What worries you about the coming world of artificial intelligence?
Too
often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi
thriller. People worry that developments in A.I. will bring about the
“singularity” — that point in history when A.I. surpasses human
intelligence, leading to an unimaginable revolution in human affairs. Or
they wonder whether instead of our controlling artificial intelligence,
it will control us, turning us, in effect, into cyborgs.
These
are interesting issues to contemplate, but they are not pressing. They
concern situations that may not arise for hundreds of years, if ever. At
the moment, there is no known path from our best A.I. tools (like the
Google computer program that recently beat the world’s best player of
the game of Go) to “general” A.I. — self-aware computer programs that
can engage in common-sense reasoning, attain knowledge in multiple
domains, feel, express and understand emotions and so on.
This
doesn’t mean we have nothing to worry about. On the contrary, the A.I.
products that now exist are improving faster than most people realize
and promise to radically transform our world, not always for the better.
They are only tools, not a competing form of intelligence. But they
will reshape what work means and how wealth is created, leading to
unprecedented economic inequalities and even altering the global balance
of power.
It is imperative that we turn our attention to these imminent challenges.
What
is artificial intelligence today? Roughly speaking, it’s technology
that takes in huge amounts of information from a specific domain (say,
loan repayment histories) and uses it to make a decision in a specific
case (whether to give an individual a loan) in the service of a
specified goal (maximizing profits for the lender). Think of a
spreadsheet on steroids, trained on big data. These tools can outperform
human beings at a given task.
This
kind of A.I. is spreading to thousands of domains (not just loans), and
as it does, it will eliminate many jobs. Bank tellers, customer service
representatives, telemarketers, stock and bond traders, even paralegals
and radiologists will gradually be replaced by such software. Over time
this technology will come to control semiautonomous and autonomous
hardware like self-driving cars and robots, displacing factory workers,
construction workers, drivers, delivery workers and many others.
Unlike
the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the A.I.
revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who
use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs
(assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers).
Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs —
mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.
This
transformation will result in enormous profits for the companies that
develop A.I., as well as for the companies that adopt it. Imagine how
much money a company like Uber would make if it used only robot drivers.
Imagine the profits if Apple could manufacture its products without
human labor. Imagine the gains to a loan company that could issue 30
million loans a year with virtually no human involvement. (As it
happens, my venture capital firm has invested in just such a loan
company.)
We
are thus facing two developments that do not sit easily together:
enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands and enormous
numbers of people out of work. What is to be done?
Part
of the answer will involve educating or retraining people in tasks A.I.
tools aren’t good at. Artificial intelligence is poorly suited for jobs
involving creativity, planning and “cross-domain” thinking — for
example, the work of a trial lawyer. But these skills are typically
required by high-paying jobs that may be hard to retrain displaced
workers to do. More promising are lower-paying jobs involving the
“people skills” that A.I. lacks: social workers, bartenders, concierges —
professions requiring nuanced human interaction. But here, too, there
is a problem: How many bartenders does a society really need?
The
solution to the problem of mass unemployment, I suspect, will involve
“service jobs of love.” These are jobs that A.I. cannot do, that society
needs and that give people a sense of purpose. Examples include
accompanying an older person to visit a doctor, mentoring at an
orphanage and serving as a sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous — or,
potentially soon, Virtual Reality Anonymous (for those addicted to their
parallel lives in computer-generated simulations). The volunteer
service jobs of today, in other words, may turn into the real jobs of
the future.
