Earlier this week, the Nobel memorial prize in economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, who study how technology and culture mix.

Mokyr is a professor at Northwestern University. He looks at history to understand how open exchanges between scholars and inventors can inspire each other and spur economic growth. Oh, and he’s a regular Marketplace listener, too.

He recently chatted with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio about technological advancements and disruptions. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Well, I'm glad that the culture of growth that you've long written about is here and is in grain. And when you look at the famed hockey stick graph of the economy over centuries, not much, not much — then boom! 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?

Joel Mokyr: 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.

Brancaccio: 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?

Mokyr: Yes, indeed. And you know, I'm actually not worried about — I don't share the sort of 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 before. And I'm all for that. I don't think any of the pessimistic predictions about AI will come true, but I wish I could say the same about institutions and politics.

Brancaccio: Well, I mean, indeed, that does bring us back to your previous point — that institutions and politics would have to evolve along with this technology, so that the technology, for instance, doesn't get abused.

Mokyr: Here is the dilemma: In the past, we've had major technological changes, but that change was relatively slow, and so institutions had the time to adjust, you know. So labor relations changed, the organization, the work changed, and it all worked out reasonably well. But if technological change is very, very quick, then institutions will fall behind. And once that disequilibrium occurs, societies could be in trouble, and things could happen that nobody expects.

Brancaccio: Yeah. And with all this disruption, it's a little hard to plan one's training and career. You've thought about that, right? We just don't know, with technological advances what the big jobs will be.

Mokyr: You always have people who end up on the losing end of the stick. And there's very little you can do, but the alternative is worse, right? So if you have a society which is completely technologically stagnant, in which there is very little progress, I would say what society should do is above all, they should understand that this is happening, and give people perhaps a kind of training that is more flexible, that is more adaptable, that is more agile. So if you are trained for one task and then it turns out to become obsolete, you can easily switch to another task, but it's the price you pay for progress. David, there's no other way.