Daron Acemoglu: recommendation

Transcript context

…You’ve called repeatedly for what you call pro-worker AI. Just specifically, what does that mean in terms of regulation? Because current AI, by definition, the knowledge or the abilities are fairly general, but they’re implemented in a decentralized fashion. Mercatus has accounts. We use AI. Companies use AI on their own. Is the regulator supposed to look at what Stripe, Mercatus, all these different institutions are doing with their AIs, and ask if it helps the workers and approve it or not? What does that regulation look like for you? Fantastic question. Thanks for asking that, Tyler. I’m again going to give a two-part answer to that. The most important part of what I’ve been, like a broken record, talking about pro-worker AI for 10 years—although the term I’ve been using only for about five, that’s what I want to clarify. I do not think that we know today or we desire today a regulator deciding what is pro-worker AI and what’s not, and then saying only pro-worker AI should be enabled. I’ve never argued that, and I do not believe that. What I believe is that pro-worker AI would be much better for society, and if we find a way of cultivating it, we would be better off. Cultivating it has to start by changing the narrative, changing the aspirations of tech entrepreneurs and tech companies, and public policy has a role but has a supporting role in that. No, I do not believe that we need to have a regulator that says, oh, only pro-worker AI is allowed. Absolutely not. What is pro-worker AI? Let me just clarify that for a minute. By pro-worker AI, I mean AI that enables workers to do new or more sophisticated things by giving them information, by expanding their problem-solving and their expertise. That’s intimately related to the earlier discussion that we had about automation and other things. Automation, again, narrowly construed, isn’t pro-worker AI. If we use new machinery and new information systems to train people better to do things that they couldn’t do, nurses now can do much more, journalists can do much more, electricians can do much more, that is where pro-worker AI comes in. Now, a somewhat different question. Your recent paper with Autor, Beirne, and Scott, does that mean you’re less worried about the fertility crisis than many of my friends?…

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