Daron Acemoglu: belief

Transcript context

…—and from computers. Oh, 100 percent, but that’s why I’m, again, if perhaps we’ll go to this later, when I talk of AI, I don’t say, “AI is going to be automation.” No, AI is going to be hopefully both automation and new tasks and then creating the right balance. Again, once we open that black box of technology, which I uploaded enthusiastically five minutes ago, then we are also saying, well, there are different rates at which these different components of technologies are advancing. During some periods, and when we went so much into robots, that was one, automation was really going very rapidly and new task creation wasn’t going as rapidly. By the way, that’s not just in the nature of technology. When Japanese and South Korean, and to some extent German car manufacturers, for example, were introducing robots, they also redesigned jobs to create many new tasks that American companies didn’t do. There’s a lot of choice in that endeavor. That’s why I think AI is so exciting and so dangerous. 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?…

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