What if we’ve been fascinated by artificial intelligence the unsuitable way?
In any case, AI is usually discussed as something that would replicate human intelligence and replace human work. But there’s an alternate future: one wherein AI provides “machine usefulness” for human employees, augmenting but not usurping jobs, while helping to create productivity gains and spread prosperity.
That will be a reasonably rosy scenario. Nevertheless, as MIT economist Daron Acemoglu emphasized in a public campus lecture on Tuesday night, society has began to maneuver in a unique direction — one wherein AI replaces jobs and rachets up societal surveillance, and in the method reinforces economic inequality while concentrating political power further within the hands of the ultra-wealthy.
“There are transformative and really consequential selections ahead of us,” warned Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT, who has spent years studying the impact of automation on jobs and society.
Major innovations, Acemoglu suggested, are almost at all times certain up with matters of societal power and control, especially those involving automation. Technology generally helps society increase productivity; the query is how narrowly or widely those economic advantages are shared. With regards to AI, he observed, these questions matter acutely “because there are so many various directions wherein these technologies could be developed. It is kind of possible they may bring broad-based advantages — or they may actually enrich and empower a really narrow elite.”
But when innovations augment relatively than replace employees’ tasks, he noted, it creates conditions wherein prosperity can spread to the work force itself.
“The target is just not to make machines intelligent in and of themselves, but increasingly useful to humans,” said Acemoglu, chatting with a near-capacity audience of just about 300 people in Wong Auditorium.
The Productivity Bandwagon
The Starr Forum is a public event series held by MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS), and focused on leading issues of world interest. Tuesday’s event was hosted by Evan Lieberman, director of CIS and the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa.
Acemoglu’s talk drew on themes detailed in his book “Power and Progress: Our 1000-12 months Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity,” which was co-written with Simon Johnson and published in May by PublicAffairs. Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship on the MIT Sloan School of Management.
In Tuesday’s talk, as in his book, Acemoglu discussed some famous historial examples to make the purpose that the widespread advantages of latest technology can’t be assumed, but are conditional on how technology is implemented.
It took at the very least 100 years after the 18th-century onset of the Industrial Revolution, Acemoglu noted, for the productivity gains of industrialization to be widely shared. At first, real earnings didn’t rise, working hours increased by 20 percent, and labor conditions worsened as factory textile employees lost much of the autonomy they’d held as independent weavers.
Similarly, Acemoglu observed, Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin made the conditions of slavery within the U.S. even worse. That overall dynamic, wherein innovation can potentially enrich a couple of on the expense of the various, Acemoglu said, has not vanished.
“We’re not saying that this time is different,” Acemoglu said. “This time may be very much like what went on up to now. There has at all times been this tension about who controls technology and whether the gains from technology are going to be widely shared.”
To be certain, he noted, there are a lot of, some ways society has ultimately benefitted from technologies. Nevertheless it’s not something we will take with no consideration.
“Yes indeed, we’re immeasurably more prosperous, healthier, and more comfortable today than people were 300 years ago,” Acemoglu said. “But again, there was nothing automatic about it, and the trail to that improvement was circuitous.”
Ultimately what society must aim for, Acemoglu said, is what he and Johnson term “The Productivity Bandwagon” of their book. That’s the condition wherein technological innovation is tailored to assist employees, not replace them, spreading economic growth more widely. In this manner, productivity growth is accompanied by shared prosperity.
“The Productivity Bandwagon is just not a force of nature that applies under all circumstances routinely, and with great force, however it is something that’s conditional on the character of technology and the way production is organized and the gains are shared,” Acemoglu said.
Crucially, he added, this “double process” of innovation involves yet another thing: a major amount of employee power, something which has eroded in recent a long time in lots of places, including the U.S.
That erosion of employee power, he acknowledged, has made it less likely that multifaceted technologies can be utilized in ways in which help the labor force. Still, Acemoglu noted, there’s a healthy tradition inside the ranks of technologists, including innovators akin to Norbert Wiener and Douglas Engelbart, to “make machines more useable, or more useful to humans, and AI could pursue that path.”
Conversely, Acemoglu noted, “There’s every danger that overemphasizing automation is just not going to get you a lot productivity gains either,” since some technologies could also be merely cheaper than human employees, no more productive.
Icarus and us
The event included a commentary from Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. Christia offered that “Power and Progress” was “an amazing book concerning the forces of technology and easy methods to channel them for the greater good.” She also noted “how prevalent these themes have been even going back to precedent days,” referring to Greek myths involving Daedalus, Icarus, and Prometheus.
Moreover, Christia raised a series of pressing questions on the themes of Acemoglu’s talk, including whether the appearance of AI represented a more concerning set of problems than previous episodes of technological advancement, a lot of which ultimately helped many individuals; which individuals in society have probably the most ability and responsibility to assist produce changes; and whether AI may need a unique impact on developing countries within the Global South.
In an intensive audience question-and-answer session, Acemoglu fielded over a dozen questions, a lot of them concerning the distribution of earnings, global inequality, and the way employees might organize themselves to have a say within the implementation of AI.
Broadly, Acemoglu suggested it remains to be to be determined how greater employee power could be obtained, and noted that employees themselves should help suggest productive uses for AI. At multiple points, he noted that employees cannot just protest circumstances, but must also pursue policy changes as well — if possible.
“There’s some extent of optimism in saying we will actually redirect technology and that it’s a social alternative,” Acemoglu acknowledged.
Acemoglu also suggested that countries in the worldwide South were also vulnerable to the potential effects of AI, in a couple of ways. For one thing, he noted, because the work of MIT economist Martin Beraja shows, China has been exporting AI surveillance technologies to governments in lots of developing countries. For one more, he noted, countries which have made overall economic progress by employing more of their residents in low-wage industries might find labor force participation being undercut by AI developments.
Individually, Acemoglu warned, if private corporations or central governments anywhere on this planet amass increasingly details about people, it’s prone to have negative consequences for many of the population.
“So long as that information could be used with none constraints, it’s going to be antidemocratic and it’s going to be inequality-inducing,” he said. “There’s every danger that AI, if it goes down the automation path, could possibly be a highly unequalizing technology all over the world.”