“Who wouldn’t want a robot to watch your kids?” Elon Musk asked Davos delegates last week, as he excitedly looked forward to a world with “more robots than people.”
Not me, thanks: Children need the human connection – love – that gives life meaning.
As he works toward launching SpaceX on the stock market, in perhaps the largest share sale ever, the world’s richest man has every incentive to make a big deal.
Yet when Musk spoke wistfully about this robotic utopia, it was a reminder that major decisions about the direction of technological progress are being made by a small number of very powerful men – and they are predominantly men.
In casual conversation on stage, Larry Fink, interim co-chair of the World Economic Forum, failed to ask Musk what change in internal plumbing had allowed his Grok chatbot to produce and broadcast 1.8 million erotic images of women in just nine days in a New York Times investigation.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t in the Swiss mountains, probably because he didn’t like facing questions about the $70 billion he has worthless. inserted into the metaverseHis plan for all of us to hang out in a virtual world with imaginary companions.
Even if they had shown off, it doesn’t seem like there would have been pressure on them to come up with the next big thing: the Meta’s smart glasses, which are already, totally anticipated, Women are being used for secretly filming.
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told Davos delegates that the failure to regulate the technology was one of her biggest concerns, adding: “Wake up: AI is real, and it is changing our world faster than we can keep up with it.”
However, rather than in childcare robots, the way most people are likely to encounter AI in the near term is in the labor market, where Georgieva warns of a coming “tsunami” as jobs will be replaced or eliminated.
The IMF is calling on governments to invest in education and reskilling to prepare the population for the changing job market; But also strict competition policies must be implemented, so that the benefits of innovation are not concentrated in too few hands; and strong welfare safety nets.
In a blogpost published just before Davos, Georgieva warned: “The stakes go beyond economics. Work brings dignity and purpose to people’s lives. That’s what makes AI transformation so consequential.”
Business surveys show that outside the tech sector, leaders are excited about the potential of AI, but are not yet realizing its benefits. For example, a PwC survey of UK CEOs published to coincide with the launch of the WEF showed that 81% were making AI their top investment priority, but only 30% had seen any cost reductions as a result.
This means that in the coming months, there will be intense pressure to find savings, with the focus likely to be on the wage bill.
Chairing a WEF session on “Jobless Growth,” Eric Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford’s Digital Economy Laboratory, explained The recent work he and his colleagues didSuggesting that workers aged 22–25 in the US are already facing AI-related job losses, especially in sectors where AI “automates rather than augments labour”.
Brynjolfsson believes this dichotomy is an important one, getting to the bottom of why Musk’s robot dreams have a dystopian edge.
Brynjolfsson wrote four years ago A paper called The Turing Trap. He argued that the Turing test, which stated that the ultimate praise for a technology was to replicate human intelligence in a way that looks human, was the wrong goal.
Instead, he argues, “As machines become better substitutes for human labor, workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become dependent on those who control the technology. In contrast, when AI focuses on augmenting humans rather than imitating them, humans retain the power to assert their share of the value created.”
Brynjolfsson urges policymakers to use tax incentives and regulation to motivate companies to develop technologies that enhance humans’ abilities – putting powerful tools in their hands – rather than replacing them entirely.
This was largely the picture presented by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, in an upbeat session about the future of AI, in which he talked about the benefits for the global South, describing a world in which doctors are freed up by technology to spend more time with patients, for example.
Nevertheless, he warned that the technology risks losing its “social sanction” if it does not prove successful in improving people’s lives rather than simply enriching a few powerful tech firms.
“We, as a global community, have to get to the point where we’re using it to do something useful that changes outcomes for people and communities and countries and industries, right? Otherwise I don’t think there’s any point to it,” he mused.
Of course, it may be difficult for AI to get “social permission” to gobble up energy, water and capital, if the way many people encounter it – except in a sea of misogynistic online sluttiness – it causes their careers to be derailed.
And that is why trade unionists are rightly calling for urgent conversations about how the benefits of increased productivity, if they are indeed realised, can be shared with society, and not hoarded by the technocrats.
As Liz Shuler, president of the US union federation AFL-CIO, said, “If we can all agree that it’s about making our jobs better and safer, easier, more productive, then we’re all on board. But if all you want to do is downskill, dehumanize, replace workers, put people on the street without any way to get ahead, then surely you’re going to have a revolution.”
