Excerpts: “Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in early industrial societies organized, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably” (p. 7).

“Temples and other monuments appear in most early civilizations and typically for the same reasons as the medieval church constructed cathedrals—to legitimize the rule of the elite by honoring their deity and to maintain people’s faith” (p. 122).

“Technological changes have always been with us, along with influential people making decisions about what needs to be done and by whom. Over the past twelve thousand years, agricultural technology has advanced repeatedly and sometimes in dramatic ways. There have been times when, as productivity rose, ordinary people also benefited. But there was nothing automatic about these improvements trickling down to benefit the greater number of people. Shared benefits appeared only when landowning and religious elites were not dominant enough to impose their vision and extract all the surplus from new technologies” (p. 136).

“In 1889, about 1 percent of factory power came from electricity. By 1919, this share exceeded 50 percent” (p. 220).

“What was the secret sauce of shared prosperity in the decades following World War II? The answer lies in the two elements we emphasized earlier in this chapter: a direction of technology that created new tasks and jobs for workers of all skill levels and an institutional framework enabling workers to share productivity increases with employers and managers” (p. 240).

“In fact, globalization and automation have been synergistic, both driven by the same urge to cut labor costs and sideline workers. They have both been facilitated by the lack of countervailing powers in workplaces and in the political process since 1980” (p. 263).

“Encouraging the use of machines and algorithms to complement human capabilities and empower people has, in the past, led to breakthrough innovations with high machine usefulness. In contrast, infatuation with machine intelligence encourages mass-scale data collection, the disempowerment of workers and citizens, and a scramble to automate work, even when this is no more than so-soautomations—meaning that it has only small productivity benefits. Not coincidentally, automation and large-scale data collection enrich those who control digital technologies” (p. 300).

“The tragedy is that AI is further undermining democracy when we need it most. Unless the direction of digital technologies is altered fundamentally, they will continue to fuel inequality and marginalize large segments of the labor force, both in the West and increasingly around the world. AI technologies are also being used to more intensively monitor workers and, through this channel, create even more downward pressure on wages” (p. 381).

“Our current problems are rooted in the enormous economic, political, and social power of corporations, especially in the tech industry. The concentrated power of business undercuts shared prosperity because it limits the sharing of gains from technological change. But its most pernicious impact is via the direction of technology, which is moving excessively toward automations, surveillance, data collection, and advertising” (p. 392-393).

Acemoglu, Daron & Johnson, Simon. (2023). Power and Progress: Our 1000 Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity. New York: Hatchette Book Group, Inc.