Technologists used to be cheery types — often boosterish to the point of annoying. So it has been a little disorientating lately to watch a parade of tech leaders issue public warnings about the dire potential consequences of their own inventions.
Mustafa Suleyman, one of the co-founders of AI lab DeepMind, told an event in San Francisco this month that AI would threaten white-collar workers and create “a serious number of losers” who would be “very unhappy, very agitated.” Governments, he said, would have to think about how to compensate them.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, was encouraging last week in testimony to Congress about the potential for new work to be created, but nonetheless said there would be some “impact on jobs” which would “require partnership between the industry and government, but mostly action by government, to figure out how we want to mitigate that.”