We keep hearing we can't be 'competitive' without hugging AI, & yet a growing body of research asserts this is in fact bovine manure.

Check out this steely take from Nobel Laureate (Econ) Daron Acemoglu:

"[...]roughly 0.55% in total factor productivity gains is what AI will actually deliver over the next decade, a fraction of Wall Street’s euphoric projections."

He insists what we should really b focusing on is that AI is simply about vastly extending corporate power

https://fortune.com/2026/06/21/nobel-laureate-daron-acemoglu-ai-productivity-capitalism-democracy/

Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu on the ‘brainless’ AI discourse, the myth of capitalism and the Gen Z revolution risk

The MIT economist and Nobel Prize winner doesn't mince words: most of what you're reading about AI is wrong, and the stakes for getting it right are existential.

Fortune
TBH the 'revolution risk' he talks about sounds pretty good around about now. Bring it on I reckon.

It is good to hear this from a well studied and celebrated economist.

It reminds us that what you are doing when you are letting 'agenticAI' etc into your workplace, community spaces, culture at large, is helping extend (US) corporate power (and in so doing, the US gov).

While you have been engineered by the market to believe otherwise, you are not necessarily better off using these tools. You have instead been tooled, and you're not getting paid for it.

Big AI is first and foremost a trojan

Sure there's a lot of healthy skepticism around productivity & AI, but what of reputational damage from using it?

It's surely a thing in the arts, where the ballooning distaste around genAI is making it a risk to use in your practice (bit like NFT's, who remembers).

In my own arcane tech circles I'm starting to see murmurs of the same, where to do vibe coding is to mark yourself, tainting trust of peers.

I'll guess we'll see what the 'costs' are of the broader cultural fallout.

Yes Fortune magazine is a generally conservative publication, just as this economist is a neoliberal centrist.

I agree with some of what he says, & disagree with some too.

But that's not the point. Zoom out a bit and you'll see that having a celebrated neoliberal economist dissing the AI productivity myth is a weather report, one that investors will be listening to.

His views are a sign of a bubble approaching maximum waistline, if ever there was one.