Thread by @MarkusEconomist

At #MarkusAcademy we had @MITEcon Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT to discuss his new book with Simon Johnson @baselinescene: “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity.” A thread with the highlights 👇👇1/6
ilp.mit.edu/node/59183

Their book coins the term “The Productivity Bandwagon”: the idea that technological progress will always lift all boats. Economists tend to think this way: as firms try to hire more workers, they will increase wages. However, history suggests the bandwagon is not guaranteed 2/6

To secure shared prosperity you need two things: (1) Technology has to improve workers’ productivity, and (2) workers must benefit from that productivity. Often the coercive structure of the economy prevents workers from doing so, even if they were more productive 3/6

Innovation can be redirected. We must focus on “Machine Usefulness” rather than “Machine Intelligence”, and steer tech towards creating new tasks for workers and improving their skills and knowledge. AI has an unparalleled ability to do so and complement knowledge work 4/6

Do we truly need Big Tech? Market trends have led to huge LLM models, trained on the entire internet, aiming to dominate the search market. The alternative: smaller scale models that are more domain-specific, which would have been much more open for many companies to enter 5/6

You can watch the full talk here. And stay tuned for our next episode! 6/6
bcf.princeton.edu/events/daron-a…