Simon Johnson: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay. Now turning to your new book with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress. Could you please summarize that book for us as a high-quality GPT-4 program might? That’s my prompt. [laughs] Okay, I haven’t had a chance to ask GPT-4 that, but it’s a great question. We are challenging, I think, some modern techno optimism view, which happens to be quite prevalent, Tyler, which is that technology just kind of happens. It raises productivity. It improves how people live, including their health, and it provides them with more opportunity, and everyone benefits eventually. Well, when we look back over the past 1,000 — and in some ways, we can look back 10,000 years — we find it to be more complicated. Sometimes, technology is massively beneficial, absolutely. The Industrial Revolution did work out well for many people eventually, but eventually took more than a hundred years. I think getting better outcomes for more people sooner — including from, for example, artificial intelligence right now, Tyler — is something we need to put our minds to. We have a number of recommendations about making technology more people-centric and more about generating new tasks, helping people become more productive and creative, rather than displacing workers and pushing them out, just using automation to displace workers. That is not the way we recommend going forward. Say we take the Industrial Revolution. There’s a new paper by Joel Mokyr in the Journal of Political Economy, and he argues in the areas where you had an Industrial Revolution, wages went up a fair amount pretty rapidly. Performance in England, as a whole, was mixed, but it was the areas that didn’t have the IR where wage performance was poor. Doesn’t it typically happen pretty rapidly that if you have sustained advances in technology, most people are much better off?…

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