Happy Nice Mall

Yet technological change has flourished as growth in post-secondary education slows and companies begin to spend less on training their employees. “When technology, education and training go together, you achieve shared prosperity,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “Otherwise, you won’t.”

Increasing international trade tended to encourage companies to adopt automation strategies. For example, companies worried about low-cost competition from Japan and later China invested in machinery to replace workers.

The next wave of technology today is artificial intelligence. And Mr. Acemoglu and others say it can be used primarily to help workers, make them more productive or replace them.

Mr. Acemoğlu, like some other economists, has changed his perspective on technology over time. In economic theory, technology is an almost magical ingredient that both increases the size of the economic pie and enriches nations. He remembered working on a textbook containing standard theory more than a decade ago. Soon after, as I researched further, he had second thoughts.

“It’s a very restrictive way of thinking,” he said. “I should have been more open-minded.”

Mr. Acemoğlu is not an enemy of technology. He states that his innovations are essential to addressing society’s biggest challenges, such as climate change, and ensuring economic growth and rising living standards. His wife, Asuman Özdağlar, is the head of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

But as Mr. Acemoğlu delved deeper into the economic and demographic data, the displacement effects of technology became more and more evident. “They were bigger than I thought,” he said. “It made me less optimistic about the future.”

Mr. Acemoglu’s estimate that half or more of the growing wage gap over the past decades is due to technology was published last year with Pascual Restrepo, an economist at Boston University. The conclusion was based on analysis of demographic and business data detailing the declining share of economic output that goes to workers as wages and the increase in spending on machinery and software.