Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson
Technological progress does not automatically deliver shared prosperity; across a thousand years, elite choices and excessive automation have routinely enriched a few while stagnating worker wages and worsening working conditions.
Medieval windmills enriched elites, while British textile technologies enriched owners without raising textile workers' incomes for almost 100 years.
So-so automation technologies, such as self-checkout kiosks, merely displace human labor and transfer work without generating significant economic productivity gains.
True shared prosperity requires shifting technological design toward machine usefulness, prioritizing tools that augment human decision-making and expand worker capabilities over mimicking human intelligence.