[ad_1]
There’s a movement afoot to counter the dystopian and apocalyptic narratives of artificial intelligence. Some people in the field are concerned that the
frequent talk of AI as an existential risk to humanity is poisoning the public against the technology, and are deliberately setting out more hopeful narratives. One such effort is a book that came out last fall called AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future.
The book is co-written by
Kai-Fu Lee, an AI expert who leads the venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures, and Chen Qiufan, a science fiction author known for his novel Waste Tide. It has an interesting format. Each chapter starts with a science fiction story depicting some aspect of AI in society in the year 2041 (such as deepfakes, self-driving cars, and AI-enhanced education), which is followed by an analysis section by Lee that talks about the technology in question and the trends today that may lead to that envisioned future. It’s not a utopian vision, but the stories generally show humanity grappling productively with the issues raised by ever-advancing AI.
IEEE Spectrum spoke to Lee about the book, focusing on the last few chapters that take on the big issues of job displacement, the need for new economic models, and the search for meaning and happiness in an age of abundance. Lee argues that technologists need to give serious thought to such societal impacts, instead of thinking only about the technology.
The science fiction stories are set in 2041, by which time you expect AI to have already caused a lot of disruption to the job market. What types of jobs do you think will displaced by then?
How do you imagine this trend changing the engineering profession?
It reminds me of the PhD thesis of
Charles Simonyi, the person who created Microsoft word. He did an experiment to see what would happen if you have a really smart architect who can divvy up the job of writing a piece of code into well-contained modules that are easy to understand and well-defined, and then out-source each module to an average engineer. Will the resulting product be good? It was good. We’re talking about the same thing, except we’re not outsourcing to the average engineer, who will have been replaced by AI. That super engineer will be able to delegate the work to a bunch of AI resulting in creativity and symbiosis. But there won’t be very many of these architect jobs.
In the book, you say that an entirely new social contract is needed. One problem is that there will be fewer entry-level jobs, but there still needs to be a way for people to gain skills. Can you imagine a solution for engineering?
Lee: Let’s say someone is talented and could become an architect, but that person just graduated from college and isn’t there yet. If they apply for a job to do entry-level programming and they’re competing for the job with AI, they might lose the job to the AI. That would be really bad because we will not only hurt the person’s self-confidence, but also society will lose the talent of that architect, which needs years of experience to build up.
But imagine if the company says, “We’re going to employ you anyway, even though you’re not as good as AI. We’re going to give you tasks and we’ll have AI work alongside you and correct your errors, and you can learn from it and improve.” If a thousand people go through this entry-level practical training, maybe a hundred emerge to be really good and be on their way to become architects, maybe the other 900 will take longer and struggle, or maybe they’ll feel complacent and continue to do the work so they’re passing time and still have a chance to improve. Maybe some will say, “Hey, this is really not for me, I’m not reaching the architect level. I’m going to go become a photographer and artist or whatever.”
I think that will be one model in which there can be full employment.
Why do you think that this round of automation is different from those that came before in history, when jobs were both destroyed and created by automation?
Lee: First of all, I do think AI will both destroy and create jobs. I just can’t enumerate which jobs and how many. I tend to be an optimist and believe in the wisdom and the will of the human race. Eventually, we’ll figure out a bunch of new jobs. Maybe those jobs don’t exist today and have to be invented; maybe some of those jobs will be service jobs, human connection jobs. I would say that every technology so far has ended up making society better, and there has never been a problem of absorbing the job losses. If you look at a 30-year horizon, I’m optimistic that that there will not be a net job loss, but possibly a net gain, or possibly equal. And we can always consider a four-day work week and things like that. So long-term, I’m optimistic.
Now to answer your question directly: short-term, I am worried. And the reason is that none of the previous technology revolutions have tried explicitly to replace people. No matter how people think about it, every AI algorithm is trying to display intelligence and therefore be able to do what people do. Maybe not an entire job, but some task. So naturally there will be a short-term drop when automation and AI start to work well.
“If you expect an assembly line worker to become a robot repair person, it isn’t going to be so easy.”
—Kai-Fu Lee, Sinovation Ventures
Autonomous vehicles are an explicit effort to replace drivers. A lot of people in the industry will say, “Oh no, we need a backup driver in the truck to make it safer, so we won’t displace jobs.” Or they’ll say that when we install robots in the factory, the factory workers are elevated to a higher-level job. But I think they’re just sugarcoating the reality.
Let’s say over a period of 20 years, with the advent of AI, we lose X number of jobs, and we also gain X jobs; let’s say the loss and gain are the same. The outcome is not that the society remains in equilibrium, because the jobs being lost are the most routine and unskilled. And the jobs being created are much more likely to be skilled and complex jobs that require much more training. If you expect an assembly line worker to become a robot repair person, it isn’t going to be so easy. That’s why I think the next 15 years or 20 years will be very chaotic. We need a lot of wisdom and long-term vision and decisiveness to overcome these problems.
CurrencyThere are some interesting experiments going on with universal basic income (UBI), like Sam Altman’s ambitious idea for WorldCoin. But from the book, it seems like you don’t think that UBI is the answer. Is that correct?
Lee: UBI may be necessary, by it’s definitely not sufficient. We’re going to be in a world of very serious wealth inequality, and the people losing their jobs won’t have the experience or the education to get the right kinds of training. Unless we subsidize and help these people along, the inequality will be exacerbated. So how do we make them whole? One way is to make sure they don’t have to worry about subsistence. That’s where I think universal basic income comes into play by making sure nobody goes without food, shelter, water. I think that level of universal basic income is good.
As I mentioned before, the people who are most devastated, people who don’t have skills, are going to need a lot of help. But that help isn’t just money. If you just give people money, a wonderful apartment, really great food, internet, games, and even extra allowance to spend, they are much more likely to say, “Well, I’ll just stay home and play games. I’ll go into the metaverse.” They may even go to alcohol or substance abuse because those are the easiest things to do.
So what else do they need?
Lee: Imagine the mindset of a person whose job was taken away by automation. That person has been to be thinking, “Wow, everything I know how to do, AI can do. Everything I learn, AI will be able to do. So why should I take the universal basic income and apply that to learning?” And even if that person does decide to get training, how can they know what to get training on? Imagine I’m an assembly line worker and I lost my job. I might think, truck driver, that’s a highly paid job. I’ll do that. But then in five years those jobs are going to be gone. A robot repair job would be a much more sustainable job than a truck driver, but the person who just lost a job doesn’t know it.
So the point I make in the book is: To help people stay gainfully employed and have hope for themselves, it’s important that they get guidance on what jobs they can do that will, first of all, give people a sense of contribution, because then at least we eliminate the possibility of social unrest. Second, that job should be interesting, so the person wants to do it. Third, if possible, that job should have economic value.
Why do you put economic value last in that list?
Lee: Most people think jobs need to have economic value. If you’re making cars, the cars are sold. If you’re writing books, the books are sold. If you just volunteer and take care of old people, you’re not creating economic value. If we stay in that mentality, that would be very unfortunate, because we may very well be in a time when what is truly valuable to society is people taking care of each other. That might be the glue that keeps society going.
More thought should go into how to deal with the likely anxiety and depression and the sense of loss that people will have when their jobs are taken and they don’t know what to do. What they need is not just a bunch of money, but a combination of subsistence, training, and help finding a new beginning. Who cares if they create economic value? Because as the last chapter states, I believe we’re going to reach the era of plenitude. We’re not going to be a situation of incredible scarcity where everyone’s fighting each other in a zero-sum game. So we should not be obsessed with making sure everyone contributes economically, but making sure that people feel good about themselves.
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
Source link