Nobel-Winning economist: AI WILL Destroy Democracy | Daron Acemoglu interview

Daron Acemoglu (0:00)

Am I tough enough?

Ava (0:01)

Strong and stable leadership. Total ruba.

Daron Acemoglu (0:03)

Hell yes, I'm tough enough. Shut the fridge. Not another once.

Ava (0:07)

It's the PoliticsJOE Podcast.

Daron Acemoglu is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and his new book, How to Save Liberal Democracy, argues that political institutions need to rethink if we are going to engender trust in our political institutions. He argues in recent decades, promises have been broken that have eroded trust in democracies across the world. What a privilege to have you here today.

Daron Acemoglu (0:32)

Thank you, Ava. It's my pleasure.

Ava (0:33)

But in this moment as well, I mean, over the last week, the entire conversation of the world has been AI and the dangers of AI.

And you've written spectacularly about this, and you talked spectacularly about this, and about social cohesion. Do you want to give me your initial thoughts, thinking about what has been going on the past week, and then thinking about social cohesion? I'm going to ask you a very leading question here. Do you think that these sort of revelations from former workers of Anthropic and Sam Altman's warnings, do you think they're going to be helpful for social cohesion or unhelpful?

Daron Acemoglu (1:09)

Well, that's a great starting point. But let me first say that in some sense, the media, both in the US and the UK and elsewhere, has been behind the curve.

The media has not put the spotlight on AI sufficiently for the last 10 years.

In the United States, there was a while that nothing AI leaders did could be wrong. Then now we are getting into a doom scenario in which AI is going to kill us all. Of course, all of these perspectives have to be represented. And I cannot, I'm not an AI scientist, I cannot say categorically that the existential risks that some of those people are talking about should be completely dismissed. But there are so many other issues with AI and social cohesion. As you point out, AI is part of it. What's going on to the economy? What's going on to the education system? What will happen to jobs? And who will control AI? I think all of those are critical questions. And I am kept awake at night. Sometimes by AI, sometimes by what's going on with liberal democracy and our world system.

And the two, of course, merge. And the sort of social cohesion angle that you brought is very important. We have lost community. We have lost political participation. We have lost engagement. We have lost the ability to engage with people around the world. And AI risks deepening all of these divides.

Ava (3:03)

That's a very ominous start, isn't it?

Daron Acemoglu (3:05)

I didn't mean to destroy your morning here.

Ava (3:09)

Tell me, so the sort of things that keep you up at night, can you give us an example of that? Well, it's a very broad question.

Daron Acemoglu (3:19)

Yeah, let me actually start with liberal democracy, because I am convinced that liberal democracy is one of the greatest achievements of humanity.

Think of where we've come from.

Our ancestors were used to living in small bands, violence was everywhere.

The perspectives that people had were very much inward looking. And we've now come to take it for granted that we can live in societies made up of hundreds of millions of people, with very diverse backgrounds, with very different perspectives, with very different interests. And we broadly live peacefully, we communicate, we reach compromises. And more importantly, we've built amazing states that at the end of the day, by and large, in functioning democracies, have prioritized providing services to people. And we've built an economy out of which for quite a while, wages grew, people found jobs. There were inequities, but there was also shared prosperity, meaning that everybody took some benefits from the process of economic growth. All of these are gifts of liberal democracy. And here is the problem. We've come to a point where we're about to destroy all of that. Liberal democracy is in crisis. Even though we need it more than ever, we need both the ideas of individual freedom, fairness, and democratic participation more than ever in the age of AI, we're not sure that we can count on it everywhere. Look at the UK, look at what's going on in continental Europe, and most of all, look at what's going on in the United States. But if you don't want to worry about liberal democracy, you can worry about AI. If AI goes in its current direction, centralizing information in the hands of a handful of people who are completely unaccountable, who have their own agenda, and are pushing AI to be both dominant over humans and a machine for automating jobs under the banner of AGI, artificial general intelligence, again, our future is very, very bleak.