Book Review: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
This brilliant book is not an easy read, but it is definitely a rewarding one. The authors (both professors at MIT) delve deep into history and economics to explain why in our present era the very few elite prosper while the rest of humankind gradually becomes poorer. It has to do with technological innovation and how those who control it decide to use it. As the authors explain, it is not inevitable that people lose jobs due to automation; in fact, in some countries this has not happened. However, those in power typically look out for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Technological progress is supposed to make everyone’s lives better; at least that’s what corporate propaganda would have us believe, but at crucial historical moments this has not been true – nor is it true today. The authors prove this point through examples such as England at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the Deep South in the United States when machinery like the cotton gin enriched plantation owners and made the lives of multitudes of slaves miserable, and the rise of factories and communal farms in Soviet Russia. In each of these situations, only the elite prospered while most people endured worse conditions than before. The evolution of economic history the authors present clarify what most of us are aware of even now: that progress favors the few, while the rest of us see no gain or even a diminution of our quality of life.
Certainly modern tech companies are set up like this. Instead of using the amazing recent technological innovations to benefit us all (and the authors make it clear that this could have been an option), the biggest digital businesses are set up for exploitation of the masses, for surveillance and personal data collection that makes the very rich richer. This was not inevitable. Instead of focusing on automation that replaces humans, innovators could have opted for machine usefulness – in other words, machines complementing and assisting humans. The present social media algorithms, contrary to what is touted in slogans and advertisements, are not set up to increase communication and socialization. They are set up to sell advertisements. For this reason, they foster hatred, division, and misinformation. They want you to be enraged and upset (regardless of the truth or falsehood of what you read or see) because these emotions increase platform engagement and help them sell more ads. They honestly don’t give a damn about you.
The new trends in artificial intelligence platforms are also set up for similar reasons: to enrich a few innovators at the expense of everyone else. They scrape data from everywhere with complete disregard for privacy, let alone copyrights. And what AI is theoretically capable of (although at present it can do it only poorly) could put many, many more people out of work. This has happened to me personally recently. For years I have been ghostwriting articles and blog posts as a primary source of income, but in the last several months these income streams dried up. The reason? The companies that were paying me and many others to write for them decided it was cheaper to have AI write their articles (they even outright announced this), even though there is a significant drop in quality and basically all the AIs are doing is copying what they have scraped without permission from other sites.
In the final chapter, the authors of Power and Progress offer a number of possible solutions, none of which are easy but most of which are necessary. I won’t spoil the book by giving away the ending, though. Read it yourself if you want to know what’s really happening and not just what those in power tell us.
