philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Most Joyless Tech Revolution Ever: AI Is Making Us Rich and Unhappy

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While Wall Street greets AI with open arms, ordinary Americans respond with ambivalence, anxiety, even dread.

This isn’t like the dot-com era. A survey in 1995 found 72% of respondents comfortable with new technology such as computers and the internet. Just 24% were not.

Fast forward to AI now, and those proportions have flipped: just 31% are comfortable with AI while 68% are uncomfortable, a summer survey for CNBC found. ...

Since November 2022, when ChatGPT was released, the market value of the “Magnificent Seven”—megacapitalization tech stocks closely tied to AI such as Nvidiaand Microsoft—is up 169%. The spending spurred by that wealth, and the massive sums those companies are plowing into data centers, are why the hard data on economic growth and household finances looks pretty healthy.

And yet consumer sentiment is near a record low, according to the University of Michigan. ...

Most people also get that tech inevitably makes some jobs obsolete. But what about a technology that could make humans obsolete? In a recent report, economists at Goldman Sachs, mapping out downside and upside scenarios to AI, say the latter means an acceleration in productivity that “eventually makes human input in knowledge-based work tasks redundant.”

And here is Yale University economist Pascual Restrepo imagining the consequences of “artificial general intelligence,” where machines can think and reason just like humans. With enough computing power, even jobs that seem intrinsically human, such as a therapist, could be done better by machines, he concludes. At that point, workers’ share of gross domestic product, currently 52%, “converges to zero, and most income eventually accrues to compute.”

These, keep in mind, are the optimistic scenarios. ...

It isn’t just the job-destroying potential that is disturbing. The technology defies comprehension. Even the modelers aren’t sure why models do what they do. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-most-joyless-tech-revolution-ever-ai-is-making-us-rich-and-unhappy-6b7116a3