Mustafa Sulaiman, co-founder of DeepMind, is a heavyweight in the AI space. The Oxford dropout worked as a negotiator for the United Nations and the Dutch government earlier in his career, but then turned to AI and co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Damus Hassabis and Shane Legg. .
Backed by Peter Thiel’s founding fund, the machine learning lab grew like a weed under Solomon before being sold to Google’s parent company Alphabet for £400 million in 2014. Sulaiman played several roles in DeepMind before stepping down after five years
Now, the veteran AI founder is working on a new company called Inflection AI, which offers personalized AI assistants. And while Solomon is an enthusiastic supporter of AI, he expressed concern about the industry’s potential negative impact, particularly on workers.
“In the long term…we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools, because they’re completely left to the market and to their own devices, essentially replacing labor. There are tools,” Solomon told CNBC Wednesday at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The DeepMind co-founder said that AI tools basically do two main things. First, they make existing operations more efficient, which can lead to big savings for the business, but often by replacing the people who used to do it. Second, they allow the creation of entirely new operations and processes—a process that can lead to job creation. Both of these forces will take the labor market by storm in the coming years, with a serious, but unpredictable, impact.
While Solomon hopes AI will “enhance us and make us smarter and more productive for the next two decades”, in the long term, its impact is still “an open question”.
Experts have been debating whether AI will replace human workers for more than a decade. Some researchers say AI will cause a wave of unemployment and economic disruption as it takes jobs around the world, but others believe the technology will create new jobs and increase worker productivity. It will promote economic development.
There is a steady stream of academic papers on the subject. A 2013 the study Carl Benedict Frey and Michael Osborne, for example, estimate that 47% of US jobs are at risk of being automated by the mid-2030s during the AI boom. and a July McKinsey the study found that nearly 12 million Americans will need to change jobs by 2030 as AI takes over their responsibilities.
On the other hand, some researchers have found that AI can boost economic growth and offer new opportunities for workers. A 2022 United Nations International Labor Organization (ILO) the study It turns out that most AI systems will complement workers rather than replace them.
Still, Solomon isn’t the only big name in the AI industry to warn about AI’s dire implications for the labor market.
In January 10 Wired topicMIT professor Daron Esimoglu predicts that AI will disappoint everyone in 2024, proving itself to be merely a form of “so-so automation” that will take jobs away from workers but make an expected dent in productivity. Will fail to improve.
Researchers have yet to solve the problem of deception — where creative AI systems exaggerate the facts — and it could cause a lot of problems in the coming years, the leading economist argued. There is “no quick fix”.
“Generative AI is an impressive technology, and it offers tremendous opportunities to improve productivity across a range of tasks. But because the hype has far outstripped reality, the technology setbacks in 2024 will be more memorable.” Acemoglu wrote.
For Solomon, unlike Acemoglu, it’s not that the hype surrounding AI isn’t real, it’s definitely a “truly transformative technology.”
“Everything of value in our world is born out of our intelligence, our ability to reason about information and make predictions. That’s exactly what these tools do, so it’s going to be very fundamental,” he explained Wednesday.
Solomon instead worries that AI will become so good at duplicating humans that it will eventually displace workers, and that, without regulation, could have dire economic consequences.
That being said, like Acemoglu, Suleiman argues that AI proponents may be getting ahead of themselves with their optimistic near-term vision for increased productivity. The true effects of AI, from its potential to spawn revolutionary technology to its epic job losses, will likely not be felt for years.
“AI is truly one of the most incredible technologies of our lifetimes, but at the same time, it feels like the expectations for its delivery are higher than ever and perhaps we’ve overhyped a kind of hype for the moment. hit,” he explained.
Credit : fortune.com
