Two-class future warning: Acemoglu says you can't stop AI, but you can redirect it

On Oksijen TV, host Uğur Koçbaş speaks with MIT Institute Professor and 2024 Nobel laureate in economics Daron Acemoglu about his new book What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity, published in Turkish as Hangi Liberal Demokrasi. The conversation opens with the sharpest line: the gravest risk is AI developing beyond public control, deepening inequality and locking in a two-tier order between a narrow circle that controls the technology and everyone else.

Why Is Liberal Democracy in Crisis?

For Acemoglu, the rise of the far right in France, the AfD winning power at the state level in Germany and the ascent of Reform UK in Britain are not isolated episodes; these movements live off the space liberal democracy provides while eroding its foundations, and their appeal comes less from the strength of their own programs than from liberal democracy failing to deliver on its promises. He says the book devotes about a third to liberalism's historical achievements and a third to how the crisis accumulated: after the Soviet Union dissolved many expected a steady spread of functioning democracies, yet a generation later the opposite mood prevails, as a philosophy born to challenge power struggled once it became the establishment, could not manage digital shocks and turned its back on core commitments in the postindustrial economy.

The Sewer Metaphor: When Is Democracy Loved?

The most memorable image is a sewer metaphor attributed to an English poet. People love democracy and a working sewer system for the same reason, Acemoglu argues: not just because they can cast a vote but because they expect tangible things from politics. Public services such as sewers, roads, education, health and security, plus a market that creates opportunity, jobs, rising pay and shared growth, are the real test. When those arrive, support holds; when they falter, trust erodes quickly.

Why do citizens look outside the system? He points to two reinforcing channels. First, unmet promises: sharper inequality and public services that no longer work as they once did. Second, the feeling of not being heard, common in the United States, Britain and France. The complaint is sometimes overstated but not groundless, and it feeds the protest vote.

Why Did Workers Drift Away from the Center?

That feeling is rooted in the unraveling of old coalitions. For decades workers, farmers and the middle layers carried the center left, from Labour in Britain to the Democrats in the United States and social democrats across Scandinavia. From the 1970s onward, first in the United States and then in Europe, a highly educated, big-city, globalized cohort grew and gradually came to dominate the center left; today university graduates in cities form the core of that electorate while workers lean more toward the center right and the far right. The split, in his account, reflects how left parties stopped listening to workers on both economic and cultural questions and often excluded them, even when their names still said workers party.

What Does Working-Class Liberalism Propose?

The final part of the book is seen as radical for this reason: place workers at the heart of liberal thought and make job creation, rising wages and fairly shared growth the central pillars rather than decorative extras. Around those pillars a new governing philosophy can be built, and from there a broad coalition and a renewal of liberalism become plausible. Is that a return to roots or a new ideology? Acemoglu notes that 18th- and 19th-century liberal thinkers were both brilliant and elitist, some warm to democracy and some hostile, so the dilemmas need resolution; the task is twofold, to leave past mistakes behind while adapting ideas to a postindustrial, digital society where AI is central, and whether the result is called an ideology or a governing philosophy is left to debate.

Fallibility, Culture and Polarization

He argues liberal democracy works best when it is pluralistic, non-dogmatic and respectful of different communities. In recent years left liberalism in many countries adopted a tone of certainty on cultural questions, treating less educated groups as if their values were wrong and needed correction. Amplified by social media and right-wing populists, that tone hardened polarization in the United States and Europe. The pattern is visible in Turkey as well despite a later digital transition, and the call to recenter workers applies there too.

On AI, he distances himself from two easy slogans associated with figures like Bernie Sanders: stop the technology or expect firms to share profits. Stopping AI is extremely hard and costly, and if the path stays locked on automation, profit sharing gives way to the gradual displacement of workers. The left is right to warn that inequality beyond a threshold corrodes society and that worker discontent matters.

The alternative he advances is AI that augments rather than replaces, raising productivity and strengthening what workers can do, helping people take on new tasks and improve problem solving while still creating value together with machines. That direction does not emerge on its own; it is a design choice shaped by incentives and institutions. He therefore sees value in the energy coming from the left when combined with an inclusive cultural stance, stressing that this is not a turn to the right, whose own illiberal examples such as Reform UK and the AfD are far from inclusive.

Asked whether any political movement already embodies this program, he cites a few centrist figures in Britain and the United States who emphasize inequality and public services, mentioning profiles akin to John Ossoff in the United States, yet he argues the deeper need is an organic, philosophical and democratic dynamic rather than a single charismatic leader, saying one reason the book was written quickly is to feed that wider conversation and noting he does not present his own views as infallible. A connection is drawn to Francis Fukuyama's book published about a week later, which argues people want not only welfare but recognition, and that populism turns attractive when that need goes unmet. Acemoglu finds the summary close to his own point about shared growth, services and voice, but adds that voice cannot stay symbolic; it must enable communities to govern themselves and translate into jobs and prosperity. The conversation closes by restating the hierarchy of AI risks: he does not rule out sci-fi extinction as a possibility but does not see it as the largest danger, with the larger risk being a small set of firms and leaders growing vastly more powerful while sixty to eighty percent of society is left without meaningful work or confined to jobs with little contribution and regard, a picture already hinted at by how the highest earners and prestige clustered around technology over three decades, with a handful of engineers receiving offers worth hundreds of millions while many struggle, and social separation visible in assortative marriage, neighborhoods and low contact across education levels, suggesting a two-tier structure in incubation. On education he rejects the idea that everyone must go to university, arguing that just as doctors and dentists need continuous training, electricians, plumbers and nurses benefit more from vocational and lifelong learning than from four years of general university, that a diploma should not remain the sole measure of status and that the need for ongoing learning only grows with AI; finally, on his spat with The Economist, he says the critique felt unthoughtful and links it to a publication line that hypes AI and reacts sharply to critical perspectives.