The day when artificial intelligence takes your job may be further away than most people think.
Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference on Monday, Mark Warner, chief executive of consulting firm Faculty, dismissed concerns that large-scale adoption of the technology would automatically lead to mass layoffs.
“It’s going to be a lot further than these people expect,” Warner told conference participants in London, adding that with the ongoing hype, it is often too easy to overestimate the true capabilities of AI.
“Look, when we were promised fully autonomous cars, it took a little longer than we expected,” Warner continued.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, experts have predicted that generative AI, and AI more broadly, would eventually revolutionize every aspect of our daily lives, just as the Internet did a generation ago. Even Goldman Sachs economists predicted last April as a result, at least 300 million full-time equivalent jobs were at risk of being lost.
Warner believes such predictions will be as unrealistic as robotaxis.
Executives in both the technology and auto industries have repeatedly argued that this technology is just around the corner. For example, Elon Musk incorrectly predicted Five years ago by the month that Tesla will have 1 million vehicles on the road by 2020, each generating an annual income of $30,000 for its lucky owners. Instead, it took significantly longer to ensure the technology was safely implemented. Just a few weeks before the advent of ChatGPT, Bloomberg already has concluded “Self-driving cars are here to stay.”
“Nowhere” may sound too skeptical, but progress has indeed been painfully slow. The few AI cars in service are largely limited to a select few cities that boast the most generally favorable road conditions, such as San Francisco and Phoenix, and even there are not without the occasional scandal.
AI should be created to support people, not replace them
The idea that AI will quickly automate human jobs and disappear in its lifetime will also be premature, Warner said.
“Obviously this is true, and it’s good that it will continue,” he said.
Former Harvard Physics Fellow Warner co-founder Educators in 2014 to help organizations using AI better leverage the technology’s benefits while managing its potential risks.
He believes that AI should be designed and built around people first, to serve as a tool that supports them. rather than displacing them.
Not only could this approach ultimately prove more effective than scaring people with predictions of hundreds of millions of layoffs, it could also go a long way toward gaining public acceptance for AI.