White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Productivity To Surge with AI. Do the Politicians Know?

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There is every chance that the world’s industrial economies may be about to enjoy an incredible surge in productivity, something like the arrival of steam power in the 18th century.

The driver of this will be artificial intelligence. Gradually, it will seep into every aspect of our working and living, pushing up the amount produced by individual workers and leading to general economic growth.

The downside is that jobs will be eliminated, probably mostly, and historically for the first time, white-collar jobs. Put simply, office workers are going to find themselves seeking other work, maybe work that is much more physical, in everything from hospitality to healthcare to the trades.

I have canvassed many super-thinkers on AI, and they believe in unison that its impact will be seminal, game-changing, never to be switched back. Most are excited and see a better, healthier, more prosperous future, justifying the upheaval.

Omar Hatamleh, chief AI officer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and author of two books on AI and a third in preparation, misses no opportunity to emphasize that thinking about AI needs to be exponential not linear. Sadly, linear thinking is what we human beings tend to do. To my mind, Hatamleh is in the vanguard of AI thinkers,

The United States is likely to be the major beneficiary of the early waves of AI adoption and its productivity surge if we don’t try to impede the technology’s evolution with premature regulation or controls.

Economies which are sclerotic, as is much of Europe, can look to AI to get them back into growth, especially the former big drivers of growth in Europe like Germany, France and Britain, all of which are scratching their heads as to how to boost their productivity, and, hence, their prosperity.

The danger in Europe is that they will try to regulate AI prematurely and that their trades unions will resist reform of their job markets. That would leave China and the United States to duke it out for dominance of AI technology and to benefit from its boost to efficiency and productivity, and, for example, to medical research, leading to breakthroughs in longevity.

Some of the early fear of Frankenstein science has abated as early AI is being seamlessly introduced in everything from weather forecasting to wildfire control and customer relations. 

Salesforce, a leading software company that has traditionally focused on customer relations management, explains its role as connecting the dots by “layering in” AI. A visit to its website is enlightening. Salesforce has available or is developing “agents,” which are systems that operate on behalf of its customers.

If you want to know how your industry is likely to be affected, take a look at how much data it generates. If it generates scads of data — weather forecasting, electric utilities, healthcare, retailing and airlines — AI is either already making inroads or brace for its arrival. 

PFor society, the big challenge of AI isn’t going to be just the reshuffling of the workforce, but what is truth? This is not a casual question, and it should be at the forefront of wondering how to develop ways of identifying the origin of AI-generated information — data, pictures and sounds.

One way is watermarking, and it deserves all the support it can get from those who are leading the AI revolution –the big tech giants and the small startups that feed into their technology. It begs for study in the government’s many centers of research, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the great national laboratories.

Extraordinarily, as the election bears down on us, there is almost no recognition in the political parties, and the political class as a whole, that we are on the threshold of a revolution. AI is a disruptive technology that holds promise for fabulous medicine, great science and huge productivity gains.

A new epoch is at hand, and it has nothing to do with the political issues of the day.

Please Note: I will be hosting a virtual press briefing, which I have organized for the United States Energy Association, on the impact of AI in the electric utility industry on Wednesday, Oct. 2, at 11 a.m. EDT. It is open to the press and the public.

Here is the registration link: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BbE_VO1bRo2PuiVl6g8IzQ#/registration

How Computers Are Trashing the Old Ways of Work

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I saw the future outside my apartment building this week — and it was a brown van. To be exact, it was a United Parcel Service van and the operator was struggling with a huge load of parcels on a hand truck.
 
You can’t tell too much from a parcel, but the shape gives the contents away to some extent: a small, rolled carpet; a large, flat-screen television; about a dozen boxes that could contain a variety of goods — goodies for fun and essentials to keep things going. Talk about Frankie Laines’1949 hit “Mule Train.”
 
Every day the UPS delivery man is at our building, sometimes with more, sometimes with less. Sometimes he brings clothes for my wife, and recently he brought a book for me. What the trusty fellow in the brown van doesn’t unload, his compatriots from FedEx and the United States Postal Service do.
 
A sea of goods flow into this building each day; goods that have never seen a retail store, never been offered for sale in a mall or high street shop, but goods that people want anyway. Welcome to online shopping and the future disruption it'll bring.
 
What's missing with this shopping is the shop, whether it's a big box store in the mall or a ma-and-pa operation on the high street.
 
It's part of one of the great historical revolution brought about by the Internet. All the data show that online shopping grows every day.
 
Eventually, in the way that the malls undermined the neighborhood shop and the chains killed off those wonderful downtown department stores, a different one for each city (Garfinkel's in Washington, D.C., Jordan Marsh in Boston and I. Magnin in San Francisco), the Internet may bury the malls.
 
Make no mistake, the Internet is a hellishly efficient and cruel exterminator of jobs, as well as a ruthless agent of social change.
 
As so often, the political class is still convinced that job growth can be achieved by economic and regulatory policy shifts. It's easier to blame presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, depending on your ideological persuasion, even though the evidence of massive change is everywhere, than to face a new reality.
 
It's nigh impossible to speak to anyone on the phone at a bank, an insurance company or a utility without going through 20 minutes of computer-assisted torture in the form of voice prompts — “Press star 2 to get your balance.”
 
Academia has been surprisingly slow to study and quantify the job-threatening nature of the new order. MIT, Oxford and Harvard have spoken up, and now you can expect more pessimism from on high as academics get the wind up about their own employment.
 
In the ivory towers, those citadels of refined arrogance, there is deep disquiet. The cause: MOOCS, or massive open online courses. These are attracting students by the hundreds of thousands; some for credit, some just for the joy of watching the most articulate professors in action. They are creating a star system that favors the telegenic over everything else and could, in time, change the nature of higher education so profoundly that many lesser university will close up shop. One study, by researchers at Oxford, has estimated 47 percent of our jobs may disappear.
 
History tells us that new ways of doing things lead to new areas of endeavor; agrarian people became urban manufacturers, manual labor gave way to service-sector work. The computerization of work is an equal-opportunity un-employer. Is new work possible?
Factories in China and Germany are as subject to computer predation as those in the United States. We may yet see a global economic collapse driven by too much productivity; computer productivity.
 
This column was written on a computer and distributed by computer. The contents were generated by a human being, but that may change. Stay online. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate