Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economist Sendhil Mullainathan is worried about how we are developing AI, and how it is being put to use in the workplace. In a deep-dive discussion with the Wall Street Journal, the professor tackled one of the biggest questions about embracing this revolutionary technology: will it replace some human jobs? MacArthur genius grant winner Mullainathan thinks no, not necessarily, but to keep AI onside, we must rethink the goals companies are setting for themselves as they develop new AI tools. He argues it should be about augmentation, rather than automation.
"Whether we end up building things that replace us, or things that enhance our capacities, that is something we can influence," Mullainathan said, even while admitting he feels "as much urgency as everyone else: If we keep going down the automation path, it's going to be very hard to walk back and start changing things."
The main problem is that each time "Anthropic or OpenAI or Google releases a new model, you'll notice they always talk about, oh, we did better on these benchmarks," he told the paper. This is like a self-determining conclusion, he thinks, because "in many ways those benchmarks dictate what these models are asked to be good at," and companies are pondering if they can build a tool that can do something as well as a person. That means "we're building algorithms with a strong capability for automation."
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