Should We Fear AI? with Philippe Aghion | Markus Academy | Ep. 153

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A summary in four bullets:
In contrast with Acemoglu (2025), Aghion and Bunel (2024) estimate the impact of AI on productivity growth at 0.68% per year; this excludes AI’s additional effect on growth from making ideas easier to find
Market power in cloud, compute, and foundational models risks turning AI into a superstar-firm technology that depresses new firm entry. Competition policy needs to be updated to address the impact of concentration on innovation
So far evidence suggests that AI adoption in firms raises employment via productivity and expansion effects, with displacement concentrated in a small set of highly exposed and substitutable administrative jobs
Education focused on “learning to learn”, flexicurity-style labor market institutions, DARPA-like innovation institutions, and a renewed competition policy will be central in managing AI’s creative destruction and securing Europe’s AI position

On Thursday, December 4, Philippe Aghion joined Markus’ Academy for a conversation on “Should We Fear AI?” Philippe Aghion is The Kurt Björklund Chaired Professor in Innovation and Growth at INSEAD, a professor at Collège de France and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Introductory remarks by Markus Brunnermeier.

Timestamps:
[8:09] New estimates of the impact of AI
[28:02] Superstar firms and renewing AI competition policy
[33:48] AI and employment
[43:43] Conclusion and Q&A