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Comment on MIT Economist Daron Acemoğlu Takes on Big Tech: "Our Future Will Be Very Dystopian"

I find his statement about wind mills without any merit. I am not historian and forgive me for being lazy, but if If I ask ChatGPT4 about it, here is the answer I get:

The invention of the windmill had a substantial impact on peasant life, particularly in medieval Europe. Before windmills, much of the labor-intensive tasks like grinding grain, pumping water, and other mechanical work were done manually or with the help of animals. The introduction of windmills automated these processes to some extent, making life easier for peasants by reducing their labor burden.

The windmill can be considered one of the key innovations that started moving societies away from purely manual labor, allowing people to focus on other tasks and thereby improving overall quality of life. While it didn't entirely revolutionize the peasant lifestyle overnight, it was a step towards greater efficiency and productivity.

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Yes, I understand that it is not really a proof, but at least some evidence that his statement is simply hot air.

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PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Allow me to respond in kind.

Here’s Perplexity.ai’s response (based on GPT-4) to your response:

In the provided link, Daron Acemoğlu’s argument focuses on how the distribution of the impact of technological change tends to favor elites over time, as they accrue the benefits for themselves. The response you provided, however, discusses the impact of the invention of the windmill on peasant life in medieval Europe, emphasizing how it improved efficiency and productivity. This response does not address Acemoğlu’s main point about the distribution of benefits from technological change and how it is influenced by the power dynamics between elites and the general population. Instead, it focuses on the general impact of a specific technology (windmills) on the lives of peasants, which is not the central argument in Acemoğlu’s discussion.

And then I asked Perplexity.ai to expand on the last two sentences. I thought they were too condensed.

In the Spiegel article, Acemoğlu argues that the benefits of technological innovations tend to accrue disproportionately to elites and people in power over time. He provides historical examples like the spinning jenny and the steam engine, which initially benefited workers but over decades the gains shifted toward factory owners and capitalists as they consolidated economic and political power.

The key point is that technology alone does not determine how the gains are distributed - it depends on the relative power dynamics between different groups. Powerful elites are often able to co-opt innovations to serve their own interests, rather than broadly sharing the benefits.

In contrast, the response about windmills focuses narrowly on how a specific medieval technology improved efficiency for peasants through automation. It does not address the distribution of gains from windmills over time, nor does it consider how elites may have captured the benefits. The windmill example is about the general productivity impacts of technology, not the argument Acemoğlu makes about unequal distribution based on existing power structures.

tl;dr: Technological innovation has improved the lives of elites and peasants. This is undeniable and is not under consideration. What is under consideration is who benefits from technological innovation at its introduction (or over some relatively other short time period that isn’t “the past”).

Also, as a beneficiary of it, AI is so fucking cool.

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