AI: By The Nicest Man in Economics

Erik Brynjolfsson saw AI coming.

Excerpt: "Yet human beings find it easier to worry about what may be lost than to imagine what could be created, he said. We don’t want AI to do everything humans can do. We want AI to change what humans can do. Beyond the corpus of current human achievement, he said, exists “this much bigger space, bigger than you know, as big as you can imagine, of things that have never been done before.”

Brynjolfsson wants people to see that, while also understanding the social risks AI poses. Right now, “human skills are inherently decentralized,” he said. “No matter how smart Bill Gates is, he can’t make all the decisions in Microsoft.” But if AI is performing thinking tasks and executing on them, this limitation disappears. AI could create significant unemployment if humans do not adapt fast enough; it could create malign new forms of inequality too. Society needs to act now, or “a lot of people could be made worse off.”

The politics that can help get us there are beyond his remit, he said; policy isn’t his area of expertise. So he is doing what he always does. He is building the body of human knowledge. And he is acting as a social network. He is convening. He is talking. He is getting people together to figure it out."

...Yet he worries that algorithms could further cleave the 0.001 percent from everyone else, and that those elites could consolidate political and social power, along with precious capital. He added—joking, I pray—that a powerful AI could “do whatever it wanted, I mean, including get rid of us all.”

Could, he emphasized, not would. “We’re going to be scrambling with chaos, and I don’t know how we will handle it,”

Brynjolfsson said, before tossing on a leather jacket and loping off to give his students a pop quiz."