Satya Nadella has said in the past which metrics matter and which don’t. In his view, the exact market value of Microsoft or which company is the highest valued in the world is not so important. Microsoft’s chief similarly sees evaluating artificial intelligence. According to him, the performance of AI models in benchmarks is a secondary issue. What matters is how AI (including its tweaked version AGI) will realistically affect economic growth and…. whether it will take our jobs.
In a recent interview, Satya Nadella said that the measure of success for artificial intelligence will be tangible global economic growth, not arbitrary benchmarks that measure how well AI programs can compete in challenges, such as solving obscure math puzzles. These are interesting in isolation, but have no practical application.
Taking away people’s jobs through AI is to distract from important problems?
Microsoft’s CEO also addressed the burning question of late – whether artificial intelligence will take away people’s jobs. AGI, or general-purpose AI, according to more pessimistic visionaries, will replace humans, and those humans will receive nothing in return. Indeed, taxing machines and AI and introducing an unconditional basic income in the current political climate seems remote and unrealistic. Satya Nadella allays these fears. According to him, there will be no replacement of humans, and talking about it is an unnecessary distraction when the industry needs to become practical and just try to make money before investors lose patience.
Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, a company whose CEO Sam Altman has long expressed concern that AI could eventually take over the world. Critics say this scaremongering is primarily aimed at putting Altman in the center of power and maintaining control through regulatory capture. On the other hand, in response to Elon Musk’s recent proposal to buy out OpenAI, Altman has stated that the company is structured so that one person cannot have power over it.
If we have this explosion, abundance, whatever, of available intelligence commodities, the first thing we will see is an increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is where we’re looking a little bit ahead with all the hype around AGI. When we say it’s like an industrial revolution, let’s have that type of growth typical of an industrial revolution.
– Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
AI as new industrial revolution will affect economic growth
According to Nadella, even 10% growth adjusted for inflation and attributed to AI would prove that it is a technology for the next industrial revolution. According to him, the billions invested in AI companies today do not count as real GDP growth, because there must be real demand on the other side. Otherwise, these companies will crash and burn.
Despite this reassuring tone from Satya Nadella, there are companies, usually providers of AI-powered services and hardware, that outright boast that they can replace humans. A considerable buzz was generated by Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemi±tkowski, who talked about replacing many of his employees with artificial intelligence. The entrepreneur backtracked on those words, but a later report revealed that Klarna had replaced its basic phone tree system with artificial intelligence, which was not particularly innovative and caused frustrated customers to leave the chat room.
AI agents can do a great job of assisting human workers and increasing their productivity. However, if a company hopes to make serious savings by laying off people and casting lame AI in their place, the effect will be counterproductive…. at least for now, while strong artificial intelligence is in the conceptualization stage.
Author: Krzysztof Sulikowski
Source: Gizmodo.com
