Simon Johnson

We are living in an age that is even more blindly optimistic and more elitist about technology than the times of Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke. As we document in , people making the big decisions are once again deaf to the suffering created in the name of progress

In fact, a thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing abundantly clear: there is nothing automatic about new technologies bringing widespread prosperity. Whether they do or not is an economic, social, and political choice.

Optimism regarding shared benefits from technological progress is founded on a simple and powerful idea: the “productivity bandwagon

First, productivity growth increases the demand for workers as businesses attempt to boost profits by expanding output and hiring more people. Second, the demand for more workers increases the wages that need to be offered to attract and retain employees. Unfortunately, neither step is assured, as we explain in the next two sections.

using existing technologies and developing new ones for increasing worker marginal productivity—not just automating work, making workers

technology is about control, not just over nature but often over other humans

The current path of AI is neither good for the economy nor for democracy, and these two problems, unfortunately, reinforce each other

canal opened in November 1869

version of techno-optimism: big public infrastructure investments and technological advances would benefit everybody, in Europe and globally

His penchant for big projects, his techno-optimism, his belief in the power of private investors, and his indifference to the fate of all of those who were voiceless would put him in good company with many contemporary corporate boardrooms.