“Who wouldn’t want a robot to watch over your kids?” Elon Musk asked Davos delegates last week, as he looked forward with enthusiasm to a world with “more robots than people”.
Not me, thanks: children need the human connection – the love – that gives life meaning.
As he works towards launching SpaceX on to the stock market, in perhaps the biggest ever such share sale, the world’s richest man has every incentive to talk big.
Yet as Musk waxed eccentrically about this robotic utopia, it was a reminder that major decisions about the direction of technological progress are being taken by a small number of very powerful men – and they are mainly men.
In the cosy onstage chat, the World Economic Forum’s interim co-chair, Larry Fink, failed to ask Musk about whichever tweak of internal plumbing allowed his Grok chatbot to produce and broadcast what a New York Times investigation estimated was 1.8m sexualised images of women in just nine days.
The Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, wasn’t in the Swiss mountains, perhaps because he didn’t fancy facing questions about the $70bn he has fruitlessly poured into the metaverse, his plan for us all to hang out in a virtual world with imaginary mates.
Even if he had put in an appearance, it seems unlikely he would have been pressed on the next big thing: Meta’s smart glasses, which are already, entirely predictably, being used to film women covertly.
The International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, told Davos delegates that the failure to regulate tech was one of her greatest concerns, saying: “Wake up: AI is for real, and it is transforming our world faster than we are getting ahead of it.”
Rather than childcare robots, though, the way most people are likely to encounter AI in the near term, is in the labour market, where Georgieva warned of a coming “tsunami” as jobs are transformed or eliminated.
The IMF is calling on governments to invest in education and reskilling to prepare populations for the changing jobs market; but also to implement tough competition policy, so the benefits of innovation do not end up concentrated in too few hands; and strong welfare safety nets.
In a blogpost published just ahead of Davos, Georgieva warned: “The stakes go beyond economics. Work brings dignity and purpose to people’s lives. That’s what makes the AI transformation so consequential.”
Business surveys suggest that outside the tech sector, leaders are enthusiastic about the potential of AI, but are not yet feeling the benefits. A PWC poll of UK chief executives, published to coincide with the start of the WEF, for example, showed that 81% were making AI their top investment priority but only 30% had seen any cost reductions as a result.
That means in the months ahead, there will be intense pressure to find savings, with the focus likely to be on the wage bill.
Chairing a WEF session on “jobless growth”, Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford’s digital economy lab, pointed to recent work he and colleagues did, suggesting workers in the US aged 22-25 are already experiencing AI-related job losses, especially in sectors where AI “automates rather than augments labour”.
Brynjolfsson believes that this dichotomy is a crucial one, which gets to the heart of why Musk’s robot dreams have a dystopian edge.
Four years ago Brynjolfsson wrote a paper called The Turing Trap. He argued that the Turing test, which posited that the ultimate accolade for a technology was to replicate human intelligence by seeming human, was the wrong goal.
Instead, he argues, “as machines become better substitutes for human labour, workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become increasingly dependent on those who control the technology. In contrast, when AI is focused on augmenting humans rather than mimicking them, then humans retain the power to insist on a share of the value created.”
Brynjolfsson urges policymakers to use tax incentives and regulation to nudge companies towards developing technologies that enhance humans’ abilities – putting powerful tools in their hands – rather than replacing them completely.
That was broadly the picture presented by the Microsoft chief executive, Satya Nadella, in an upbeat session about the future of AI, in which he talked up the benefits for the global south, describing a world in which doctors are freed up by tech to spend more time with patients, for example.
Nevertheless, he warned that the technology risked losing its “social permission” if it could not be shown to be making people’s lives better, rather than just enriching a small number of powerful tech firms.
“We, as a global community, have to get to the point where we’re using this to do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries, right? Otherwise I don’t think this makes much sense,” he mused.
Certainly, “social permission” for AI to swallow up energy, water and capital may be hard to come by, if the way many people encounter it – aside from in a sea of misogynistic online slop – is as the reason for their career going off the rails.
And that’s why trades unionists are rightly calling for an urgent conversation about how the benefits of increased productivity, if indeed they materialise, can be shared with society, not hoarded by the tech bros.
As Liz Shuler, president of the US union federation the AFL-CIO put it, “if we can all agree that this is to make our jobs better and safer, easier, more productive, then we’re all in. But if you’re looking to just de-skill, dehumanise, replace workers, put people out on the street with no path forward, then absolutely you’re going to have a revolution.”
