Liliana Rojas Suarez

Everybody has heard of the Luddites, but few know Sir Thomas Maitland, the man who defeated them. Rather than using brute force to take them all out, Maitland simply identified the men he took to be ringleaders, had them arrested on evidence that was often thin, and executed them. Hit one, educate a hundred. This is the strategy that the British magazine The Economist seems to have adopted toward the new version of the Luddites: AI critics. Rather than the public execution, they use the public humiliation of the anti-AI ringleaders, with equally scant evidence. Whatever its editors intended, the critical piece against @DAcemogluMIT, published by the magazine on August 17th, functions less like a conventional assessment of scholarship than like an act of intellectual discipline. I have long criticized important parts of Daron’s work, and I am not afraid to expose weaknesses in his reasoning, as I have in the latest episode of my Capitalisn’t podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=rOnrvBzJ…. But I would never have written that piece. If The Economist had objections to his Nobel Prize, it should have raised them when it was awarded. But it did not. If it had objections to his paper on demography, it should have raised them when the paper came out. But it did not. Why does the British magazine raise these questions only now? Why does it do a review of a book that is not about AI, but only reviews the half-chapter he wrote about AI? I have read The Economist for more than thirty years. I cannot remember it ever attacking a living economist in this ad hominem way, let alone one of Daron's caliber. The piece is not really about Daron. It is a warning shot. If the Economist can humiliate the leading economist of my generation, imagine what it can do to anybody else who criticizes AI. Criticize the new incarnation of the latest technological wonder, and your weakest paper becomes your body of work. Praise it, and your weakest paper is never mentioned at all or even celebrated like a great piece of scholarship. If AI delivers even half of its promises, it will be transformative, ushering in a new era of productivity and growth, as the first industrial revolution was and possibly even more. Many professional economists only see these long-run benefits. Yet, the path to Nirvana is littered with the bodies of the people hurt during the transition. It took between 50 and 70 years after the start of the First Industrial Revolution for workers' wages to begin rising. In the meantime, life expectancy stagnated, and average height declined, a clear sign that the Dickensian stories of squalor and misery were not the product of their author’s imagination but a real account of what the country went through. Criticizing AI is not necessarily resisting progress; it is pointing out the costs it entails. Unlike 19th-century Great Britain, today, the democratic West is not forced to maximize the speed of innovation at all costs. We need a serious public debate on the costs and benefits of acceleration, with concrete proposals for minimizing transition costs. This debate needs critical voices like Daron’s. In the undemocratic Great Britain of the early 19th century, Lord Maitland was not serving the British people, but the British merchant elite, who had only to gain by putting the innovation pedal to the metal, since the costs were borne by others. In the interest of whom is The Economist publicly humiliating Daron?