“What’s the core competence of human beings?” Fareed Zakaria’s brutally simple question to OpenAI boss Sam Altman boiled down an hour-long discussion over the future of technology to its essence: in a world racing to develop the first artificial general intelligence, what does humanity still excel at when a machine comes along that is effectively smarter in every way?
No one on the World Economic Forum’s panel, Altman included, had a convincing answer for the CNN journalist moderating the panel in Davos on Thursday.
“I admit it does feel different this time. General purpose cognition feels so close to what we all treasure about humanity that it does feel different,” conceded the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, before venturing into a prediction.
“We [humans] will make decisions about what should happen in the world,” said Altman. READ MORE...
Generative artificial intelligence technology such as ChatGPT could boost productivity for many workers in the years ahead. But some people are likely to lose their jobs in the process.
That's according to Sam Altman (ABOVE), the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Altman said in June that AI's development could provide the "most tremendous leap forward" for people's quality of life. But he also said in March it'd be "crazy not to be a little afraid of AI" and its potential to create "disinformation problems or economic shocks."
In a new interview with The Atlantic, Altman pushed back on the idea that the AI boom would have only a positive impact on workers.
"A lot of people working on AI pretend that it's only going to be good; it's only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced," he said. "Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop."
Since ChatGPT rolled out last November, economy experts have spoken about the ways AI could serve as a valuable assistant to workers — helping them become more productive and spend less time on boring tasks.
Some experts expressed optimism that AI wouldn't result in the widespread job displacement many Americans fear and said that they should be more worried about their co-workers using these technologies to supplant them.
"You will not be replaced by AI but by someone who knows what to do with AI," Oded Netzer, a Columbia Business School professor, told Insider in early July.
But Altman's comments speak to a harsh reality: Even if most jobs aren't displaced, some are likely to go by the wayside. In March, Goldman Sachs said that 300 million full-time jobs across the globe could be disrupted by AI.
"History tells us that simplification is often merely a step towards automation," Carl Benedikt Frey, an Oxford economist, previously told Insider. "AI assistants that analyze telemarketers' calls and provide recommendations are being trained with the ultimate goal of replacing them." READ MORE...
