@Noahpinion Read the article. We should have more people like Noah that choose rationality over publicity.
2:35 AM · Jul 15, 2026 Great writing from Noah:
"Even when it comes to specific occupations, technologists are often startlingly wrong on the “complement or substitute” question. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the inventors of modern AI, famously predicted the end of human radiologists within a few years, only to see a boom in hiring and salaries for radiologists when it turned out that AI actually complemented their skills.
So how the heck are businesspeople and inventors supposed to “steer” AI toward being complementary to human workers? They obviously couldn’t predict the labor market effects of the last round of AI — at least, in the short term. So why should anyone believe that technologists have the ability to purposefully invent different forms of AI with different labor market effects?"
What I always appreciate about this fellow is that you can see him updating his opinions in real time as he learns. He never clings doggedly to the things he said six months ago or a year ago.
Sign of a bright mind. Willingness to change.
Even if I don't agree with him on everything he says and many times don't, I respect a willingness to grow and change in public and put yourself out there:
More from the article:
"Acemoglu himself has certainly not had a better record than the technologists when it comes to predicting the effects of AI on jobs. He wrote an empirical paper claiming that companies that buy robots tend to hire fewer workers, but this paper was contradicted by a very large number of follow-up studies. And he wrote a theoretical paper claiming that AI wouldn’t do much to raise productivity, but that prediction was based on arbitrarily assuming away parts of his own model.
So any panel of wise mandarins that Acemoglu and his fellow-travelers assemble in order to “steer” AI technology is likely to have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Here’s what I wrote about that idea back in 2023:
[I]f we were to set up a panel of experts and task them with deciding which lines of research and innovation to encourage and which to discourage in order to maximize jobs and wages, they would be operating purely on gut instinct and quasi-science-fictional supposition…[I]n practice, any panel or commission set up to speed up and slow down various types of AI will be simply adding noise to the innovation process, offering rewards and punishments essentially at random. That’s not good for the development of technology as a whole, since it introduces uncertainty into the innovation equation. But it’ll also be ineffectual in terms of actually protecting human workers.
Three years later, having witnessed so many of the dire predictions of job destruction dashed on the rocks of reality, I see absolutely no reason to change my assessment. Acemoglu’s big idea — basically, to put him and his friends in charge of AI development — is not a good idea."
3:57 AM · Jul 15, 2026 