AI Hype Is Blasted by MIT Economist,

Who Claims It’s Too Simple to Actually Affect Jobs

 

 

17/8/2024,

Businesses are “over-investing in generative AI and then regretting it.

“The fear of an AI bubble is only getting bigger.

Experts were concerned that the dam was bursting after major selloffs at the start of this week, but markets have since greatly stabilised.

However, the discussion over the tech companies losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalisation goes on,

with detractors claiming that the long-term sustainability of the AI boom is questionable.

Leading AI sceptic and MIT economist Daron Acemoglu said in an NPR interview that

the technology is just too simple to make a significant difference.

Acemoglu gave a direct response when asked if generative AI would bring about revolutionary changes in the economy.

“Not at all. No. Not, Acemoglu stated to NPR. “I mean unless you count a lot of companies over-investing in generative AI and then regretting it, a revolutionary change.”

Many of the difficulties faced by generative AI persist from when ChatGPT was originally released to the public in late 2022. One reason is that AI chatbots are still prone to “hallucinate,” which means that their grasp of reality is shaky at best.

According to experts, claims of “generative AI intelligence” are probably overblown and amount to little more than “autocorrect on steroids” a statistical model that can only identify patterns in data, as NPR notes.

Although the public has had access to it for some years, the rate of significant business use is still questionable. Although employees use technology daily, businesses have not yet adopted it widely, according to a report published by The Economist last month.

According to Acemoglu, AI cannot perform the majority of activities found in a modern office. The economist projects that generative AI will eventually affect less than 5% of human tasks.

Additionally, he forecasted that during the following ten years, technology will only slightly increase the impact on the gross domestic product. He said to NPR that while that’s “nothing to be sneered at,” “it’s not revolutionary in any shape or form.”

“So a lot of people in the industry don’t recognise how versatile, talented, multifaceted human skills and capabilities are,” Acemoglu stated to NPR. “And once you do that, you tend to overrate machines ahead of humans and underrate the humans.”