A worthy article to read + insights I found compelling:

+ In an important new book, two leading economists survey 1,000 years of tech history to discover the likely impact of AI

+ In Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, they look at a millennium of technological innovation to understand the likely impact of AI.

+ The answer they come to is not cheerful — though they’ve reached that conclusion by way of an irritating Brahmin populism.

+ Throughout history, powerful elites have seized control of new technologies and used them to enrich themselves and extend control over their subordinates.

+ The authors concede that technological progress is often the work of challengers to the status quo.

+ Technologies and their makers were eventually co-opted by the ruling class.

+ Countervailing forces can come along and redirect technology from elite enrichment to creating shared gains.

+ In Acemoglu and Johnson’s view, the digital revolution has already been hijacked by self-seeking elites.

+The book proposes an interesting set of policies to produce a better version of the future: Provide government subsidies to develop more socially beneficial technologies; refuse to give patents to technologies that are aimed at worker or citizen surveillance; eliminate tax incentives to replace labor with machines; break up the big tech companies that enjoy market shares not seen since the days of the American industrialists John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie; repeal Sector 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that protects internet platforms against legal action or regulation because of the content they host; and impose a digital advertising tax.

+ The authors rightly worry about the way the Chinese government is using the digital revolution to monitor and repress its people.

+ But what about India? Thanks largely to Nandan Nilekani, a tech billionaire and chairman of Infosys Ltd., India has introduced the world’s biggest biometric ID system that provides 1.3 billion Indians with a digital identity.

+ The internet is now used as much to tempt us to buy stuff we don’t need as it is to democratize information. The emancipatory power of AI will surely be limited and distorted in the same way.

+ There is nothing inevitable about the direction of technology. Powerful people can direct it towards narrow interests rather than the common good. Clear-sighted coalitions of the concerned can lead it in more enlightened ways. Time may be running short given the pace of AI’s advance but there is still time to save ourselves from digital slavery.

Read the full article here.