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Who do you believe when it comes to the potential impact of artificial intelligence? An MIT Nobel laureate economist or the former CEO of the world's biggest tech company?
MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, for his part, says the current hype is way over the top. AI might profitably automate only 5% of tasks and add just 1% to global GDP over the coming decade, he said in a recent MIT Sloan presentation. Acemoglu also asserted that AI's potential is less clear than the internet's was when it began to proliferate in the 1990s. Currently, he added, AI is seen as a cost‑cutting tool rather than as a new force for innovation, as was the internet in its early days.
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At the same time, former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt believes that, if anything, we're underplaying AI and not grasping its full, sweeping effects. "The arrival of non‑human intelligence is a very big deal," he told a recent TED conference. He reiterated the same points at a conference in July. Essentially, AI has become adept at developing solutions to problems—solutions never considered by humans.
On the overhyped side, "the industry has not produced applications that are critical for the production process or for generating new goods and services that are going to be hugely valuable," Acemoglu said. The rise of the commercial internet has had a more substantial impact, he added. Even the scenario in which machines will eventually perform cognitive tasks "is not so clear on how you're going to get AI tools into the production process."
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The current state of the art in AI is still relegated to predictive tasks that don't require high levels of social interaction and judgment, he continued. Roughly 20% of the economy is "either in the crosshairs of AI to be automated or could be majorly boosted by AI input."
Schmidt, on the other hand, says AI is upending even the most forward‑looking economic models. "There are assumptions that we'll end up with something like 30% increases in productivity per year," he pointed out. This is even beyond the scope of traditional economics, as economists have never seen such gains. And the pace is accelerating. "As this stuff happens quicker, you will forget what was true two years ago, or three years ago," Schmidt added.
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