Sure, the economics profession and its popularisers might be a little more incentivised by political aims and AI research and AI's hypers and commercialisers a little more by money, but both fields suffer from the fact whilst researchers agonise over tradeoffs between tractability and predictive accuracy and fitting and overfitting and wonder whether the class of problem they're looking at is even soluble, the people with the most confidence in their assertions tend to get the column inches, even if they barely know what they're talking about.
I only wonder whether it will ultimately lead to similarly widespread middlebrow dismissals[1] of the entire field of AI...
[1]for the avoidance of doubt, not an accusation I'm levelling at the poster above
It's not like economists don't know there are problems in distribution of wealth -- one of the most discussed papers last year (see these podcasts [1] [2]) talks about the effects of China massively expanding trade with the US in early 2000s on some parts of the country.
Pretty much everyone has known for half a century what trade does, there's a political and logistical problem in redistribution, though (counties tend to get devastated, and people don't like to move).
Interestingly, trade has extremely similar labor market effects to automation.
[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/03/david_autor_on_1.ht...
[2] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-eat-americas-jobs/
As just one simple example, good old Hekscher-Olin trade theory (a neat general equilibrium model with 2 countries, 2 goods, and 2 factors of production, capital and labor) "shows" that free trade is a good thing, leading to a Pareto improvement.
But of course, that's predicated on a whole host of assumptions that might or might not hold, and furthermore predicated on the assumption that the "winners" compensate the "losers", through redistribution.
So, the economic case for free trade more or less includes the case for redistribution and compensation of those negatively affected by it - but that's often conveniently left out by proponents.