The Dark Ages weren’t entirely dark. Advances in agriculture and constructing technology increased Medieval wealth and led to a wave of cathedral construction in Europe. Nevertheless, it was a time of profound inequality. Elites captured virtually all economic gains. In Britain, as Canterbury Cathedral soared upward, peasants had no net increase in wealth between 1100 and 1300. Life expectancy hovered around 25 years. Chronic malnutrition was rampant.

“We’ve been struggling to share prosperity for a very long time,” says MIT Professor Simon Johnson. “Every cathedral that your parents dragged you to see in Europe is a logo of despair and expropriation, made possible by higher productivity.”

At a look, this may not seem relevant to life in 2023. But Johnson and his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu, each economists, think it’s. Technology drives economic progress. As innovations take hold, one perpetual query is: Who advantages?

This is applicable, the students consider, to automation and artificial intelligence, which is the main target of a latest book by Acemoglu and Johnson, “Power and Progress: Our 1000-Yr Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity,” published this week by PublicAffairs. In it, they examine who reaped the rewards from past innovations and who may gain from AI today, economically and politically.

“The book is concerning the decisions we make with technology,” Johnson says. “That’s a really MIT style of theme. But quite a lot of people feel technology just descends on you, and you could have to live with it.”

AI could develop as a useful force, Johnson says. Nevertheless, he adds, “Many algorithms are being designed to try to exchange humans as much as possible. We predict that’s entirely unsuitable. The way in which we make progress with technology is by making machines useful to people, not displacing them. Prior to now now we have had automation, but with latest tasks for people to do and sufficient countervailing power in society.”

Today, AI is a tool of social control for some governments that also creates riches for a small number of individuals, based on Acemoglu and Johnson. “The present path of AI is neither good for the economy nor for democracy, and these two problems, unfortunately, reinforce one another,” they write.

A return to shared prosperity?

Acemoglu and Johnson have collaborated before; within the early 2000s, with political scientist James Robinson, they produced influential papers about politics and economic progress. Acemoglu, an Institute Professor at MIT, also co-authored with Robinson the books “Why Nations Fail” (2012), about political institutions and growth, and “The Narrow Corridor” (2019), which casts liberty because the never-assured end result of social struggle.

Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship on the MIT Sloan School of Management, wrote “13 Bankers” (2010), about finance reform, and, with MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, “Jump-Starting America” (2019), a call for more investment in scientific research.

In “Power and Progress,” the authors emphasize that technology has created remarkable long-term advantages. As they write, “we’re greatly higher off than our ancestors,” and “scientific and technological progress is a crucial a part of that story.”

Still, quite a lot of suffering and oppression has occurred while the long run is unfolding, and never just during Medieval times.  

“It was a 100-year struggle throughout the Industrial Revolution for staff to get any cut of those massive productivity gains in textiles and railways,” Johnson observes. Broader progress has come through increased labor power and electoral government; when the U.S. economy grew spectacularly for 3 a long time after World War II, gains were widely distributed, though that has not been the case recently.

“We’re suggesting we are able to get back onto that path of shared prosperity, reharness technology for everyone, and get productivity gains,” Johnson says. “We had all that within the postwar period. We are able to get it back, but not with the present type of our machine intelligence obsession. That, we expect, is undermining prosperity within the U.S. and around the globe.”

A call for “machine usefulness,” not “so-so automation”

What do Acemoglu and Johnson think is deficient about AI? For one thing, they consider the event of AI is simply too focused on mimicking human intelligence. The students are skeptical of the notion that AI mirrors human pondering all told — even things just like the chess program AlphaZero, which they regard more as a specialized set of instructions.

Or, for example, image recognition programs — Is that a husky or a wolf? — use large data sets of past human decisions to construct predictive models. But these are sometimes correlation-dependent (a husky is more more likely to be in front of your own home), and might’t replicate the identical cues humans depend on. Researchers know this, in fact, and keep refining their tools. But Acemoglu and Robinson contend that many AI programs are less agile than the human mind, and suboptimal replacements for it, whilst AI is designed to exchange human work.

Acemoglu, who has published many papers on automation and robots, calls these alternative tools “so-so technologies.” A supermarket self-checkout machine doesn’t add meaningful economic productivity; it just transfers work to customers and wealth to shareholders. Or, amongst more sophisticated AI tools, for example, a customer support line using AI that doesn’t address a given problem can frustrate people, leading them to vent once they do reach a human and making the entire process less efficient.

All told, Acemoglu and Johnson write, “neither traditional digital technologies nor AI can perform essential tasks that involve social interaction, adaptation, flexibility, and communication.”

As an alternative, growth-minded economists prefer technologies creating “marginal productivity” gains, which compel firms to rent more staff. As an alternative of aiming to eliminate medical specialists like radiologists, a much-forecast AI development that has not occurred, Acemoglu and Johnson suggest AI tools might expand what home health care staff can do, and make their services more precious, without reducing staff within the sector.

“We predict there’s a fork within the road, and it’s not too late — AI is a superb opportunity to reassert machine usefulness as a philosophy of design,” Johnson says. “And to look for tactics to place tools within the hands of staff, including lower-wage staff.”

Defining the discussion

One other set of AI issues Acemoglu and Johnson are concerned about extend directly into politics: Surveillance technologies, facial-recognition tools, intensive data collection, and AI-spread misinformation.

China deploys AI to create “social credit” scores for residents, together with heavy surveillance, while tightly restricting freedom of expression. Elsewhere, social media platforms use algorithms to influence what users see; by emphasizing “engagement” above other priorities, they will spread harmful misinformation.

Indeed, throughout “Power and Progress,” Acemoglu and Johnson emphasize that the usage of AI can arrange self-reinforcing dynamics through which those that profit economically can gain political influence and power on the expense of wider democratic participation.

To change this trajectory, Acemoglu and Johnson advocate for an in depth menu of policy responses, including data ownership for web users (an idea of technologist Jaron Lanier); tax reform that rewards employment greater than automation; government support for a diversity of high-tech research directions; repealing Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from regulation or legal motion based on the content they host; and a digital promoting tax (aimed to limit the profitability of algorithm-driven misinformation).

Johnson believes people of all ideologies have incentives to support such measures: “The purpose we’re making will not be a partisan point,” he says.

Other scholars have praised “Power and Progress.” Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, has called it a “humane and hopeful book” that “shows how we are able to steer technology to advertise the general public good,” and is “required reading for everybody who cares concerning the fate of democracy in a digital age.”

For his or her part, Acemoglu and Johnson wish to broaden the general public discussion of AI beyond industry leaders, discard notions concerning the AI inevitability, and re-evaluate about human agency, social priorities, and economic possibilities.

“Debates on latest technology should center not only on the brilliance of recent products and algorithms but on whether or not they are working for the people or against the people,” they write.

“We’d like these discussions,” Johnson says. “There’s nothing inherent in technology. It’s inside our control. Even in case you think we are able to’t say no to latest technology, you may channel it, and improve outcomes from it, in case you speak about it.”