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After ChatGPT became popular, a joke was widely circulated on the Internet: The artificial intelligence we imagined in the past is that humans write poetry, paint, and play music, while AI cooks, moves bricks, and repairs computers. Unexpectedly, in the end, it is AI that writes poetry, paints, and plays. Music, we cook our own food, move bricks and repair computers.
Although this joke contains exaggerated elements, it can resonate with everyone in the dissemination, and it also shows that the scene it describes fits our current hidden worries, that is, will artificial intelligence eliminate more human jobs?
This is an old topic that has been discussed since the dawn of artificial intelligence. If it is said that the development of artificial intelligence in the past has made this issue mostly regarded as empty talk and prediction, then the emergence of generative AI has made this issue have practical significance.
The academic and industrial circles have naturally been very sensitive to how much the public is concerned about this. At the 2023 Alibaba Luohantang Digital Economy Annual Conference, the opportunities and challenges brought by artificial intelligence became the theme of the dialogue between Zhang Yong, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group and Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group, and three Nobel Prize winners. In the follow-up lectures by scholars and media meetings, people from academia and industry expressed their views on this.
In terms of quantity alone, economists do not have a particularly accurate estimate of how many jobs the rise of generative AI will affect, or even how many people will be unemployed, but a study by Goldman Sachs at the end of March gave A rough figure: 300 million, that is, generative AI will affect 300 million jobs in major economies.
This huge number naturally caused a discussion on the Internet. However, the industry generally believes that the “impact” here does not mean the complete disappearance of jobs, but more refers to the restructuring of the labor market. As for the impact and reconstruction of generative AI on the labor market, the participating scholars gave their own analysis.
Regarding the impact on the labor market, Thomas Sargent, the 2011 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is quite optimistic. He believes that the flow of jobs is two-way. Old jobs are disappearing and new jobs are being created. in production. However, after resources and labor are re-matched, it will be found that the disappearance of old jobs and the creation of new jobs is a dynamic process, and this has been the case over the years.
Zhang Yong also holds a similar view on this. He believes that the upgrading of technology will allow mankind to see the emergence of more new formats and new industries, and new industries and jobs will continue to emerge in the future.
Although the academic circles and the industry are generally not too pessimistic about the direction of this issue, the restructuring of the labor market brought about by technology will at least bring pains to specific industries and specific groups of people for a period of time. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Institute, elaborated on this more concretely, in his research, he found that the impact of machine learning as a whole has not been evenly distributed across all groups. , mainly affects low-wage workers, and high-wage workers are less affected by artificial intelligence and machine learning. But the development of generative AI such as ChatGPT has changed the situation. When this is used as the research target, the higher the salary, the more it will be affected.
This is also reflected in the report by Goldman Sachs. The impact of generative AI on the labor market is different from before. It may create a new class of unemployed white-collar workers who may encounter similar problems to manufacturing workers in the 1980s. destiny.
In this regard, the 2007 Nobel Laureate in Economics Eric Maskin (Eric Maskin) made a proportional division, the 1% at the top of the pyramid will definitely benefit from the rapid development of technology, while the bottom 1% % will definitely be impacted the most, and the 20% at both ends may be affected to varying degrees. Groups at the top of the pyramid, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, will naturally benefit from the improvement of technology. But for some unskilled jobs, if there is no retraining and learning of skills, they may be useless in the future.
In addition to the impact of generative AI on the labor market, there are other more pressing concerns in academia and industry, that is, the threat of its rapid iteration to human society. The rapid rollout of the model set off alarm bells. A few months ago, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) issued an open letter signed by many scholars, CEOs and technical experts, calling on all institutions around the world to suspend training AI stronger than GPT-4 for at least six months, and use these six Months to formulate AI security protocols.
Maskin is also aware of the threat of artificial intelligence to human society in terms of analyzing and processing information, and gave a slightly exaggerated example: “If AI shuts down the Federal Reserve and does not allow him to use computers, how risky would it be?” ?” Therefore, he believes that artificial intelligence may need more supervision, such as allowing computers to obtain data in certain fields, rather than using technology to obtain desired data without restriction.
Even with such threats, Christopher Pissarides, the 2010 Nobel laureate in economics, believes that slowing down technological progress in artificial intelligence would be a big mistake. What everyone should do is not how to slow down this process, but how to ensure how to use its rapid development to form good applications and feed back the development of society.
Compared with academia, the industry pays more attention to regulatory issues. For example, Zhang Yong believes that a major challenge brought about by the rapid development of artificial intelligence is the issue of intellectual property rights. “Now machines may really become more and more powerful. But let’s not forget, where did all this raw knowledge and raw data come from? How do we respect the ownership of this information?”
Judging from past experience, the development of technology and changes in business models will bring corresponding regulatory issues. How to ensure the rapid development of technology while at the same time reasonably supervising it and suppressing the negative impact of technology on society will be a question that all human beings should think about in the next few decades.
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