Social Science Bites

Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior, with little ground in between. But that’s not the stance of economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, with Simon Johnson, of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Combining a cogent historical analysis of past technological revolutions, he examines whether a groundbreaking new technology “augments” the status quo, as opposed to merely squeezing out human labor. “[M]y favorite term is ‘creating new tasks’ because I think it really clarifies what the quote unquote augmenting needs to take the form of,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It's not just making a worker more productive in tightening the screws, but it's really creating new jobs that didn't exist.” And so, he explains to those perhaps afraid that a bot