Daron Acemoglu Highlights Technology’s Role in Inequality at HKS Lecture

MIT Economics professor Daron Acemoglu delivered the fourth annual Stone Lecture at a JFK Jr. Forum Tuesday evening, discussing the impacts of AI and technological advancement on wealth concentration.

Newly minted Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein opened the talk by praising Acemoglu, the co-author of “Why Nations Fail.” Weinstein shared how one of Acemoglu’s early papers on the colonial origins of comparative development inspired him as a budding academic in the 1990s.

“I know that this is a common experience for almost every scholar who has come of age in this generation,” Weinstein said. “And we were not all shaped by the same paper.”

Delivering the Stone Lecture on Tuesday was yet another accolade for Acemoglu, a Turkish-American economist who has often been mentioned as a future Nobel Prize winner for his extensive research on the role of institutions in economic growth.

During the event, Acemoglu discussed how the relationship between technology and inequality will shape a world grappling with the rise of AI.

“Unless we strike the right sort of institutional and technological trajectory to create the type of economic growth that’s going to benefit a broad cross section of society we would not be just creating a sad society, but we would be creating a very unstable one,” he said.

Acemoglu linked his research to the “complete excitement,” surrounding the economic implication of wide scale adoption of generative AI without proper guardrails and considerations.

“I think there is a danger that more and more people are seeing that AI advancements — even if they materialize — may end up benefiting a rather narrow segment of society, a technological elite,” Acemoglu said.

Despite the recent spike of attention given to AI, he argued that for decades there has been an idea that “human level intelligence were eminent,” yet the world has simply seen increased automation.

“Where is the productivity?” Acemoglu said.

“If these technologies are so brilliant and we’re having this innovation boom, where is the technology? Where are the productivity gains from?” he asked.

While the hype continues to grow over a new AI frontier, Acemoglu dissented, pointing to the lackluster data economists have at hand.

“The productivity gains are not easy to find in the aggregate or even in the sectoral data today,” he said. “In fact, the U.S. economy on the left is showing some of the slowest productivity growth as measured by economists favorite total factor productivity.”

Acemoglu also presented a series of recent anecdotes on the economic history of technological advancements published in his latest book “Power and Progress.” He countered the “productivity bandwagon” argument that advancements in technology will increase productivity and benefit the worker.

“You can also find many examples where productivity increases as technological breakthroughs happen, but nothing beneficial takes place for workers,” he said.

Acemoglu pointed to historical examples from the windmill to cotton gin and cautioned that AI may be one to follow if proper action is not taken.

“Those important technologies were monopolized by the very wealthy,” he said. “As a result of that, the gains from this very important technological change became very unequally distributed.”

“Now these power related reasons may appear distant, but they’re not,” Acemoglu added.

—Staff writer Thomas J. Mete can be reached at thomas.mete@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @thomasjmete.