In the last few years, artificial intelligence
has made massive leaps in capability and ease of
use. The rise of tools like Chatgpt and
Midjourney have created a way for anyone to
create essays, art and other types of content
without needing the individual skill and
training normally associated with these
tasks.
I think they signal the beginning of a road
that will see many technological
breakthroughs that will be based on AI
technologies like machine learning.
This sort of generative technology that's
currently out there uses data largely that's been
scraped from the Web.
So my blogs, your blogs, anyone listening who's
written stuff online since roughly 2004, their
work is potentially swept up in this.
The legal and societal consequences of this
rapid emergence of AI could shake the economy
to its core.
For myself, as both an economist, as an
engineer, I'm absolutely shocked at the rate at
which some of these generative content
mechanisms are improving. There's also
been a long standing debate. What's the impact
likely to be on the workforce?
These new AI tools are facing legal pressure
from lawsuits, and legislators are also
voicing their concern about what I could mean
for the economy. Leaders in the tech sector have
even advocated for a so-called AI pause to
slow down the emerging technologies that could
potentially cause wide scale disruption to
multiple industries.
If someone is sitting right here, is the
implication there that Microsoft is being
irresponsible? Because we know that being AI is
not perfect and we know that Google's own product
is not perfect. So are they waiting for
perfection or is this just kind of an excuse
because they're behind?
Are these AI tools the next industrial
revolution or a high tech Pandora's box?
Several companies have already embraced forms of
AI as a way forward in a competitive marketplace,
while others are taking a wait and see approach
over concerns about copyright and potential
problems with some AI systems.
Educators remain concerned about students
using AI to complete assignments, but it's
possible learning how to use these tools could set
some up for careers as so-called prompt
engineers who understand how to get the most out
of these AI systems.
Putting in prompts helps guide the AI towards the
final output.
The interaction between humans and AI will become
more and more prevalent as we move forward.
Then we will see that they can be really good
because they can increase our
productivity, our efficiency.
Is there a case where you could say, Alex, that why
do I need to Google or Bing something if I've
got AI? Why don't I just say, hey, whatever, phone
or wristwatch? What are the best three
restaurants around where I'm standing right now?
Problems like incorrect or entirely made up
citations, so-called hallucinations by AI and
other problems could put businesses that deploy
this new tech in potential hot water,
negating the advantage they hope to enjoy.
The language models are now providing the news
soaked up from from the journalists without
compensation, then the journalists can't make
money, which means they get replaced essentially
by language models that then can't even be
trained on the content.
That would be correct.
And so more and more start making up things as
well.
Some of the most at risk jobs, according to a
report by Goldman Sachs, are Office,
administration, legal and business and
financial operations.
On the other end of the spectrum, production
repair and cleaning and maintenance jobs are in a
safer position.
The prospect of a runaway evil eye has been
explored in countless science fiction books and
movies. And when things like fake images of the
former president getting arrested go viral, it can
reinforce the view that AI tools are dangerous in
the wrong hands.
Now that AI enabled forms of manipulation are so
accessible and the products that they
produce are so convincing, the burden of
determining what is factual and what is not
really falls on the individual at this point.
You can always misuse technology in order to
create harm, and therefore we need
regulation. We need regulatory measures which
will increase transparency.
Some governments around the world are considering
legislation and Italy has even banned chatgpt.
Right now there are no institutions that exist
to regulate or to contain these
technologies and the companies themselves that
create the tools and that and that control
them are not providing any any semblance of
self-regulation.
If you look at North American laws, especially
US law, it's really hard to see anything that
would be very effective against the kinds of
abuse that we're worried about. Here in Europe,
the largest digital platforms are going to be
subject to something called the Digital
Services Act, and that would require them to
make an annual assessment of risks
associated with their technology, risks to
human rights in particular, and to come
back with measures to mitigate those risks in
an annual reporting on how effective their
measures have been.
So that might actually go a fair way towards
addressing these issues. Whether it goes far
enough, we probably won't know until we have
some experience with it.
It's probably in the right direction.
A recent report by Goldman Sachs laid out
some stark possibilities when it comes to AI in
the economy. The report estimates that two thirds
of jobs in the US and Europe and 300 million
jobs worldwide could be exposed to automation
from new AI advances.
The report also notes that some of these
potential job losses could be offset by new
jobs that would emerge in this post AI world.
If you go back to Ben Franklin's Times, you
know, everybody was a farmer practically.
And today the fraction of the workforce that's
farmers is pretty darn small.
And yet it hasn't caused massive unemployment.
New technology gave rise to new opportunities, new
opportunities, gave rise to new jobs.
That's very likely to be the case here.
When we're talking about large language models, we
can also talk about specific occupations
related to word processing, translation
typing a lot.
However, consider on the other side a lawyer that
goes to the court to defend the client.
So we are going to higher income jobs.
So I could be of a tremendous help there.
I can prepare help you prepare this big pile of
documents, combine different pieces of
information and advice and provide also all the
evidence together so that the lawyer can go to
the court and be more efficient in defending
their client.
Even if 300 million jobs aren't exposed to
automation from this new jump in AI capability,
it's still likely that some industries will face
a new wave of disruption in the coming years.
Some companies are already leaning into new
AI tools to increase productivity.
What exactly the new jobs will be is not so clear,
but they're likely to be there.
At the same time, it's fair to say very nearly
all jobs are in the process of being
transformed by new technology.
And that's going to have important implications
for lots of things.
Misinformation in the use of AI, tools to create
and respond to newsworthy events will be
a new arena of concern.
We need to be diligent when we consume our
content on the Internet, because even when we
consume a piece of media that we know to be false,
but it represents something that perhaps we
fear or perhaps we desire, or perhaps we,
you know, a reality that isn't in fact, our own,
that can elicit an emotional reaction where
emotional creatures being able to moderate
your our collective reactions to false
content and understand the fact that even once
something is disproven, it may still in fact be
internalized, is an important thing to
understand moving forward.
The issue of bias in algorithms is another
thorny issue that tech companies will have to
deal with.
So there are two two massive issues of bias,
one being the skew of who's represented and the
other and the other one being around the sort of
language that we use to talk about different
subpopulations like women.
The issue with the former is that I don't
think people understand it and I don't know that
companies understand it.
They like to sort of say that because they're
sampling from the Internet that this is a
representation of humanity as a whole.
Instead of paying attention to the fact
that the demographics of the Internet is not a
reflection of humanity as a.
Whole, it's possible these tools could also
allow for smaller payrolls as fewer
employees are needed.
This is something we observe also in past
industrial revolutions, technological
breakthroughs. So it employment is not under
threat, but it is just that we will see some
shifts on employment from one job to the other
because these technological advances
can have a pervasive impact.