When new technology changes the world, is it worth all the intense disruption? We consult an authoritative source.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. We begin our program here with a conversation with a marketplace listener.

He spends a lot of time about a half hour north on the train from Chicago. Oh, and he won the Nobel Economics Prize this week.

Joel Mokier is a professor at Northwestern University, who, along with fellow Nobel winners, Philippe Agion and Peter Howitt, studies how technology and culture mix.

Mokure himself looks at history to understand how open exchanges between scholars and people who make things

inspire each other for enduring economic growth. Professor Mokier, first of all, congratulations.

Thank you so much. Well, I'm glad that the culture of growth that you've long written about

is here and is ingrain. And when you look at the famed hockey stick graph of the economy over

centuries, not much, not much. Then boom, it up, it goes with innovation. It all seems like

it's here to stay, this culture of growth. But what's your view? Could we still mess this up?

Count on the human race to mess things up. It's institutions that screw up.

That, I think, is a huge concern because if institutions don't improve, while technology

improves, you're giving more and more power to people who are likely to abuse and

misuse it.

Yeah, and a new challenge emerging, right?

The emergence of this revolutionary technology, artificial intelligence.

One expects it to increase economic growth, but you also want the other piece of this,

not just growth, but indeed prosperity, right?

Yes, indeed.

And, you know, I'm actually not worried about, I don't share this

apocalyptic view of artificial intelligence, that it's going to replace the human race. And, you know,

I think AI is another tool for us to do research. And it will make our knowledge, you know, much more advanced, much faster than it did

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