How tech could actually make things better

Economist Daron Acemoglu on what techno-optimism misses, and how to build a more equitable, pro-human future

It’s commonplace nowadays for tech leaders to defend their relentless accumulation and the disappearance of countless jobs not just as a consequence of new business models but as unfortunate collateral damage in a grand historical quest for the survival of civilization, at least in the abstract, into the distant future.

Call it techno-optimism, effective altruism, or just late capitalism — but how did we get here, and why do these ideas persist?

MIT economist Daron Acemoglu is known for his diagnoses of the state of democracy and the tensions between political and economic institutions, which have made him one of the most cited scholars of the past decade. More recently, he’s brought his insights to a broader audience; his book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (written with James A. Robinson) examined the tension between authoritarianism and democracy and how political choices lead towards — or away from — prosperity for people. His more recent Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity (with Simon Johnson) focuses more specifically on battles over technological innovation — between the forces working solely to profit from technological change at the expense of workers and those who would extend the benefits of change to humanity at large.

We talked to Acemoglu about why everyday Americans and tech leaders have boundless faith in technology’s ability to deliver solutions, how that is both driven by and exacerbates diminishing faith in democracy, why the professions of economics and journalism have failed to make the case for people over profit, how we can foster a more pro-human attitude toward technological progress, and how Kamala Harris can make the case for small-d democracy to working people.

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One of the ideas you are best known for is that progress is not inevitable, specifically, that technological innovation doesn't necessarily lead to prosperity for people. Now many tech leaders disagree and have this faith — and this is also widely held in American society — that the next big thing is going to fix all the problems. Or A.I. is just going to figure it out for us at some point in the future. Can you speak to why that belief is so widespread, and why and how you question it?

So my view isn't that technology doesn't lead to prosperity, but that technology does not need to lead to prosperity, meaning that if you look at history, it's quite clear that there have been some very important episodes in which technological breakthroughs have been tremendously useful to humans. We are probably in the midst of one, which started 250 years ago with the application of industrial technology and then later scientific knowledge to the production process. And we are incredibly fortunate, very comfortable, much healthier, much more prosperous than people who lived more than 250 years ago thanks to that process of technological change.

But what I argue is that there is no necessity that every technology will lead to this outcome. You might even hear some tech billionaires like Mark Andreessen offer their opinion that the history of the Industrial Revolution proves technology is a gift to society. 

He's a sort of a technological fundamentalist. 

He calls it technological optimism. In fact, his thing was called the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” But when you look at the details of what happened, there was a struggle to actually get technology to bring prosperity to a broad cross-section of society. There wasn't anything predestined about that.

So I would characterize my stance as a cautious, conditional optimism. If we do the right things, we can get a lot out of technology because after all, technology expands our capabilities. But then expanded capabilities can be used for good of for ill. If you know how to manufacture nuclear bombs, that's much more likely to lead to nuclear warfare than increased prosperity for everybody.

So what technologies are, how they are used, who controls them, and what we do with our institutions are particularly important. 

So talk about the back and forth. Technology's contribution to human prosperity is not inevitable, and its effect involves this tension with institutions, with politics on a very large scale. Looking to the past, can you talk about an example where a new technology had a negative social or political impact?