation, NASA, the Knight Foundation, the Walmart Foundation, and Samsung Electronics.