Daron Acemoglu: belief

Transcript context

…Why don’t you look at the printing press and say, “Oh my goodness, this was horrible. We need to restrict what books are put out by publishers”? First of all, the history is that when the printing press first came, it was used in the religion wars. It did have some periods during which we adjusted to it. If I was alive during that period, I don’t know what my reaction to that would have been. Think of American society or European society or even India or Latin America in the 1980s. I think even though some people could be swayed by some extremist books of one sort or another from the right or from the left, humanity, human community was very well adjusted to the broadcast of certain free speech–driven ideas via books. Algorithms are a completely different matter. If social media, and this is one of the proposals I make related to social media, always stayed in the nonalgorithmic feed that on Facebook, Twitter—TikTok couldn’t exist in that case—you only see posts by your chosen outlets and your friends and neighbors in chronological order, I think we would adjust to that very quickly. That’s like the Myspace kind of model. Once algorithms can see, “Tyler has a weakness for this specific thing, I can fan the flames,” I think that’s a completely new world. Now, perhaps in 10 years’ time, our education system, not by the way so optimistic about our education system, that’s a different conversation, but it’s possible that our education systems, our social norms will evolve such that we are well adapted to those algorithms. Perhaps at that point, I could have a different view. Right now, I find the ability of these very powerful companies to exploit the free speech of other people potentially very damaging to mental health, to people’s daily social activities, and to political discourse. Since you’re a left liberal, I want to pull you in the direction of being more pro-immigration. The H-1B visa program, which no one thinks is well designed, but it’s, what, 85,000 workers a year, it’s not really creating brain drain for India or China. It gives people an incentive to develop skills.…

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