Reject inevitability claims- they deny human agency

(Erik Brynjolfsson is Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, , 5-20)

Acemoglu is right on three key points. First, core AI technologies are indeed advancing rapidly and becoming increasingly powerful. Improvements in machine learning, in particular—such as the deep learning techniques that made such rapid progress on the Imagenet dataset—are affecting more and more of the economy. In the right applications, the payoff can be large. Adoption is still in its early days—only 1.3 percent of firms in the United States have adopted robotics, for instance—but the numbers are growing rapidly. Second, the societal implications of AI are profound, especially regarding the future of work and our individual freedoms and democracy. Third, and most important, outcomes are not preordained. This last point is not to be taken for granted. The most common question I get from audiences when I speak about AI is some version of: What will AI do to society? But this is not the right question to ask; it erases our agency. Acemoglu deserves special credit not simply for diagnosing the challenges created by these technologies, but also for suggesting a set of specific solutions. (In fact Acemoglu has long been one of the most powerful and rigorous advocates of the idea that we can and should direct the course of technical change. He published an influential article making this argument nearly twenty years ago.) Regarding Acemoglu’s diagnosis, I would emphasize the following details. When it comes to AI’s effect on the workforce, the real challenge is wages, not jobs. While employment has grown over the past forty years, real wages for Americans with a high school education or less have fallen. Tyler Cowen and others have argued that this is evidence of a lack of technological progress, but overall GDP and GDP per capita have also grown, and 2019 saw a record number of billionaires. Drawing on the work of Acemoglu as well as David Autor, Lawrence Katz, Melissa Kearney, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane, Andrew McAfee and I have made the case that advances in technology were not inconsistent with falling wages for some or even large part of the workforce. The scale of these changes, and the bigger ones yet to come, is massive. The value of all the human capital in the United States—the sum of American workers’ skills, experience, education, and knowhow—is likely around $240 trillion. That implies that if our decisions change the trajectory of technology’s effects on the U.S. economy enough to cause even a 10 percent change in that value, it would be worth more than an entire year’s GDP (currently $21 trillion). As for AI’s effect on democracy, we ought to be concerned about increasing polarization and enabling Orwellian levels of surveillance. As Marshall van Alstyne and I have written, it is precisely because digital technologies better enable us to find content and people we like that they can also separate and polarize us. These technologies can also massively amplify the power of the state to monitor the words and actions of its citizens, giving it the power to not only silence critics but even shape their thoughts. The implications are increasingly recognized by world leaders; as even Vladimir Putin has put it, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” In the wrong hands, the result may be what Jean Tirole calls a digital dystopia. But no outcome is inevitable. We have the ability to direct AI, just as we can direct other types of technical change. Let me focus on three groups that can and should play a role in shaping AI for good: technologists, managers, and policymakers.