"Instead, AI research and development has focused on only a few sectors, ones that are having a net negative impact for humanity, MIT economistDaron Acemogluargues in “Redesigning AI,” a Boston Review book."

"But the majority of these commentators view such concerns with a sense of inevitability — they believe that it is in the very nature of AI to accelerate automation and to enable governments and companies to control individuals’ behavior."

"It can increase human productivity most powerfully by creating new tasks and activities for workers."

"AI in the classroom can make teaching more adaptive and student-centered, generate distinct new teaching tasks, and, in the process, increase the productivity of — and the demand for — teachers."

"Finally, AI can be combined with augmented and virtual reality to provide new productive opportunities to workers in blue-collar and technical occupations."

"Plenty of academic research shows how emerging technologies — differential privacy, adversarial neural cryptography, secure multiparty computation, and homomorphic encryption, to name a few — can protect privacy and detect security threats and snooping, but this research is still marginal to commercial products and services."

"One objection to the argument I have developed is that it is unwise to mess with the market."

"Yet Robert Solow’s thirty-year-old quip about computers — that they are “everywhere but in the productivity statistics” — is even more true today."

"The argument that we should rely on the market for setting the direction of technological change is weak as well. In the terminology of economics, innovation creates significant positive “externalities:” when a company or a researcher innovates, much of the benefits accrue to others."

"This is doubly so for technologies that create new tasks. The beneficiaries are often workers whose wages increase (and new firms that later find the right organizational structures and come up with creative products to make use of these new tasks)."

"But these benefits are not part of the calculus of innovating firms and researchers. Ordinary market forces — which fail to take account of externalities — may therefore deter the types of technologies that have the greatest social value."

"A similar point holds for automation technologies: it is easy to ignore the vital role that good, secure, and high-paying jobs play in making people feel fulfilled. With all of these externalities, how can we assume that the market will get things right?"

"Last but certainly not least, innovation responds not just to economic incentives but also to norms."

"All of these reasons cast doubt on the wisdom of leaving the market to itself. What’s more, the measures that might be thought to compensate for a market left to itself — redistribution via taxes and the social safety net — are both insufficient and unlikely to work."

"Even worse, building shared prosperity based predominantly on redistribution is a fantasy. There is no doubt that redistribution — via a progressive tax system and a robust social safety net — has been an important pillar of shared prosperity in much of the twentieth century (and high-quality public education has been critical)."