From the article:
A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite. What’s more, a plurality of voters view AI negatively and don’t believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology.
Which raises two questions. The first question is what, exactly, are these “risks”? I suspect the real meaning for many is “I might lose my job to AI”, and those who are supportive of AI include those who will profit from this transformation.
It would be foolish to dismiss this risk as unfounded. Indeed, the AI transformation of the workplace may be greater than anyone imagines. IBM already has a product family called Watsonx, derived from the original Watson natural language query engine after 15 years of research, that currently offers six products aligned with different aspects of business needs.
For example, there’s “Watsonx Orchestrate”, described as “Enable employees to quickly offload time-consuming work to tackle more of the work only they can do”. Translation: “enables you to fire lower-level knowledge workers”. Or “Watsonx Assistant”: “Empower everyone in the organization to build and deploy AI-powered virtual agents without writing a line of code.” Translation: “enables you to fire half your programmers”. Or “Watsonx Code Assistant”: “Empower developers of all experience levels to write code with AI-generated recommendations.” Translation: “enables you to fire most of the other half, particularly the expensive senior ones”.
So AI is bound to be transformative, and many jobs are bound to be lost. Furthermore, unlike the rise of automation where manual-labour workers could be retrained for other jobs, there’s no general path forward for knowledge workers displaced from their jobs.
But here’s my other question, and I haven’t seen a good answer either from the AI naysayers or from anyone else:
What do you expect anyone to do about it?