In my last two columns, I argued that AI brings both opportunities and great dangers, some even existential. This transformative technology also threatens fundamental values, including personal and institutional accountability, the rule of law, democracy and even what it means to be human. Moreover, AI will be hard to regulate successfully, not only because its impact will be pervasive, but because progress is being driven by fierce competition among businesses and between the US and China.Remarkably, a recent post from Anthropic states that “we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves . . . Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of . . . autonomously designing and developing its own successor.” The post then states that “if it were possible to . . . slow the development of this technology, to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing”. If even Anthropic, a leader in AI, is fearful of what lurks ahead, the fears of the rest of us, especially the young, can only be reinforced.
A big part of this politically salient concern is over the unemployment downside of the assumed productivity upside. But the speed and scale of the transformation AI will produce is unknown. My colleague John Burn-Murdoch noted recently, for example, that the increase in the supply of apps generated by AI has not led to a corresponding rise in their use. It has also generated a bigger jump in output in the early stages of software development than in final products. (See charts.)
Again, an overview of the employment impact of AI issued by the International Labour Organization last year concluded that, globally, one in four workers is in an occupation with some exposure to generative AI. But, it also adds, just “3.3 per cent of global employment falls into the highest exposure category”. This does not seem a huge disruption. Moreover, in the past long lags have occurred between big innovations (electricity, for example) and higher productivity. As Paul Krugman writes, productivity growth has been lower during the digital era than it was after the second world war, a period without such breakthroughs.