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Journalism of Courage
In the last two years, Artificial Intelligence dominated conversations around the world. However, now it seems the hype around it seems to be losing some steam. MIT Economist, Daron Acemoglu, who claims not to be an AI pessimist, says that only about 5 per cent of jobs will be impacted by the AI wave. This may come as a breather for millions of professionals worldwide who have been staring at an uncertain future owing to the rapid rise of AI technologies.
In his interview with Bloomberg, Acemoglu said, “As promising as AI may be, there’s little chance it will live up to that hype”. According to him, only about 5 per cent jobs will be taken over or be heavily aided by AI over the next decade. While he admits this is great news for workers, he also explained how it is bad news for companies that are pushing billions into the technology with hopes that it will drive a remarkable surge in productivity.
Acemoglu is a widely known professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has become one of the most prominent voices warning about the AI frenzy that has gripped Wall Street and C-suites across the US. The 57-year-old economist holds the title of an Institute Professor, the highest at MIT, and his work over the years has featured his perspectives on AI and other new technologies. Owing to the unbending hype around AI and its impact on investments, Acemoglu’s comments could be a worry for some.
In the interview, the MIT professor shared three ways AI could play out in the future. According to him, in the first scenario, which is mostly ‘benign’, the AI hype could slowly cool down and investment in the ‘modest’ use of AI could take over. In the second instance, the AI frenzy mounts for another year resulting in a tech stock crash that leaves investors, executives and students disillusioned with the technology. He has termed this as ‘AI spring’ followed by an AI winter’.
The third and possibly scariest scenario would be that the hype goes unchecked for years, pushing companies to cut thousands of jobs and pour hundreds of billions of dollars into AI without really understanding what they will do with it. In this scenario, eventually these companies would be scrambling to rehire workers after technology does not pan out as intended.
According to Acemoglu, the most likely scenario would be a combination of the second and third scenarios. Inside the C-suites, there is too much apprehension about missing out on the AI boom to see that it could actually slow down anytime soon, he said. “When the hype gets intensified, the fall is unlikely to be soft,” he was quoted as saying by the publication.
In the second quarter of the year, tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta alone have invested over $50 billion into their capital spending, most of which is directed towards AI. The MIT professor said that LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are impressive, yet they are unable to replace humans. According to him, this is because of the reliability issues and lack of human-level judgement which is unlikely to push companies to outsource many of the white-collar jobs to AI. He believes that AI is not going to be able to automate physical jobs such as construction work. He termed these as the reality check about where we are with AI at present.
