The Download: a Nobel winner on AI, and the case for fixing everything

Plus: the first zero-day exploit built by AI has been discovered. A few months before he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. He argued that AI would give only a small boost to US productivity and would not eliminate the need for human work. Two years later, Acemoglu's measured take has not caught on. The technology has advanced quite a bit since his cautious predictions, but the data is still largely on his side. Here are the three things Acemoglu is paying closest attention to in AI right now .