The missed opportunity in the AI boom | ABC News Daily Podcast

hi I'm Melissa Clark coming to you fromgaryland this is ABC News Daily[Music]artificial intelligence is disruptingand Transforming Our working lives butwhile it holds the Promise of Greaterproductivity as machines take over thetasks of sorting assessing and analyzingfrom the human brain it could alsothreaten a wide range of jobs and makeincome inequality even worsetoday Professor Bhaskar chakravorty thedean of global business at TuftsUniversity in the United States on howworried we should be about the AIRevolutionProfessor chakravorty artificialintelligence has just exploded over thepast year and is really promising totransform Our Lives what is it thatmakes AI so powerful I think AI ispowerful for many many reasons not theleast of which being that it allows usto transfer a whole bunch of tasks toautomated systems and uh in many ways itfrees up human beings from doing thosetasks and in many situations uh thetasks could be so complex that nocombination of humans could actuallyaccomplish that so we could turn thisover to machines and it could processall that information very quickly andhelp us make better choices and thosechoices may have to do with you know bigorganizational decisions or something assimple as correcting the grammar in asentence right so we know computeralgorithms have been used for a longtime in many ways but the recent shiftin AI is towards generative AI systemslike chat GPT which use machine learninghow is that shift likely to change oureconomy what sort of jobs and work mightbe affectedjust so you know historically the beliefwas that most of the routine jobs youknow if for example uh if you want todrop a contract for the sale of a homewhy do I need a high-priced professionaluh to go through it instead I have an AIsystem that you know pretty much readsthe template and does it so many ofthese routine jobs could potentially uhbe done by the AI systems that was thetraditional belief and still those arethe jobs that are most at risk now withthe appearance of generative AI whatthat has done is raise the possibilitythat a lot of White Collar jobs andthese jobs are people who are in say themarketing functions they produce whitepapers or blogs or they write copy foradvertising uh or even uh you knowpeople who work for analyst houses likeGoldman Sachs and McKinsey many of thosejobs could be taken over by genderdevice system so these are white collarhigher paid jobs which are also at riskforeignthat breadth it really does suggest thatit could be transformative in theeconomy in particular when it comes toproductivity do we have a sense of whatAI might mean for productivity acrossthe economy so if the EI systems aredeployed in areas where you could expectthese systems to you know do things moreefficiently and faster and employ fewerhuman beings taking less time you knowarithmetically that translates intocreative productivity as long as theoutputs of these AI systems are as goodor almost as good as what the humanscould producein some cases the outputs may be evenbetter than what the English group is inwhich case of course there's a you knowhuge jump in productivity so the qualityhere is a really key factor of how muchimpact AI can have absolutely one is thequality the second is of course theacceptance of the rest of society forthe products of these AI generatedsystems so that's another issue becausea lot of humans may not entirely trustsomething that has been delivered byautomation by a chatbot or by analgorithmwe do have other points in theadvancement of technology in our economythat have made some really fundamentalleaps you know the development of theinternet or the penetration ofsmartphones can we gauge anything fromthe introduction of those aspects ofTechnology into our economy to take aguess at how that might see theintroduction of AI play out yeah I thinkthis is a great question because when welook at the history of uh technologyparticularly digital technology and itsimpact on productivity the history is ais a rather confusing guide[Music]interestinglysince you know pretty much uh after thesecond world war you know we saw apretty significant jump in productivityproduction is veryimportant standards of living there willbe diminishing exports to the rest ofthe world and we will fail to do ourduty by mankind wherever mankind mayliveall the way up to the 70s and then rightaround the 70s productivity startedfalling and that was also a coincidentwith the introduction of computers thatfall in productivity continued into the80s as more Computing started enteringthe systemsin a few short years computers havebecome part of our lives and there's nosign of the trend slowing with theAdvent of desktop machines businessmanshopkeepers and so there is a history ofsomewhat of a paradoxical relationshipbetween the introduction of digitaltechnology and productivity and what wefound is that the introduction of newinventions whether it's the internet orthe World Wide Web or even uh you knowsingular products like the Apple iPhonethey may have led to episodic increasesin productivity but not a systemiclong-term increase in productivitynow why do I say that AI is likely to bea different story I think AI because ofthe nature of what AI is supposed to dowhich is essentially you know uh takeover human jobs and then over time dothem even better uh I feel that AI doeshold the promise of actually defeatinghistory and uh increasing uh humanproductivity all right so let's take theoptimistic view and say your assessmentis correct and we do see AI createreally significant improvements toproductivity what will that mean forpeople working in those jobs and thewages they receive yeah so recently anumber of uh very well respectedanalysts like Goldman Sachs and McKinseyhave released studies and uh with sortof eye-watering numbers about you knowhow quickly these productivityimprovements have come modeling byInvestment Bank Goldman Sachs predictsAI will deliver a one and a half percentlift in productivity across the globalWorkforce in the next decade andthere'll be a seven percent the secondthing that uh is important to keep inmind is that increase in productivitydoesn't mean an increase in wages acrossthe boardwhat it means is that those who remainemployed their wages are going to go upbecause they can produce more output forany given hour of work but what thatalso means that there are many peoplewho are going to be laid off and they'llhave to find alternative workand if they can't find alternative worktheir wages are going to go down so thenet effect on everybody's wages is thatit's going to lead to a lot ofinequalitythe people who are likely to be affectedare historically disadvantagedminorities and these could be racialminorities or women who historicallyhave been in many of the routineoccupations that AI is likely todisplace uh earlier rather than later[Music]and what about at a more societal levelor does it also mean that companies andcountries that are heavily investing inAI will also see their power andinfluence increase yeah absolutely manyof these AI decisions they require anenormous amount of computing power sowhat that means is that very fewcompanies are going to be able to affordit and very few companies are actuallybehind all the r d in AI so theconcentration that we're currentlyexperiencing in the tech industry that'sonly going to get worse so that's yetanother outcome of what we're going tosee we're going to see inequality inwage growth we're going to seeinequality in terms of increasingmonopolization of power in the techbusiness and when I say the powers theseare likely to be more in the privatesector rather than in the hands ofgovernments because what we've seen interms of the amount of money that thegovernments are spending and these areeven the big uh AI superpowers like theUnited States and China the amount ofmoney that they're investing in AIdoesn't come close to the amount ofmoney that the Googles and microsofts ofthe world are spendingthere's an enormous interest and aredirection of scarce Resources byscarce resources I mean talent I meandata I mean oversight capabilities a lotof that is being directed towardsgenerate Avi applications and my fear isthat it's going to take these resourcesaway from potentially societally moremeaningful applications of AI and to mymind some of the biggest applicationsare saving human lives whether it is indrug Discovery or in crisis responseduring atsunami AI has been used to track downvictims and and there are lots of otherapplications where human lives have beenaffected by thoughtful deployment of AIand all of that requires further work infurther development and My worry is thatbecause of this obsession withgenerative AI we are potentially losingsight of some of these larger societallymeaningful applicationsis someone who spends a lot of timethinking about AI do you believe theintegration of AI into our lives willmake our lives better are you anoptimist or a pessimist in this casewell ultimately I'm an optimist but theparts to optimism you know is uh youknow many uh sojourns in pessimisminvention after invention we struggledto integrate them into our lives in facteven when the printing press first cameabout and books uh became a thing peopleworried that everyone would becomestupid because they wouldn't know how tomemorize things anymore because there'sjust a page on which stuff is writtenbut here we are we consider the readingof a book as an intellectual activity soI do believe that over the Long Haulthere are grounds for optimism but weare going to make lots of mistakes alongthe wayoh[Music]Professor Bhaskar chakravorty is thedean of global business at TuftsUniversity in Bostonthis episode was produced by Flintduxfield Veronica apop and Sam Dunn whoalso did the Binks our supervisingproducer is David Cody I'm Melissa ClarkABC news daily we'll be back againtomorrow you can find all of ourepisodes of the podcast on the ABClisten app to get in touch with the teamemail us on ABC News Daily atabc.net.edu thanks for listeningforeign[Music]