The stock market is largely buoyed by a promise of AI that has yet to deliver: creating what could be a disastrous bubble. But the rush to AI isn’t just a risky bet. Wall Street is putting the health of markets – and that of the economy as a whole – on the line by betting against the common good.
It seems to be a lose-lose situation for those outside Wall Street and Silicon Valley: if the frenzied investment in artificial intelligence is overheated, like even the OpenAI project Sam Altman has warnedMarkets could be hit hard enough to shake the economy as a whole, with an impact worse than the collapse of dotcom companies 25 years ago. But if the bet succeeds, it will mean a boom for a technology that could lead to widespread unemployment and social disruption.
“If this works as quickly as venture capital money seems to hope, society seems completely unprepared for the consequences,” as put by Daniel Barcay, executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, says Vanity fair, citing potential mass unemployment and political instability. “If the market is on top of its skis, we’ll likely see a race to the bottom of these dark monetization models. We were promised to cure cancer, but we’re getting scraps from AI.”
AI has already led to significant layoffs in a number of industries, including at Amazon, which announced it would do so. eliminate 14,000 white-collar jobs last week. And Americans appear concerned that this is only the beginning, with more than two-thirds of those surveyed in a recent Reuters/Ipsos study saying so. survey we fear that a large part of the workforce will be permanently displaced.
It’s for a good reason :A report released by senator Bernie Sanders last month (which ironically used ChatGPT) estimated that nearly 100 million American jobs could be eliminated in 10 years thanks to AI. Other reports reached similar conclusions. And while not all data is so pessimistictechnology providers themselves have warned of impending job losses: Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, warned in a interview with Axios Earlier this year, technology could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. As he described it, AI could mean “cancer is cured, the economy grows 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced, and 20 percent of people don’t have a job.”
