Daron Acemoglu: prediction

Transcript context

…You have a new paper with David Autor, Beirn, and Scott where when the number of young people is relatively low, there’s induced innovation, and that raises per capita income, right? Does that not make you much more optimistic? Is it at variance with your papers with Restrepo? It’s a much more positive vision, right? Yes, it is a more positive vision, absolutely, 100 percent. By the way, the precursor to that paper is also another paper I wrote with Pascual Restrepo. Both papers use the task-based framework, but that just shows exactly like I was trying to say in the task-based framework and in my thinking automation isn’t bad. Sometimes automation is a response to scarcities of certain types of factors, in which case it’s really very important for enabling economic growth. By the way, I think the possibility that there will be shortages of labor in certain, especially manual tasks, is indeed, as you say, a possibility for optimism, but depends on how you deal with it also. In both papers, you also see the element of choice. You have to do the technology, and not every society does that technology in the same way. We could get that wrong. We can get too excited with certain currents in AI and miss some of those boats, or we can use AI just the right way to deal with our shortages while also creating opportunities for remaining workers. I don’t think there is any law of nature or economics that all of these things are going to work perfectly, or there is just one path for them to work in one way and not in other ways. At the beginning of your book, there’s an excellent quotation from Frederick Douglass. I read, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.”…

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