When you think about it, this second assumption is both terrifying and ahistoric. In the paperback edition of their 2023 book, “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity,” Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, two M.I.T. economists, point out that the lesson of earlier economic transformations is: “you can’t stop technological change, but you can shape it.” In early British textile factories, women and children worked twelve-plus-hour days in unsanitary environments. It took the advent of factory legislation to shorten the workday and improve working conditions. And in many countries, including the United States, the rise of labor unions was a key factor in insuring that technology-driven productivity gains fed through to wage increases and expanded employment benefits as well as higher profits. The Treaty of Detroit, a five-year wage contract agreed upon by General Motors and the United Auto Workers in 1950, made this compact explicit.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter