Η τεχνητή νοημοσύνη στην οικονομία

Αντιγράφω επιστολή αναγνώστη με τίτλο “Optimism around AI productivity is premature”, η οποία δημοσιεύτηκε στην Φαϊνάνσιαλ Τάιμς της 30 Μαρτίου 2023. Το επιχείρημα είναι εύλογο και πειστικό.

“Like Monsieur Jourdain, the Molière character who had been speaking prose all his life without realising it, we have for years been using artificial intelligence, unobtrusively embedded in a range of goods and services, but the emergence of ‘generative’ artificial intelligence has stirred up optimism to a level that I feel is premature.

Goldman Sachs’s latest research, which is cited in Delphine Strauss’s article (‘AI predicted to put 300mn jobs at risk in big economies’, Report, March 28), concludes that its application could raise global gross domestic product by 7 per cent over a decade.

But we have been here before, during the computer revolution, that swept away whole swaths of clerical jobs, from typing pools to telephonists, but prompted economist Robert Solow’s famous remark that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics’.

What was the missing factor? Schumpeter’s ‘Creative Destruction’. In other words, the transition from existing working practices to new ones is not seamless nor frictionless. It takes time to install the new systems and to train workers, and the dislocation this creates drags down overall productivity growth.

Only once the new systems are bedded in can productivity move to a higher level. I suspect this will happen again for AI. Goldman Sachs may well see the GDP growth it expects, but happening a decade later than planned.”

Richard Cragg

London KT1, UK

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