Joel Mokyr: AI could narrow inequality as it reshapes work
Mokyr’s optimism about access to knowledge, Sarah Levy’s changing hiring plans, and Zeev Farbman’s vision for universities at the Hebrew University’s AI gathering.
"It says in the Book of Genesis that humans were created in the image of God. And when I listen to people talk about AI, sometimes I get the impression that we have created a god in the image of humans."
Professor Joel Mokyr, the 2025 Nobel laureate in economics, spoke at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s event inaugurating its Federman Centre for Artificial Intelligence. As far as he is concerned, AI is simply a tool. A tool with extraordinary properties, but nothing more. He doesn't even like the word "agent", because it conveys something human, and it was hard to miss that this was a direct reply to Yuval Noah Harari, who had spoken an hour earlier about the "sociology of AI".
He built his case on the first law of the historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg: technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. Then he added that Rabbi Akiva had said much the same 2,000 years ago: "All is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given." AI will change everything, so it isn't neutral. For better or worse? That is up to us.
What surprised me most was his optimism about inequality. He acknowledges that a few people have made "obscene" fortunes from AI, but he reckons that in the long run AI will actually narrow the gaps. Building the technology may cost a fortune, yet anyone can use it for a ridiculously low price. The upshot, says the Nobel laureate, is that the knowledge gap between the educated elite and everyone else is shrinking, and the bargaining power of doctors, lawyers and engineers is weakening. "Your kid is sick. Who do you call? Your doctor, or ChatGPT? I can call ChatGPT and know almost as much as my doctor. Now, it's not so good if you're a doctor, but it's good if you're a patient. And there are more patients than doctors."
On the panel I moderated with two Hebrew University alumni who are building this industry, Dr Zeev Farbman, co-founder of Lightricks, and Sarah Levy, founder and CEO of an enterprise-data start-up Euno, I heard two things that stayed with me. Levy said her company now has ten developers, where it once would have needed thirty or forty, and that over the coming year she doesn't plan to hire a single developer, only salespeople. She also warned about something she sees in organisations: people employed to tidy up the environment for the robots, cleaning up after them and setting their rules. "It's insane, because we brought the robots in to help us in the first place."
I asked Farbman what will be left of academia. Universities, he suggested, may step back from the race and from being a factory for professionals. They could become less of a factory and more of a medieval monastery: a place where a group of people has the privilege of thinking without running.
