Jeffrey Sachs

Well, this has happened repeatedly.

These technologies we call GPT, general purpose technologies, which means something like the steam engine, which was the great invention of 250 years ago.

created the factory world and not just in one sector, but across the economy.

And it created the railroad and many other things.

Electrification was a general purpose technology.

AI is a general purpose technology, an extraordinarily powerful one in my view.

I don't believe it's hyped.

I think it's amazing and real.

But what you find with general purpose technologies is that generally they raise overall output in the economy, but dramatically redistribute the output as well.

In the first industrial revolution with the steam engine,

there were vast numbers of losers.

The economy started to boom, especially in Britain, which was the first industrialized nation.

But those masses in the satanic mills, these were women and children who used to have jobs in rural areas, for instance, spinning yarns.

All of that went away with mechanization.

They ended up as degraded workers.

And it was exactly that

what we call a miserization, becoming more miserable, that led Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to issue the Communist Manifesto in the late 1840s.

So that was real.

Then over time, new institutions were developed to share information.

the increase of output.