Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the highest faculty rank the university confers, with research spanning macroeconomics, political economy, labor economics, development economics, and economic theory. He is one of the most cited economists in the world and, in 2024, was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, together with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, for work on how institutions shape prosperity.
Within AI economics, Acemoglu’s most influential contributions are the task-based models he developed largely with Pascual Restrepo. That body of work, including “Robots and Jobs,” “Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work,” and “Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in US Wage Inequality,” gave the field a rigorous way to think about how machines displace labor from specific tasks, how new tasks can reinstate it, and how the balance of those forces drives wages and inequality. In his 2024 paper “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI,” he became a prominent skeptic of bullish productivity forecasts, estimating that generative AI would add only a modest amount to total factor productivity over a decade.
Acemoglu is also a public-facing thinker on technology and society, most visibly through his 2023 book “Power and Progress,” co-authored with Simon Johnson, which argues that the gains from technology are distributed according to who holds power rather than by the technology itself. His combined empirical, theoretical, and popular work makes him a central voice in nearly every serious discussion of what AI will do to work.