In an ideal world, AI would trigger something similar to the automation of automobile manufacturing in the early 20th Century, when the knock-on effect of more cars led to booms in other parts of the economy like transportation and retailing, even as skilled craftspeople were replaced. Daron Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2024, says in the book Power and Progress that current AI trends skew more heavily towards cost-cutting; with some AI tools only doing a nominally better job than huma ...