On a day when Goldman Sachs published a report saying Artificial Intelligence (AI) could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla founder who has built his fortune on technology, and 1,100 other signatories called for a six-month pause in developing any AI systems that is more powerful that Open AI’s latest GPT-4.
The Goldman Sachs report said AI could lead to a ‘significant disruption’ in the labour market, saying two-thirds of jobs could be automated to some degree in the US and Europe.
While it said as many as 300 million jobs could be affected, the report said it will also create new ones. AI technology could also boost productivity growth and boost global GDP by as much as seven percent over time.
Most affected jobs
AI’s impact will vary across different sectors – 46 percent of tasks in administration, 44 percent in legal professions, 37 percent in architecture and engineering, 36 percent in life, physical and social sciences sector, and 36 percent in business and financial operations could be automated.
The most AI-proof job, according to the report, are tasks in the building and ground cleanings and maintenance sector, with only 1 percent of tasks being affected. Six percent in construction and 4 percent in maintenance make up the bottom three.
Research in the report said 60 percent of workers are in occupations that did not exist in 1940. It also said that Generative AI could reduce employment in the near term.
Elon Musk’s appeal
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who is one of the original co-founders of OpenAI before quitting the board in 2018, and a group of AI experts and industry executives have written an open letter and said AI poses potential risks to society.
The letter, issued by the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organisation funded by the Musk Foundation, said: “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.
“Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? … Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?. Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 (including the currently-being-trained GPT-5),” demanded the signatories.
The letter, posted online on Tuesday and signed by more than 1,100 people, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal considered one of the ‘Godfathers of modern AI’, historian Yuval Noah Harari, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn and Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology.
Sam Altman, chief executive at OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft were not among those who signed the letter.
Gary Marcus, a professor at New York University, told Reuters: “The letter isn’t perfect, but the spirit is right: we need to slow down until we better understand the ramifications.
“The big players are becoming increasingly secretive about what they are doing, which makes it hard for society to defend against whatever harms may materialise.”
Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor at Brown University and former assistant director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, added: “A lot of the power to develop these systems has been constantly in the hands of few companies that have the resources to do it.
“That’s how these models are, they’re hard to build and they’re hard to democratise.”
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