"Two voices, one secular, the other theological, converging in their diagnosis of digital capitalism, yet received in opposite ways by the guardians of consensus."
Mário Figueiredo’s latest column on PÚBLICO focuses on a recent article in The Economist about Daron Acemoglu, the 2024 Nobel Prize laureate in Economic Sciences, jointly awarded with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson.
The article, provocatively titled “The world’s most influential economist is strangely unconvincing,” is considered alongside a strikingly convergent perspective from theology, expressed in Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (MH).
The irony of this juxtaposition leads Mário Figueiredo to examine the logic behind the controversy surrounding two analyses that emerge from very different intellectual traditions, yet ultimately converge. Both question the dominant narrative surrounding Acemoglu’s work on the social impact of artificial intelligence, and both challenge the assumption that the work of one of the world’s most cited living economists is necessarily persuasive.
For Mário Figueiredo, Acemoglu’s argument is concrete and runs counter to the prevailing enthusiasm. First, his assessment of AI’s economic impact diverges from the most optimistic forecasts. More importantly, when it comes to the integration of AI into the workplace, Acemoglu distinguishes between technologies designed to complement human workers and the current trajectory of what he describes as “mediocre automation”: the displacement of jobs without a radical increase in productivity - and without demonstrable improvements in the quality of services, quite the contrary.
According to Mário Figueiredo, Acemoglu presents the same structural picture through the lenses of history and economics, alongside the secular foundations of human dignity.
Read the full article in PÚBLICO: