“Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity,” by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, was published by PublicAffairs in May 2023. The two authors would go on to share the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with James A. Robinson, which gave the book lasting prominence in debates over AI.
The book’s central claim challenges a comfortable assumption: that technological progress automatically lifts everyone. Surveying a thousand years of history, from the agricultural windmill to the factory to digital platforms, Acemoglu and Johnson argue that new technology is shaped by what powerful people want and believe, and that its gains have often flowed to a narrow elite while ordinary workers waited generations, sometimes in vain, for their share. Progress for the many, they contend, happened only when countervailing power, such as unions, reform movements, and policy, redirected technology toward broadly shared prosperity rather than pure automation and labor displacement.
Applied to AI, the argument is a direct challenge to fatalism. Whether AI augments workers or simply replaces them is, in their telling, a choice influenced by business models, regulation, and social pressure rather than something dictated by the technology. The book became a touchstone for the augmentation-versus-automation debate and a warning that, left to current incentives, AI could repeat history by concentrating wealth and power unless its direction is deliberately steered.