This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,  sign up here . A few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what Big Tech CEOs had been promising—an overhaul of all white-collar work—Acemoglu estimated that AI would give only a small boost to US productivity and would not obviate the need for human work. It’s okay at automating certain tasks, he wrote, but some jobs will be perfectly fine. Two years later, Acemoglu’s measured take has not caught on. Chatter about an AI jobs apocalypse pops up everywhere from Senator Bernie Sanders’s rallies to conversations I overhear in line at the grocery store. Some previously skeptical economists have gotten more open to the idea that something seismic could be coming with AI.…