Boston University MFA in Visual Narrative Program
Who benefits from AI? New comic explores technology’s impact on labor
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When MIT economists and published “Power and Progress” in May 2023, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had been available for less than six months. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was calling artificial intelligence “the biggest, the best, and the most important” of the technology revolutions.
But best for whom? In “Power and Progress,” Acemoglu and Johnson (who shared the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James A. Robinson) argue that technological improvement does not automatically bestow its benefits on all people. Shared prosperity, they write, is the result of societies deliberately steering the direction of technological innovation and implementation so that productivity and economic gains improve the well-being of workers and society at large.
Now the ideas from “Power and Progress” have been adapted into a comic book that focuses on who will benefit from gains driven by AI. Illustrating a conversation between a historian and her AI assistant, the 20-page comic examines historical instances of technological change and its effect on workers. It then looks at the change underway today as AI proliferates throughout global industries, threatening to replace workers.
“The good news is that incredible tools are available to us today,” the historian explains. “Pro-worker AI could be steered towards creating new tasks, providing better information, and building platforms of collaboration.”
“Power and Progress: The Mini-Comic!” is available free from MIT’s Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, where Acemoglu and Johnson are faculty co-directors. The comic was developed in collaboration with the Boston University College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Visual Narrative program, led by Joel Christian Gill.
Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor of economics in the Department of Economics at MIT and is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research.
Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT Sloan, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. He is also a research affiliate at MIT’s Blueprint Labs.
In 2024, Acemoglu and Johnson, along with James A. Robinson, received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” The pair are also co-faculty directors at MIT’s Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work.
