[ad_1]
The Dark Ages were not entirely dark. Advances in agriculture and construction technology increased the wealth of the Middle Ages and led to a wave of cathedral construction in Europe. However, it was a time of deep inequality. The elites have captured virtually all of the economic gains. In Britain, when Canterbury Cathedral rose, the peasants had no net increase in wealth between 1100 and 1300. Life expectancy was about 25 years. Chronic malnutrition was common.
“We have long struggled to share prosperity,” says MIT professor Simon Johnson. “Every cathedral your parents dragged you to see in Europe is a symbol of desperation and expropriation made possible by higher productivity.”
At first glance, this may not seem relevant to life in 2023. But Johnson and his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu, both economists, think it is. Technology drives economic progress. As innovations emerge, one constant question is: Who benefits?
That’s the case, according to scientists, in automation and artificial intelligence, the focus of Acemoglu and Johnson’s new book, “Power and Progress: Our 1,000-Year Struggle for Technology and Prosperity,” published this week by PublicAffairs. In it, they explore who has reaped the rewards of past innovations and who stands to gain from AI today, economically and politically.
“The book is about the choices we make using technology,” Johnson says. “It’s a very MIT-type topic. But a lot of people feel that technology just comes to you and you have to live with it.”
Johnson says artificial intelligence can be developed as a useful force. However, he adds, “Many algorithms are designed to try to replace humans as much as possible. We think this is completely wrong. The progress we’re making with technology is for cars to help people, not move them around. In the past we had automation, but new tasks for humans to perform and enough contrasting power in society. “
Today, AI is a tool of social control for some governments that also creates wealth for a small number of people, according to Acemoglu and Johnson. “The current path of intelligence is neither good for the economy nor good for democracy, and these two problems are unfortunately reinforcing each other,” they write.
A return to common prosperity?
Acemoglu and Johnson have collaborated before; In the early 2000s, together with political scientist James Robinson, they produced influential papers on politics and economic progress. Acemoglu, an institute professor at MIT, also co-authored with Robinson Why Nations Fail (2012), on political institutions and growth, and The Narrow Corridor (2019), which posits freedom as a never-certain outcome. social struggle.
Johnson, Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, wrote “13 Bankers” (2010) on financial reform and, with MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, “Jump-Starting America” (2019) called for more investment in scientific research.
In Power and Progress, the authors emphasize that technology has created remarkable long-term benefits. As they write, “we are much better off than our ancestors” and “scientific and technological progress is a vital part of this history.”
However, much suffering and oppression occurred over a long period of time, not just during the Middle Ages.
“It was a 100-year struggle during the Industrial Revolution for workers to accept any reduction in these massive productivity gains in textiles and railroads,” Johnson said. Broader progress has been achieved through increased labor power and electoral authority; When the US economy grew spectacularly in the three decades after World War II, the gains were widely distributed, but this has not been the case recently.
“We’re suggesting that we can get back to a path of shared prosperity, reusing technology for everyone and increasing productivity,” Johnson says. “We had all this in the post-war period. We can get it back, but not with our current form of machine intelligence. We think it undermines prosperity in the U.S. and around the world.”
A call for ‘car use’, not ‘so-so automation’
What do Acemoglu and Johnson think about AI? For one thing, they believe that the development of artificial intelligence is too focused on imitating human intelligence. Researchers are skeptical of the idea that artificial intelligence can mimic human thinking — even things like the chess program AlphaZero, which they see as a more specialized instruction set.
Or, for example, image recognition programs – is it a husky or a wolf? – Use large data sets of past human decisions to build predictive models. But they often rely on correlation (a husky is more likely to be in front of your house) and can’t replicate the same cues that humans rely on. Researchers know this, of course, and continue to refine their tools. But Acemoglu and Robinson argue that many AI programs are less flexible and suboptimal substitutes for the human mind, even though AI is designed to replace human work.
Acemoglu, who has published extensively on automation and robotics, calls these replacement tools “so-so technologies.” A supermarket self-checkout machine does not add significant economic productivity; It simply transfers jobs to clients and wealth to shareholders. Or, for example, among the more sophisticated AI tools, a customer service line that uses AI that doesn’t solve a given problem can frustrate people, leading to churn after they reach a human and making the whole process less efficient.
As Acemoglu and Johnson write, “neither traditional digital technologies nor artificial intelligence can perform essential tasks involving social interaction, adaptation, flexibility, and communication.”
Instead, growth-minded economists favor technologies that create “marginal productivity” that forces firms to hire more workers. Acemoglu and Johnson suggest that AI tools could expand what home health workers can do and make their services more valuable, without reducing the sector’s workforce, rather than eliminating medical specialists. .
“We think there’s a fork in the road and it’s not too late – AI is a very good opportunity to reinvent the utility of the car as a design philosophy,” says Johnson. “And find ways to empower workers, including low-wage workers.”
Define the discussion
Acemoglu and Johnson are concerned with another set of AI issues that spill directly into politics: surveillance technologies, facial recognition tools, intensive data collection, and disinformation spread by artificial intelligence.
China implements artificial intelligence to create “social credit” scores for citizens, along with heavy surveillance, while severely restricting freedom of expression. Elsewhere, social media platforms use algorithms to influence what users see; By emphasizing “engagement” above other priorities, they can spread harmful misinformation.
Indeed, throughout Power and Progress, Acemoglu and Johnson emphasize that the use of artificial intelligence can create a self-reinforcing dynamic in which those who benefit economically can gain political influence and power at the expense of broad democratic participation.
To change this trajectory, Acemoglu and Johnson advocate a broad menu of policy responses, including data ownership for Internet users (the brainchild of technologist Yaron Lanier); tax reform that rewards employment more than automation; Government support for a variety of high-tech research areas; repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996, which protects online platforms from regulation and legal action based on the content they post; and a digital advertising tax (which aims to limit the profitability of algorithm-driven disinformation).
Johnson believes people of all ideologies have an incentive to support such measures: “This issue that we’re raising is not a partisan point,” he says.
Other researchers praised the “power and progress”. Michael Sendel, Ann T. Professor of Government at Harvard University. And Robert Bass called it “a humane and hopeful book” that “shows us how we can use technology to promote the public good” and “must read.” For anyone who cares about the fate of democracy in the digital age.”
For their part, Acemoglu and Johnson want to expand the public discussion of AI beyond industry leaders, move away from notions of AI inevitability and rethink human agency, social priorities, and economic possibilities.
“Debates about new technologies should focus not only on the brilliance of new products and algorithms, but on whether they work for or against the people,” they write.
“We need these discussions,” Johnson says. “There is nothing special about the technique. It is within our control. Even if you think we can’t say no to new technology, you can channel it and get better results if you talk about it.”
[ad_2]
Source link