As professor Joseph Stiglitz sees it, AI is not just another technology wave—it’s a force that can erode jobs and hardwire a new era of inequality. That is, unless governments and institutions deliberately push it in a different direction.
AI lets firms strip labor out of production, concentrate profits at the top, and push the risks of transition onto workers and the public—exactly the trajectory the Nobel laureate warns about in his 2024 book, the recently reissued The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. Now, the economics professor argued in a recent interview with Fortune, AI is emerging as a textbook case of how technology can turbocharge inequality.
