"Daron Acemoglu[, an Institute Professor, the highest title for faculty at MIT,] wants to make clear right away that he has nothing against artificial intelligence. He gets the potential. 'I’m not an AI pessimist,' he declares seconds into an interview.
...
By his calculation, only a small percent of all jobs — a mere 5% — is ripe to be taken over, or at least heavily aided, by AI over the next decade. Good news for workers, true, but very bad for the companies sinking billions into the technology expecting it to drive a surge in productivity.
'A lot of money is going to get wasted,' says Acemoglu. 'You’re not going to get an economic revolution out of that 5%.'
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Acemoglu envisions three ways the AI story could play out in coming years.
• The first — and by far most benign — scenario calls for the hype to slowly cool and investments in ‘modest’ uses of the technology to take hold.
• In the second scenario, the frenzy builds for another year or so, leading to a tech stock crash that leaves investors, executives and students disillusioned with the technology. ‘AI spring followed by AI winter,’ he calls this one.
• The third — and scariest — scenario is that the mania goes unchecked for years, leading companies to cut scores of jobs and pump hundreds of billions of dollars into AI ‘without understanding what they’re going to do with it,’ only to be left scrambling to try to rehire workers when the technology doesn’t pan out. ‘Now there are widespread negative outcomes for the whole economy.’
The most likely? He figures it’s some combination of the second and third scenarios. Inside C-suites, there’s just too much fear of missing out on the AI boom to envision the hype machine slowing down any time soon, he says, and 'when the hype gets intensified, the fall is unlikely to be soft.'
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Today’s large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are impressive in many respects, Acemoglu says. So why can’t they replace humans, or at least help them a lot, at many jobs? He points to reliability issues and a lack of human-level wisdom or judgment, which will make people unlikely to outsource many white-collar jobs to AI anytime soon. Nor is AI going to be able to automate physical jobs like construction or janitorial, he says.
'You need highly reliable information or the ability of these models to faithfully implement certain steps that previously workers were doing,' he said. 'They can do that in a few places with some human supervisory oversight' — like coding — 'but in most places they cannot.'
'That’s a reality check for where we are right now,' he said.”
Jeran Wittenstein, AI Can Only Do 5% of Jobs, Says MIT Economist Who Fears Crash
• Daron Acemoglu doesn’t see how AI lives up to all the hype
• “You’re not going to get an economic revolution,” he says
𝘉𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘨, 2 October 2024, https://lnkd.in/gtevsQAP