AI, innovation, and welfare: A conversation with Joseph E. Stiglitz

Technological innovation has driven humanity’s rapidly advancing living standards since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Artificial intelligence (AI) and related emerging technologies offer the promise of another wave of heightened social welfare. However, technological innovations sometimes extract rents and destroy value rather than creating widespread benefits. In addition, these innovations may have large, inexorable distributive effects.

On March 7, Anton Korinek, David M. Rubenstein fellow at the Center on Regulation and Markets in Brookings’ Economic Studies program, and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz discussed how to ensure innovation creates value and increases social welfare. They examined types of innovation to avoid, how to steer technological advancement in a desirable direction for society, and how to design a regulatory framework that pursues these objectives building on their research on AI and Its Implications for Income Distribution and Unemployment and Steering Technological Progress.

This event was part of the Brookings Center on Regulations and Markets’ series, “The economics and regulation of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies,” which focuses on analyzing how AI and other emerging technologies impact the economy, markets, and society, and how they can be regulated most effectively.

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