Opinion | Will A.I. Be a Creator or a Destroyer of Worlds? – The New York Times

The advent of A.I. artificial intelligence is spurring curiosity and fear. Will A.I. be a creator or a destroyer of worlds?

In Can We Have Pro-Worker A.I.? Choosing a Path of Machines in Service of Minds, three economists at M.I.T., Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and Simon Johnson, looked at this epochal innovation last year:

The private sector in the United States is currently pursuing a path for generative A.I. that emphasizes automation and the displacement of labor, along with intrusive workplace surveillance. As a result, disruptions could lead to a potential downward cascade in wage levels, as well as inefficient productivity gains.

Before the advent of artificial intelligence, automation was largely limited to blue-collar and office jobs using digital technologies while more complex and better-paying jobs were left untouched because they require flexibility, judgment and common sense.

Now, Acemoglu, Autor and Johnson wrote, A.I. presents a direct threat to those high-skill jobs: A major focus of A.I. research is to attain human parity in a vast range of cognitive tasks and, more generally, to achieve artificial general intelligence that fully mimics and then surpasses capabilities of the human mind.

The three economists make the case that

There is no guarantee that the transformative capabilities of generative A.I. will be used for the betterment of work or workers. The bias of the tax code, of the private sector generally, and of the technology sector specifically, leans toward automation over augmentation.

But there are also potentially powerful A.I.-based tools that can be used to create new tasks, boosting expertise and productivity across a range of skills. To redirect A.I. development onto the human-complementary path requires changes in the direction of technological innovation, as well as in corporate norms and behavior. This needs to be backed up by the right priorities at the federal level and a broader public understanding of the stakes and the available choices. We know this is a tall order.

Tall is an understatement.

In an email elaborating on the A.I. paper, Acemoglu contended that artificial intelligence has the potential to improve employment prospects rather than undermine them:

It is quite possible to leverage generative A.I. as an informational tool that enables various different types of workers to get better at their jobs and perform more complex tasks. If we are able to do this, this would help create good, meaningful jobs, with wage growth potential, and may even reduce inequality. Think of a generative A.I. tool that helps electricians get much better at diagnosing complex problems and troubleshoot them effectively.

This, however, is not where we are heading, Acemoglu continued:

The preoccupation of the tech industry is still automation and more automation, and the monetization of data via digital ads. To turn generative A.I. pro-worker, we need a major course correction, and this is not something thats going to happen by itself.

Acemoglu pointed out that unlike the regional trade shock that decimated manufacturing employment after China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, The kinds of tasks impacted by A.I. are much more broadly distributed in the population and also across regions. In other words, A.I. threatens employment at virtually all levels of the economy, including well-paid jobs requiring complex cognitive capabilities.

Four technology specialists Tyna Eloundou and Pamela Mishkin, both on the staff of OpenAI, with Sam Manning, a research fellow at the Centre for the Governance of A.I., and Daniel Rock at the University of Pennsylvania provided a detailed case study on the employment effects of artificial intelligence in their 2023 paper, GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models.

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Opinion | Will A.I. Be a Creator or a Destroyer of Worlds? - The New York Times