{"id":22705,"date":"2026-05-11T17:51:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T17:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/11\/three-things-in-ai-to-watch-according-to-a-nobel-winning-economist\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T17:51:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T17:51:16","slug":"three-things-in-ai-to-watch-according-to-a-nobel-winning-economist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/11\/three-things-in-ai-to-watch-according-to-a-nobel-winning-economist\/","title":{"rendered":"Three things in AI to watch, according to a Nobel-winning economist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,\u00a0<\/em>sign up here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

A few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize<\/a> in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper<\/a> that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what Big Tech CEOs had been promising\u2014an overhaul of all white-collar work\u2014Acemoglu estimated that AI would give only a small boost to US productivity and would not obviate the need for human work. It\u2019s okay at automating certain tasks, he wrote, but some jobs will be perfectly fine.<\/p>\n

Two years later, Acemoglu\u2019s measured take has not caught on. Chatter about an AI jobs apocalypse pops up everywhere from Senator Bernie Sanders\u2019s rallies to conversations I overhear in line at the grocery store. Some previously skeptical economists have gotten more open<\/a> to the idea that something seismic could be coming with AI. A California gubernatorial candidate said<\/a> last week that he wants to tax corporate AI use and pay victims of \u201cAI-driven layoffs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the one hand, the data is still on Acemoglu\u2019s side; studies repeatedly find that AI is not affecting employment rates or layoffs. But the technology has advanced quite a bit since his cautious predictions. I spoke with him to understand if any of the latest developments in AI have changed his thesis, and to find out what does worry him these days if not imminent AGI.<\/p>\n

AI agents<\/strong><\/h3>\n

One of the biggest technical leaps in AI since Acemoglu\u2019s paper has been agentic AI, or tools that can go beyond chatbots and operate on their own to complete the goal you give them. Because they can work independently rather than just answering questions, companies are increasingly pitching agents as a one-to-many replacement for human workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that\u2019s just a losing proposition,\u201d Acemoglu says. He thinks agents are better thought of as tools to augment particular pieces of someone\u2019s work than something malleable enough to handle a person\u2019s whole job.<\/p>\n

One reason has to do with all the various tasks that go into a job, something Acemoglu has been researching in his work on AI since<\/a> 2018. For example, an x-ray technician juggles 30 different tasks, from taking down patient histories to organizing archives of mammogram images. A worker can naturally switch between formats, databases, and working styles to do this, Acemoglu says, but how many individual tools or protocols would an AI require to do the same?<\/p>\n

Whether or not agents will supercharge AI\u2019s impact on jobs will come down to whether they can eventually handle the orchestration between tasks that humans do naturally. AI companies are in heated competition to prove that their AI agents can work independently for ever longer periods without making mistakes, sometimes exaggerating<\/a> the results\u2014but Acemoglu says many jobs will be spared from an AI takeover if agents can\u2019t fluidly switch between tasks.<\/p>\n

The new hiring spree<\/strong><\/h3>\n

For years Big Tech has been offering staggering salaries to recruit AI researchers. But I asked Acemoglu about a different hiring spree I\u2019ve noticed: AI companies are all building in-house economics teams.<\/p>\n

OpenAI hired Ronnie Chatterji from Duke University in 2024 to be its chief economist and announced<\/a> last year that Chatterji will work with Jason Furman\u2014Harvard economist and former advisor to Barack Obama\u2014to research AI and jobs. Anthropic has convened<\/a> a group of 10 leading economists to do similar work. And just last week, Google DeepMind announced it had hired Alex Imas, an economist from the University of Chicago, to be its \u201cdirector of AGI economics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Acemoglu has noticed colleagues getting snatched up for these roles too. \u201cIt makes sense,\u201d he says: AI companies are well aware that public skepticism about AI, in large part due to job concerns, is growing<\/a>. And they have strong incentives to shape the economic narrative around their technology (consider OpenAI\u2019s latest proposal<\/a> for a new era of industrial policy).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I hope we won\u2019t get,\u201d Acemoglu says, \u201cis that they\u2019re interested in economists just to further their viewpoints or further the hype.\u201d That tension hangs over the emerging field of \u201cAI economics\u201d; it\u2019s concerning that some of the most influential research about AI\u2019s impact on work may increasingly come from the companies with the most to gain from favorable conclusions.<\/p>\n

AI apps<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I don\u2019t think of AI as hard to use; most of us interact with it via chatbots that use plain language. But Acemoglu says we should consider how it compares with the sort of software that kicked off earlier tech transformations, like PowerPoint for slide decks and Word for documents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAnybody could install these on their computer and get them to do the things that they want them to do,\u201d he says. They spread accordingly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have not seen the development of apps based on AI that have the same usability,\u201d he says. Even if anyone can chat<\/em> with an AI model, it tends to take a while for the average worker to get practical and productive use out of it. That\u2019s part of the reason why AI has not yet shown any seismic impact on the job market or the economy. One of the key signals Acemoglu is watching, then, is the creation of apps that make AI easier to use.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But he acknowledges that for a while, we\u2019re going to see all sorts of conflicting evidence about AI: anecdotes that college grads are finding the job market worse and worse, but no noticeable effect of AI on productivity, for example. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge amount of uncertainty,\u201d he says. And that\u2019s the most telling thing about the AI economy right now: the certainty of the rhetoric alongside the uncertainty of everything else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}