Abstract
According to leaders of the tech sector, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence will “change everything” – about productivity growth, jobs, and shared prosperity. In their recent book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand Year Struggle Over Power and Prosperity, Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu take the long view – putting the latest (and likely future) AI developments into historical context. AI could help boost the wages and living standards of everyone, but there is a very real danger that it will primarily bring a lot more automation and further widening of income inequality both within industrial economies and across countries.
In this lecture, Simon Johnson will discuss the intellectual and policy debates swirling around AI both in the US and around the world. Can we really create “Pro-Worker AI”? What would that take?
