PERSON
Daron Acemoglu
Turkish-American economist at MIT (b. 1967), Nobel laureate in economics (2024), and co-author with Allen of 'How AI Fails Us'—whose institutional analysis of how technology choices shape distributional outcomes provides the economic foundation for Allen's applied work on AI governance.
Acemoglu's work on the political economy of institutions—developed with James Robinson in Why Nations Fail (2012) and The Narrow Corridor (2019) and extended with Simon Johnson in Power and Progress (2023)—argues that technology choices are institutional choices, shaped by the distribution of power in societies and shaping that distribution in turn. The framework rejects both technological determinism (which treats technology as an autonomous force) and technological neutrality (which treats technology as equally available for any purpose). Technology is, rather, a contested domain in which institutional choices determine whether productive advances distribute their benefits broadly or concentrate them narrowly.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Acemoglu's collaboration with Allen on 'How AI Fails Us' brought together economics and political theory in an analysis of the structural antidemocratic tendencies of contemporary AI development. The paper's core argument—that the dominant AI paradigm 'tends to concentrate power, resources, and decision-making in an engineering elite'—combines Acemoglu's