Few fears have captured the public imagination as much as the fear of losing jobs due to AI. A recent survey by the think tank Data for Progress found that a majority of U.S. voters believe that AI is likely to increase unemployment, a scenario that often feels like it’s playing out in a dire job market.
It makes for a compelling story. However, in a recent article, luckGary Marcus, a cognitive scientist emeritus at New York University and a prominent AI critic, argues strongly in the opposite direction that AI won’t immediately take away someone’s job.
Much of the fear-mongering, Marcus writes, is just good old-fashioned propaganda. For example, the AI industry would like you to believe that artificial general intelligence (a still-theoretical form of AI with intellectual capabilities that rival or exceed humans) already exists or is just around the corner.
As Marcus points out, this kind of AI remains firmly in the realm of science fiction, regardless of what tech executives want to believe. “[T]”They may be protecting their base in case something like this actually happens,” he wrote.
AI calculations of the unemployment rate are similarly inconsistent, Marcus writes, including calculations by the AI companies themselves. Take the example of Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude. The company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has created a spectacle of himself warning of a growing AI jobs apocalypse, even though his company’s research arm found that “unemployment among at-risk workers has not increased systematically since late 2022.”
What’s actually happening, Marcus argues, is that companies are using AI to wash their investor reports in order to cash in on the hype. “In many cases, AI may actually act as a fig leaf to cover layoffs caused by financial distress or early overemployment,” he explains.
When mass layoffs are clearly blamed on AI, it tends to be short-lived, as in the case of financial technology company Klarna, which was forced to reverse its decision to automate customer service agents just 11 months after declaring them obsolete.
Unfortunately for those praying for a cyberpunk future, so far the AI apocalypse seems to have been a huge failure. Fortunately, real life is full of crises that will continue to plague us until the singularity arrives, that is.
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