Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

A postmortem of the thought of power as it is unfolding, changing its contours for the common people as well as those who wish to understand it but have no means to approach it.

AI has come and technical Progress cannot be reversed.How to use AI wisely.Very contemporary.

Power and Progress is better viewed as a polemic against AI and big tech than as a work of academic scholarship. Its policy prescriptions are the same big-government solutions that progressives have been pushing for decades.

Blind techno optimism, like any kind of blind faith, doesn't sound like a good idea. To that end, the book definitely opens one's eyes through interesting examples and various historical perspectives that raise concerns and alarm us to the need of understanding technological trends and aligning policies and institutions to try to maximize and to broaden the societal benefits while containing the undesirable effects.

It is very difficult to cover these topics in a single book, but it was perfectly done by the authors. Explaining the past and discussing the future, the content knowledge is very powerful in the right hands. If you are interested to know what is behind business and governamental decisions, this is the right book.

Good

Leaving aside the last part of the book, plenty of suggestions and ideas from the author that might be more subjective than anything, the historical analysis side is pretty circumstanced and interesting. Accessible to most, it shouldn't be read in isolation, especially if you're interested in the subject, but rather being the beginning point of more in depth analysis of the current debate on technological regulations, through focused papers and academic work, even and particularly those who suggest opposite ideas from those of Acemoglu!

While I would happily give "Why Nations Fail" 4.5 stars, and "The Narrow Corridor" 3.5 stars, this book fails on all counts.Societal development (from a political and institutional angle and from community traditions and norms) can be illustrated using a wide ranging series of examples to illustrate communalities and differences.Where this book fails, howerver, is that neither 'technology' or 'progress' are used consistently which makes the use of supposedly illustrative examples a hotchpotch of anecdotes without explanatory power.