The time has passed for reporters to say ‘Oh, we don’t know what the potential problems are.’
The ‘Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ report states the losses contributed to the total of 136,831 jobs that have been lost in the tech sector this year — the largest wave of job losses to strike the industry since 2001.
Last week a number of tech professionals signed an open letter citing the “risk of extinction” AI poses, comparing its potential damages to a pandemic or nuclear war.
The letter was signed by notable figures including Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Bill Gates, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who called for AI to be seen as a global priority, alongside other “societal-scale risks” like pandemics and nuclear wars.
Sam Altman (Getty Images)
This is an interesting approach, given their companies are the main drivers behind the technology.
In March, investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted AI could eventually replace 300 million full time jobs globally and affect nearly one-fifth of all employment — with a particular hit to administrative and legal professions.
Meredith Broussard is a data scientist and associate professor at New York University.
She said: “AI is math. I don’t think that everything in the world should be governed by math. Computers are really good at solving mathematical issues. But they are not very good at solving social issues, yet they are being applied to social problems.
“This kind of imagined endgame of ‘Oh, we’re just going to use AI for everything is not a future that I co-sign on.’
“The time has passed for reporters to just say ‘Oh, we don’t know what the potential problems are.’ We can guess what the potential problems are and ask the tough questions,” Ms Broussard said.
Sam Altman, Open AI and Chat GPT boss, gave an interview to the New York Times on March 31 this year. Journalist Cade Metz wrote of the encounter: “Sam’s grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. (artificial General Intelligence) and then redistribute this wealth to the people.
“In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.
“If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.
“But as he once told me: ‘I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that,’ Mr Metz reported.
AGI is seen by Altman as any computer “that is smarter than humans”, or the representation of human cognitive abilities in software.
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