The future of work under the threat of excessive automation and AI

Daron Acemoglu, MIT

Video Recording

Slides

Abstract:

Wage growth has slowed down, inequality has increased and labor shares have declined in many Western nations over the last four decades. Much of this is related to automation. But automation is nothing new. It has been going on rapidly at least since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. What has changed in the modern era is not rapid automation, but the absence of other types of technological changes that counterbalance the effects of automation and create new tasks and opportunities for humans. Such counterbalancing technologies have played critical roles in the past, especially for creating opportunities for humans and shared prosperity.

This talk will argue that this technological path was not preordained. It was the decisions of companies, researchers and engineers to double down on automation and move away from other, more human-friendly uses of technology that spawned it. All of this predates AI, but the evidence suggests that we may be pushing AI into the same trajectory, and in the process, squandering its promise and damaging the future of work. If this diagnosis is correct, what is needed is an overhaul of the direction of research, which can only be achieved by major institutional changes and societal pressure on technological companies and researchers.

Bio:

Daron Acemoglu an Institute Professor at MIT and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty.

He is the author of five books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth,  and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson).

His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks.

Daron Acemoglu has received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021.

He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.