Have you ever had a song stuck in your head? You just walk around by humming all day, and you do not seem to take it out. I find that certain intellectual ideas work a bit like that. Some people walk around the whole day by applying the word “neoliberalism” to everything they don’t like in the modern world. Others are convinced that solar energy and batteries will never be viable technologies. Others still blame immigrants for any way where their country is not yet a paradise, or think that vaccines cause every health problem in society. And so on. Once an idea like this is stuck in your head, the confirmation bias takes over and you start to see it everywhere around you – which only strengthens the strength of the idea in your mind. Instead of an ear worm, it is a brainworm.
Over the past decade, a new idea has entered many Americans. This is the idea that artificial intelligence will be bad for the economy and for society. For some people, AI is only intrinsically suspicious and threatening technology, the main function of which will be to deprive ordinary jobs of jobs and to increase inequalities, without increasing the global productivity and wealth of the company by a significant amount.
This pessimism is surprisingly common in the people I met in the AI industry itself. Although many engineers I talk about are enthusiastic about AI, some believe that the products they create will eventually make the great segments of humanity obsolete; The objective of these people is to earn as much money as possible before their own creations inevitably destroy their own career.
I also meet an surprisingly large number of center-left thinkers who adopt a similar point of view. I remember having gone to a conference of types of center-left “progress” a few years ago; While most of the discussions focused on how America can overcome nimbyism, with regard to AI, conversation suddenly moved to the way we can restrict and slow down the development of this technology.
In the economy profession, the point of view of the IA-Pessimistic is aggressively defended by none other than Daron Acemoglu, probably the best economist in the world, and a recent recipient of Econ Nobel. Acemoglu wrote a book (With Simon Johnson) on how the big scan of economic history shows that society cannot leave the creation of AI to entrepreneurs and venture capital. But although he maintains that AI will destroy jobs and cause a massive increase in inequalities, Acemoglu also thinks that all this automation will not do much to increase productivity.
But the feeling of pi-pessimistic is hardly limited to a few elites; In fact, the average American is quite negative about technology:
And in international comparisons, the United States stands out as an almost unique insane on AI:
In other words, Americans are very started with the pessimism of AI. Even the most intelligent among them tend to jump to any shredder of evidence that AI kills jobs or transforms society into a feudal landscape, or a number of other negative effects.
But whenever this was happening so far, when we look closely at the evidence – or just expect the results to happen – panic has proven to be a false alarm. AI has not yet had a negative detectably negative effect on the job market, which remains about as strong as ever in the history of the country:
Now this situation can reverse; One day soon, have could Start killing in mass jobs and sending inequalities to the moon. We don’t know. But he has not yet done it, and it is important to understand why each burst of pessimism has so far been a false alarm.
