Philip Trammell

Research Team

Stanford is, in my view, the premier university in the world for academic research on innovation, technology, and long-run growth. And more than anywhere else, the Bay Area is where advances in AI, and many of the other technologies that will probably drive this growth, are unfolding day to day. The Digital Economy Lab manages to maintain very close connections to both communities, so it is a remarkably fertile place for those hoping to rigorously study the big questions emerging from the tech frontier.

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Phil is an economics postdoc working with Erik Brynjolfsson and Chad Jones (of Stanford GSB) on questions related to economic growth and AI. He’s mainly working on theoretical questions regarding the consequences of building machines intelligent and dextrous enough to automate essentially all work. With Erik and others at the lab, Phil is thinking about the macroeconomic trends that we should expect to observe at the beginning of such a transition, and about the extent to which we are starting to observe these trends today.

With Chad, and independently, Phil is working on questions which are relevant to economic growth and technological development in general, but which seem especially relevant to understanding the implications of full automation. In particular, he is trying to understand the extent to which R&D is bottlenecked by the need for serial experiments (rather than inputs that could be quickly scaled if R&D were automated), and how the speed and ordering with which technologies are introduced affect the catastrophic risks they pose and the welfare they yield. Phil did his doctorate at Oxford, where he also did work on decision theory and the game theory of public good provision.

The Economics of Transformative AI

 

Some claim that advanced AI will greatly:

  1. Accelerate economic growth,
  2. Displace labor, and/or
  3. Risk existential catastrophe.

This 2025 course, hosted by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and organized by Phil Trammell and Zach Mazlish, covered a selection of tools in (mainly) economic theory relevant to evaluating the first two claims—and deciding what to do if some or all of them seem likely.

Click here for lecture videos and more information.