Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu says AI and liberal democracy share the same crisis: ‘there is a tendency to escalate everything’

Daron Acemoglu is frustrated by the artificial intelligence debate — and not because the MIT economist thinks the technology is dangerous.

Although he does think that.

With his nearly unique mixture of frustrated nuance, Acemoglu, who has been warning about the dangers of AI for years, argued in an interview with Fortune that giving into fear is the worst kind of response right now.

While evaluating the opposing camps in the debate, he sounds like the Groucho Marx of Nobel laureates: he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

On one side are the true believers — what he calls “quasi-moderate-friendly” types so convinced that AI is going to be good for everybody with no exception that any challenge to this view “drives them insane.” On the other are the skeptics who refuse to credit AI with any genuine capability, treating the models as “stochastic parrots” generating plausible-sounding noise.

“There are people on the left — or part of the left — that just will refuse any argument that says AI has capabilities, it just drives them insane,” Acemoglu told Fortune .

He sighs: “it’s very unproductive.” He refuses both camps.

“I think you have to really have your head in the sand to think that AI is a stochastic parrot right now,” he said, noting that anyone who uses the models will see that’s just not true.

“But I’m also not willing to go along with some inchoate belief that everything will work out fine.” Frontier models are making genuine advances in comprehension, coding and even scientific and mathematical discoveries — “it’s really great, the way proofs are being done” — and this should be celebrated just as fear of future job loss should be a concern.

“It’s become sort of radical to hold two apparently conflicting ideas in your head at the same time,” he said.

Which is why it’s the perfect time for his book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? to come out.

We are in a time of crisis, he said, and the terms of our AI debate are just like our political system: so angry because it’s been so deeply damaged, for such a long time.

The escalator effect “We live in an environment that’s been partly shaped by social media,” Acemoglu said, “and there is a tendency to escalate everything, because that gets attention.

Politics is like that.