What if we’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence the wrong way? After all, AI is often discussed as something that could replicate human intelligence and replace human work. But there is an alternate future: one in which AI provides “machine usefulness” for human workers, augmenting but not usurping jobs, while helping to create productivity gains and spread prosperity. That would be a fairly rosy scenario. However, as MIT economist Daron Acemoglu emphasized in a public campus lecture on Tuesday night, society has started to move in a different direction —…
