Environment & Energy

“I’m not an AI pessimist,” he declares seconds into an interview. What makes Acemoglu, a renowned professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, come off as a doomsayer locked in on the mounting economic and financial perils ahead, is the unrelenting hype around the technology and the way it’s fueling an investment boom and furious tech stock rally.

As promising as AI may be, there’s little chance it will live up to that hype, Acemoglu says. By his calculation, only a small percent of all jobs — a mere 5% — is ripe to be taken over, or at least heavily aided, by AI over the next decade. Good news for workers, true, but very bad for the companies sinking billions into the technology expecting it to drive a surge in productivity.

“A lot of money is going to get wasted,” says Acemoglu. “You’re not going to get an economic revolution out of that 5%.”

Acemoglu has become one of the louder, and more high-profile, voices warning that the AI frenzy on Wall Street and in C-suites across America has gone too far. An Institute Professor, the highest title for faculty at MIT, Acemoglu first made a name for himself beyond academic circles a decade ago when he co-authored Why Nations Fail, a New York Times bestselling book. AI, and the advent of new technologies, more broadly, have figured prominently in his economics work for years.