Global Courant 2023-04-19 16:00:11
The growing power of artificial intelligence threatens millions of jobs, but if regulators stay away, the emerging technology could make society more prosperous and productive.
History has repeatedly shown the same result for other technological developments dating back to the industrial revolution, said economist Peter St. Onge.
“Throughout history we’ve had massive technological revolutions. Overall, technologies are killing jobs,” St. Onge of the Heritage Foundation told Fox News Digital. “What happened? Well, you know, we had a lot of new jobs. Hardly anyone works on a farm these days.
“This is kind of the way things are in the world,” he added. The reason why you see technology improvements for every labor intensive function is to kill jobs – which is also known as job saving.
St. Onge pointed to the early 1800s, when most people worked on farms, and how the dawn of the mechanization of agriculture killed employment as farmers turned to machines instead of hiring teams of workers.
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Words about artificial intelligence can be seen in this illustration, created on March 31, 2023. (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)
A report from Goldman Sachs last month found that generative AI could replace and impact 300 million jobs around the world. Another study from outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that the AI chatbot ChatGPt could replace at least 4.8 million US jobs.
The numbers have raised some concerns, including in areas most likely to be affected by the technology, such as customer service representatives, technical writers and data entry clerks. However, St. Onge said that both Americans and businesses can thrive with AI, as long as regulation doesn’t stifle growth.
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St. Onge, who has written for years about machines and technology taking over jobs, pointed out how in 1845 the French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote a satire about candle makers protesting against sunlight because it took away their jobs.
A corn field and storage bins near Carrington, North Dakota, August 8, 2019. (REUTERS/Dan Koeck/File photo)
“So the sun comes out in the morning, it steals everyone’s job,” said St. Onge. “The candle makers can’t sell candles because the sun is out there giving it away for free. So if we go to that sci-fi utopia where AI does everything better than we do, then it’s the equivalent of the sunlight that goes for free.”
The economist said he believes it is “fair” to characterize the advent of artificial intelligence as the modern era on the brink of its own “industrial revolution,” and that the single entity that could stand in the way of thriving AI stand, regulation is.
He said he believes regulation would be a “terrible idea”.
“I empathize completely with those who fear it. And I share their fears,” he said. “Essentially, the most important question for me in AI is, ‘Who’s there first?’ And the most likely candidates are Silicon Valley and the Chinese version of Silicon Valley, which has deep Chinese government influence.”
The US and Chinese flags fly at Genting Snow Park ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics, February 2, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)
He said that when it comes to the international AI race, he would much rather have an outcome where US “tech bros” are AI authorities rather than the communist Chinese government.
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In a recent podcast, St. Onge pointed to Detroit when the auto industry was booming, but “bureaucratic micromanagement rules” eventually left people unemployed.
“What if the river of new and better jobs is blocked like a dam? Well, the jobs are drying up, the old ones are gone. The new ones are either at poverty level or they don’t come at all. This is Detroit’s result that lost tens of thousands of auto jobs, which will never be replaced again,” he said on the podcast.
He told Fox News Digital that politicians are often incentivized to roll out rules in order to collect taxes, get a good sound bite or get political donations.
“So that’s kind of a dangerous dynamic. And where governments get in the way, they attack the existing producers, the existing companies, and they can often get in the way of the formation of new companies.”
What happened in Detroit also likely startled Americans, who are concerned about AI taking jobs. Previously, each generation of the family was twice as wealthy as their parents, but currently “parents and children are neck and neck, which is really a huge government failure.”
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“I think they look around and then see that when jobs disappear in places like Detroit, they don’t come back the next day,” he said. “In fact, they don’t come back 40 years later. So I think people are right to be concerned, but I think they’re wrong to blame technology per se.
“Tech is a river that makes us rich,” he continued. “The problem is everyone has to get out of the way. We have to respect the basic economic freedoms that we always had.”
The ChatGPT logo on a laptop set up in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Thursday, March 9, 2023. (Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, was released in November and quickly became one of the most popular online platforms, breaking records as the fastest growing user base with 100 million monthly active users in January. The chatbot can mimic human conversations based on prompts and can perform various tasks such as writing short stories, composing emails, answering questions and even coming up with recipes.
Following ChatGPT’s initial release and several updates, thousands of technology leaders, experts, and others signed an open letter calling on all AI labs working on technology more powerful than ChatGPT to pause for at least six months to roll out security regulations.
Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter and Tesla, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, were among the signatories warning that such computer intelligence “may pose major risks to society and humanity.”
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Despite the calls to pause, the AI race to create the most powerful system is in full swing, with Google working on an overhaul of its search engine and even creating a new one that relies on AI, and even Musk working on a ChatGPT- alternative that would serve as a “maximum truth-seeking AI.”
