Widespread automation won’t happen in the next few years as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have predicted, said MIT professor and economist Daron Acemoglu, speaking at the DemocracyXChange Summit in Toronto on Saturday. That’s “good news if you want to actually do regulation” and to “try to create a democratic framework for controlling these very, very powerful companies and individuals,” the Nobel laureate added. (The Logic)

Talking point: Amodei has offered the starkest forecast to date, suggesting last May that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs in one to five years. That hasn’t come close to happening in the near-year since, and critics have accused him of overstating the technology’s abilities. AI progress has been “spell-binding,” Acemoglu said Saturday, but he warned of dire consequences if its developers do eventually achieve their declared target of creating artificial general intelligence. “Goodbye to democracy, goodbye to shared prosperity, goodbye to jobs,” he said. He added that there’s still time for policymakers to intervene to encourage “pro-worker AI,” which enhances rather than replaces human capabilities. Meanwhile, AI pioneer Yann LeCun said on X that people should listen to economists like Acemoglu about the technology’s labour-market impacts over fellow AI researchers like Amodei, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. 

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