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Power and Progress
Acemoglu and Simon Johnson's 2023 thousand-year history of technology — the book that reframed the AI debate by arguing that shared prosperity from technical change has always been a political achievement, never an automatic one.
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (2023) is the text Acemoglu and Simon Johnson wrote for the moment the AI industry wanted to avoid. Marshalling evidence from medieval agricultural improvements through the British industrial revolution to the digital economy, the authors demonstrate that technology has repeatedly produced long periods of stagnation or decline in living standards for the majority, punctuated by episodes of broadly shared gain only when institutional forces redirected the distribution. The productivity bandwagon — the claim that technical progress automatically raises wages — is shown to be the exception, not the rule. The book reached The New York Times bestseller list and became required reading in policy circles grappling with AI governance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's structural argument is that every major technology admits multiple deployment paths. The British industrial revolution could have produced broadly shared prosperity in its first century; it did not, because