Technology is everywhere and always an unalloyed good. New technologies ultimately create better jobs and more broadly based prosperity. So goes the conventional economic wisdom. But what if it wasn’t true? What if technology had been used — in lieu of strong political and institutional restraints — to put more money in the hands of elites throughout history?

That’s the starting point of Power and Progress, an upcoming book by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, to be published next month. It explores several moments over the last millennium when technology led to the opposite of shared prosperity: agricultural improvements that created almost no benefits for peasants; advances in ship design that allowed the slave trade to grow; and industrial factories that took flexible craft work out of the home and put it under the control of managers who increased working hours and decreased pay. It also addresses more recent developments, such as automation used to micromanage labour — and the coming revolution in AI that may disrupt us all.

These economists are hardly technophobes. It’s probably impossible to be one at MIT, a centre of American innovation. But the two academics take a different approach to the productivity gains of technology and how they get distributed compared with most of their peers. Neoclassical economic theory holds that technological progress always increases average wages. And even if it raises inequality, it ultimately lifts wages at the bottom of the income distribution. Acemoglu and Johnson refer to this idea as the “productivity bandwagon.”