Towards Life 3.0: Power and Productivity | The Role of Technology in Political Economy

my name is yokai benkler I'm a law

professor at Harvard Law School and

co-director of the Berkman client center

for Internet and Society at the

University

well robots eliminate all jobs well

platform make us all precarious workers

how do we think about the role of

Technology in shaping markets and

shaping power in society the dominant

approach in the last 40 years has been

what's called skills bias technical

change it takes technology as moving to

the beat of its own drum and markets as

more or less efficient

so as automation and artificial

intelligence became better and now in

the future we'll become better it makes

people whose skills are relatively

routine less valuable and markets price

those less valuable people less and so

you have a hollowing out of the middle

class this has been the dominant view

across policy circles but it turns out

empirically to be false it doesn't

describe correctly how differences

between different societies at the time

technological frontier in Europe in

Japan in the u.s. having fact evolved it

doesn't explain the differences between

what happened to patterns of inequality

and wages in the 80s and 90s and 2000's

and since in the United States it's a

just so story that fits some of the data

but not all of it

instead increasingly what we're learning

is that the primary drivers in the past

and in the present were institutional so

we have a whole set of institutions that

now explain better and we're left with

the question of what technology really

does rather than imagining individuals

who are rational and self-interested

operating under perfect information as

the core model instead we have to

understand that individuals or

socialized or ideas about what's

valuable and not what are not valuable

or tastes as it were are functions of

ideology or knowledge

free and Technology is a material

context in which we make these choices

what we see essentially when we look

back at the past 40 years and when we

project forward is that firms and

individuals act strategically in market

relations to essentially grab a bigger

chunk of the pie every bit as much as

they're trying to increase productivity

they will create technological

innovations that give them power over

competitors in order to increase their

rents to understand what consumers are

doing and then to manipulate their

behavior in order to control demand so

institutions technology and ideology

interact to shape the bargaining power

the market power the political power of

all of the parties and they all

constantly trade-off productivity the

ability to compete and be the most

productive for power and the ability to

extract the largest rent this model

offers a much better fit with the actual

observations of what we've seen in the

last four years yes we've seen

tremendous growth in technology but

productivity growth is actually

substantially lower than it was in the

past

business dynamism is substantially lower

than it was in the past concentration

and monopolization are higher than they

were and markups or the rents the

proportion of profit that comes from

rents is also higher all changing since

the 1980s together at the same time

we've seen increased inequality

particularly at the top one percent so

the explanation of technology developing

but not being translated into

productivity but instead being

translated into extraction is much

better explained by a model than

understand technology as an arena of

struggle over bargaining power in

markets then as a efficient response to

markets that purely focuses innovation

and it's that model that we need to

embrace in order to be able to diagnose

how tomorrow things will change whether

robots will displace work

and create only a small number of

winners or whether automation and AI can

enable a larger number of people at one

level human rights probably act in the

most important way as ideological tropes

as ways in which to frame a relationship

that will influence the more at the same

time it's critically important to

understand that winning on rights

specifically on the specific legal

doctrines is not enough because it is

relatively easy for firms for

governments to reorganize their actual

practices the other laws the

organizational routines the technologies

that get deployed to evade the effects

of law in its narrowest sense and so

understanding that human rights can

serve in important ways as aspirations

in really important ways as as ideology

as norms that shape what's acceptable to

do but not to fall into the trap of

imagining that by winning one case or

another designing a particular rule or

adding a particular set of words to a

treaty you will actually implement in

the world the world actually is a

function of a much more complex

interaction between institutions like

human rights ideas and technology than a

pure law focused answer will give you