While it’s tempting to think that leading economists, senior academics and best-selling authors are not prone to sweeping elevator pitches, Simon Johnson – who is all three – is keen to describe his latest book as “the thousand-year backstory for ChatGPT”. Johnson is one half of the authorship duo (his co-author is the equally well-credentialled Daron Acemoglu) that has just delivered ‘Power and Progress’. He says that the “slightly longer” version of the one-line summary relates to how forms of automation and machines that have been with us for more than a thousand years have been used “to replace labour and make humans essentially more productive”.
The subtitle of ‘Power and Progress’ reveals how Johnson and Acemoglu’s analysis of automation has historically brought with it a “struggle over technology and prosperity”. Although this is to simplify the scope of the authors’ work, its central theme is that while technology has always been supposed to make...