Daron Acemoğlu's Speech at UBS, February 2025

What do you think? 

February 2025

July 2024

February 2025

Did Daron Acemoğlu reply to me, plagiarize from me, or copy me? Which one happened at the UBS Speech in Zurich, February 2025?

Above you saw that I have included two screenshots of his video and the cover of my book Digitalism vs. Capitalism, printed by Amazon KDP on July 28, 2024, which has a part criticizing Daron Acemoğlu’s approach to institutions and technology, beside the Harari, Suleyman, the Economist, and Varoufakis approaches. Is DA following me?

Daron Acemoğlu gave a speech about technology and said that whoever controls the technology controls the world. Not exactly he mentioned technology in this sentence, per se, but he said, "Whoever controls Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), controls the world." His whole speech was devoted to technological progress and how it made the world miserable, defending capitalists who tried much to spread out the prosperity despite technology. Some highlights of his speech were groundless and an imitation of what I had written in my book Digitalism vs. Capitalism and very opposite to what he has theorized before, which gave him the Swiss Central Bank’s Nobel Prize.

He is fond of banks. The UBS Center for Economics in Society, or UBS Center in short, is an Associated Institute at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich. It was established in 2012, enabled by a founding donation by UBS, which the bank made on the occasion of its 150th anniversary. In view of the generous donation, the university named the UBS Center after its benefactor.

In his speech, he did not mention INSTITUTIONS as the controlling agents to prosperity; instead, POWER was. CHOICE seems to have lost its aura in Daron Acemoğlu's paradigm... All of a sudden he became a technological determinist, as a recent Nobelist. Alfred was one of the technologists, wasn't he?

Acemoğlu was announced by UBS as such: “Artificial intelligence has lately been reshaping nearly every sector of the economy, raising profound questions about the future of work, wealth, and power. Will these advancements enhance the intelligence and performance of human beings, or will they deepen inequality and keep on establishing power among a privileged few? In his lecture at UZH, Nobel laureate Daron Acemoğlu highlights the necessity of implementing suitable AI regulations to benefit society.”

First of all, technology does not enhance “the deepening inequality or keep on establishing power for a privileged few.” These are done by capitalists (or kingdoms, empires, states), not by technology. Secondly, technology is the extension of human intelligence towards space and time; it is not controlled by the capitalists, states, or hegemonic classes. Thirdly, the power classes use technology and reproduce it as they see appropriate to exert their power. Hammer and Abacus were two of the first artificial intelligences of HOMOFABER. No wonder why China produced Deepseek, which might end capitalism into a deepsheet.

All human gatherings took a radical phase after capitalism. This industrial revolution (technology), starting around the 1500s with mechanical textile spinning wheels and steam engines and ending today with artificial intelligence, marks the beginning of digitalism. Capitalism is now withering away with intrinsic ways of production sealed with digital outputs and changing the capitalist commodity/“exchange value” into "use value of goods and services." In digitalism, there are and will be abundant goods and services that only have use value and no exchange value. Also, accumulation of capital which enables exploitation from surplus value is now phasing away. This is the end of the "capitalist mode of production." We are entering the "digital mode of production and consumption." This is why the main reason I equate the recent revolution as the digital hunter-gatherer revolution. History always repeats itself in a higher form, technology.

(See: Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit, Ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling, International Publishers 1974, and Karl Marx, Wage, Labour, and Capital,  Intro: F. Engels, International Publishers 1973.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISEDCbGsOcE&t=9s https://www.ubscenter.uzh.ch/de/index.html

Scroll down and see other criticisms of Daron Acemoğlu, et al.