If you aren’t already scared about artificial intelligence, you will be after you read the next sentence: “If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10 percent by 2027, and 50 percent by 2047.”
That’s the aggregated forecast of 2,778 researchers who have presented their work in top-tier publications and conferences, according to research that was released this month but not yet published in a journal. Folding clothes and wiring a new home were two of the tasks they were asked to think about. The date of 2047 for the 50 percent chance is 13 years earlier than researchers were estimating in a survey conducted one year earlier. (Hat tip to Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for pointing out this study in his Substack newsletter.)
One plausible scenario is that the machines will come for our jobs one by one until the only working human beings on the planet are the judges on “America’s Got Talent.”
But things don’t have to turn out that way. It’s still possible for the human race to direct A.I. so that it complements and augments rather than substitutes for human skills. Gardeners use hoes and rakes rather than clawing the soil with their bare hands, right? Artificial intelligence can be the hoes and rakes of the 21st century.
A new project is dedicated to precisely that proposition. It’s called the M.I.T. Shaping the Future of Work Initiative.
Nothing is “inexorable,” Daron Acemoglu, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and a co-director of the project, said Monday at the kickoff event. “The answer in most cases is, A.I. will do whatever we choose it to do.”
I watched the event on livestream. The tone wasn’t always that brave. Even Acemoglu and his co-directors expressed trepidation at times. There were so many interesting moments that I’m going to simply pass along some of them.
Katherine Cramer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist, said that lower- and middle-wage workers have “pretty basic” expectations for the future of their work. “One man in Kentucky said, ‘I’m not looking for a mansion on a hill.’” What he and others want, Cramer said, is jobs that don’t destroy their humanity, that are meaningful and that give them time with their families. Many don’t feel they have that now. “When people feel they are voiceless in this aspect of life — that is such a huge part of life in terms of time, in terms of energy, in terms of mental energy — it makes space for resentment. It makes space for people to look around for targets to blame,” she said. “We’ve seen what that can lead to.”
Liz Shuler, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said meatpacking plants are using technology developed for the military to measure workers’ “time off task.” That induces fear, she said, and “fear is destabilizing.”
Kathleen Thelen, a political scientist at M.I.T., said, “This kind of anxiety about technology is much reduced when workers and reps are meaningfully included in the introduction of new technologies.” She pointed to Germany and Scandinavia, which have strong social safety nets and “organized labor has a real presence and a meaningful voice.”
“Managers don’t like to slow down, to compromise,” Thelen said. “But very often, the constraint, the need to negotiate, will foreclose easy, low-road strategies and force firms to be more innovative, creative, to take a higher-road strategy.” She wasn’t referring specifically to replacement of workers by A.I., but the concept applies.
David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who is also a co-director of the new initiative, said that federal law turns union organizing into “trench warfare,” fought out one workplace at a time. He said he favors sectoral bargaining, in which unions negotiate with representatives of entire industrial sectors.
Dan Huttenlocher, the dean of M.I.T.’s Schwarzman College of Computing, said that artificial intelligence “fundamentally changes the nature of what it means to be human” because it outstrips human reason — something that was always considered uniquely human. He said that humanity should make A.I. a “collaborator.”
Frank McCourt, the founder of Project Liberty, which seeks to design and govern the internet for the common good, said people should — but don’t — own the data about them that exists on the internet, adding, “We’re kind of broken as a society.”
Zeynep Ton, a professor of the practice in M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management who is a co-founder of the Good Jobs Institute, said many workers are stuck in a “vicious cycle of poverty” in which they don’t earn enough, don’t get enough sleep, have to work multiple jobs and don’t end up performing well in any of them. She pointed to companies such as Costco and QuikTrip, a chain of convenience stores based in Tulsa, Okla., that have taken the high road, designing jobs that pay more while expecting more of employees. Artificial intelligence hasn’t reached those companies in a big way yet, of course.
If taking the high road is such a good idea, why don’t more companies do it, Ton asked rhetorically. Some of it is lack of awareness and some is that getting it right means changing many things at once, from human resources to marketing to strategy, she said. But when everything comes together, she said, worker empowerment is powerful.
Acemoglu expressed doubt that business leaders would take the high road toward better jobs on their own. And Simon Johnson, the third co-director of the initiative, who teaches entrepreneurship in the M.I.T. Sloan School, concluded the day by saying his image of the future is “a little bit darker and a little more urgent” that what he heard at the event.
I prefer the positive tone embodied in the initiative’s name, “shaping” the future of work. Artificial intelligence is an artifice of human intelligence. If we let the genie out of the bottle, it’s our own fault. It doesn’t have to happen.
Elsewhere: China’s State-Owned Enterprises on the Rise
China’s private-sector companies have been on a “nonstop slide” since mid-2021 in terms of their share of market capitalization among China’s 100 most valuable exchange-listed enterprises, according to the latest update by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The private sector’s decline has been matched by a corresponding increase in the relative market capitalization of state-owned enterprises. The shift seems to show that investors don’t yet trust “the Chinese leadership’s 2023 rhetorical pivot in favor of private sector development,” the update’s authors, Tianlei Huang and Nicolas Véron, wrote.
Quote of the Day
“Hire right. As my dad said, ‘You can’t win the Kentucky Derby on a donkey.’ And not just players but staff. Be sure they complement you more than compliment you.”
— Tara VanDerveer, coach of the Stanford women’s basketball team, quoted in The Times (Jan. 14, 2024)