Article by Peter Coy: “…But A.I. could also be designed to empower people rather than replace them, as I wrote a year ago in a newsletter about the M.I.T. Shaping the Future of Work Initiative.
Which of those A.I. futures will be realized was a big topic at the San Francisco conference, which was the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, the American Finance Association and 65 smaller groups in the Allied Social Science Associations.
Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford was one of the busiest economists at the conference, dashing from one panel to another to talk about his hopes for a human-centric A.I. and his warnings about what he has called the “Turing Trap.”
Alan Turing, the English mathematician and World War II code breaker, proposed in 1950 to evaluate the intelligence of computers by whether they could fool someone into thinking they were human. His “imitation game” led the field in an unfortunate direction, Brynjolfsson argues — toward creating machines that behaved as much like humans as possible, instead of like human helpers.
Henry Ford didn’t set out to build a car that could mimic a person’s walk, so why should A.I. experts try to build systems that mimic a person’s mental abilities? Brynjolfsson asked at one session I attended.
Other economists have made similar points: Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University use the term “so-so technologies” for systems that replace human beings without meaningfully increasing productivity, such as self-checkout kiosks in supermarkets.
People will need a lot more education and training to take full advantage of A.I.’s immense power, so that they aren’t just elbowed aside by it. “In fact, for each dollar spent on machine learning technology, companies may need to spend nine dollars on intangible human capital,” Brynjolfsson wrote in 2022, citing research by him and others…(More)”.