With the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our daily lives, the question of whether humanity can avoid an AI take over arises. Dr. Daron Acemoglu believes that everything is not wrong with automating certain tasks, but he encourages the development of new tasks that humans can do to “expand their creativity”. This would be beneficial for knowledge workers as well as white-collar professions. To such an extent, AI-generated art has been created and has sparked many debates concerning its usage and implications for the impact on human work.
The Writers Guild of Hollywood is currently on strike and is demanding that AI not replace them. Acemoglu acknowledges the deeper problem of “whose data” is being used and how it is being utilized. He highlights the need for both compensation and regulation in the age of Artificial Intelligence as the knowledge produced from sources such as books and Wikipedia was not originally intended for AI use.
OpenAI is a large language model (LLM) that has been designed to be authoritative and is on the rise. However, Acemoglu worries that the current architecture is not optimized for understanding the reliability of certain pieces of information and this can lead to misleading and unreliable answers. Mitigating this potential promotion of false information requires the implementation of complexities of human cognition which are able to recognize contradictions and independent pieces of information.
Overall, AI has the potential to perform certain tasks more efficiently than humans, and thus its implementation should safe-guarded with regulation and compensation to ensure that human workers are not taken advantage of. If done properly, the use of AI can be a powerful augmentation to creativity and fuel new tasks and occupations for humans.
