Microsoft AI Launches The Humanist Review With Acemoglu Essay

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, announced the launch of The Humanist Review, an AI magazine published by the company, in a long post on X on the 6th.

The inaugural issue carries an essay by MIT professor and 2024 Nobel economics laureate Daron Acemoglu as its lead piece. In it, Acemoglu estimates that AI will replace only about 5% of human work over the next decade, and argues that AI should pivot toward "pro-worker AI" that helps people do more work rather than replacing them.

Acemoglu's essay points to earlier transitions for comparison. He cites power plants built in New York and London in 1881, noting that only about half of factories and households used electricity by the 1920s.

He also criticizes concentration in the tech industry, noting that seven big tech companies including Microsoft account for 60% of the Nasdaq. Separately, he writes that Dragon speech recognition software, after repeated acquisitions, ended up with Microsoft in 2022, but consumer products kept being deprioritized, so PC speech recognition today has not improved much since 2000.

Earlier estimates

In February 2025, Suleyman said in an interview that most professional desk work, such as lawyers, accountants, project managers and marketers, would be fully automated by AI within 12-18 months. In a 2024 academic journal, Acemoglu estimated that AI could automate about 20% of all work in the US economy by the end of the 2020s, with about a quarter of that actually automated within ten years, yielding roughly 5%.