Job Displacement on Account of Artificial Intelligence. How Senate Addressed the Concerns of the Loss of Jobs at the Judiciary Meeting on Capitol Hill

The Judiciary Meeting on Capitol Hill covered issues of manipulation, deep fakes, identity and privacy, and accountability. It focused less on the issue of the inevitable job displacement. Artificial Intelligence accelerates some white-collar jobs at rates of up to 80%. This is a massive disruption to creative industries, research, data processing, but also to jobs in the journalistic field and advocacy.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal raised the issue, calling it his “biggest nightmare” and asked the three participants, under oath, whether they share that concern or not.

Sam Altman: Like With All Technological Revolutions, I Expect There To Be Significant Impact on Jobs

During the hearing, Altman didn’t venture to speculate on what the impact on the job market would be, saying it would be “very difficult to predict”. He said there would be “far greater jobs on the other side” of the AI revolution, and that the jobs of today will get better. People noticed he said “far greater jobs”, and not “more jobs”. In an interview with Lex Friedman in March he did reveal he was afraid that chatbots will eliminate many of the current jobs.

In front of Congress and faced with Blumenthal, Altman was less radical and tried to strike an optimistic tone, suggesting AI is optimizing markets and creating new and better jobs.

“As our quality of life raises and as machines and tools that we create can help us live better lives the bar raises for what we do and on our human ability, and what we spend our time going after more ambitious, more satisfying projects. There will be an impact on jobs. We try to be very clear about that, and I think it will require a partnership between the industry and government, but mostly action by government to figure out how we want to mitigate that. But I’m very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be,” Altman said in front of Congress.

He said people should see GPT-4 as a tool, not a creature and to understand they have a great deal of control over it.”AI is good at doing tasks, not jobs.”

Christina Montgomery: I’m a Personal Example of a Job That Didn’t Exist When I Joined IBM

Christina Montgomery, Vice President and Privacy and Trust Officer at IBM, also admitted there is going to be a lot of job displacement. “New jobs will be created. Many more jobs will be transformed and some jobs will transition away,” she said.

She called on institutions to join forces with the corporate environment to educate people for the skills of the future and pledged that IBM will train 30 million individuals by 2030 “in the skills that are needed for society today.”

Regardless of the newly-created jobs, the truth of the matter is jobs are getting accelerated to an extent that demand cannot keep up with. If one field eliminates 30 to 80% of the labor, demand needs to grow by the same percentage, which is unrealistic.

Gary Marcus: Past Performance History Is Not a Guarantee of the Future

Most people discussing job displacement like to draw the line between various inventions that eliminated Some jobs and created Others. The horse and carriage being replaced by the automobile have been thrown around a lot, but AI is a different breed of automobile vs. carriage.

Throughout the hearing, the NYU professor has been the most blunt, transparent, and honest on sensitive issues, and also a pessimistic voice.

“It has always been the case in the past that we have had more jobs as new technologies came in, I think this one’s gonna be different. And the real question is over what time scale? Is it gonna be 10 years? Is it gonna be a hundred years? And I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that question. I think in the long run, so-called artificial general intelligence really will replace a large fraction of human jobs,” Marcus responded.

He also stressed the capabilities of AIs are still in their infancy. While the technology feels awe-inspiring now, it took the cork off of a much larger bottle with a lot more to pour out at the market. In terms of Artificial Intelligence, platforms like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and MidJourney are rudimentary.

Adding to the Issue, Creatives Are Feeding Their Work Into Ais Only To Be Replaced Afterwards

The issue of copyright got more attention during the hearing, as Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn talked about singers owning the rights to their own voice (what she called “owning the virtual you”).

The subject ties into multiple issues for copyright holders: painters, designers, creators, writers, singers, composers, visual artists, and movie makers. Their works are being fed into machine learning systems. New AIs are being educated on trillions of portfolios from artists available online on platforms like ArtStation. In the meantime, artists are being replaced by MidJourney, Dall-E, and likely future implementations like Jukebox.

Altman explained he is currently discussing the issue with a copyright office to find solutions for artists. They are looking for an economic model to pay for their work, but the unspoken truth is that’s simply not feasible. Each individual work is a very small fraction of the AIs system. Training Artificial Intelligence requires impossibly large datasets. Companies are not in a position to buy works of art at the “before” price.

One example that has been thrown around was Napster. “That was something that really cost a lot of artists a lot of money in the digital distribution era,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said. In fact, it took the industry some 15 years to reinvent itself through platforms like Spotify and YouTube.

This precedent, coupled with Gary Marcus’ prediction, could reasonably amount to recovery times longer than one generation.

Was the Issue of Job Displacement Glossed Over at the Senate Judiciary Hearings?

Yes and no. Job displacement is in the realm of “wait and see”. On one side, the new powerhouse is bound to accelerate the economy overall. Yes, some jobs will be eliminated, some jobs will be reinvented and others (not enough of them) will be sparked by the new technology. Neither of the participants had authority on how the new human resource is being shaped. They all expressed concerns about the job market, in the past and at the hearing. Beyond training people into new skills, their input and expertise is limited.

Experts floated insufficient ideas, like reducing work hours and decreasing the work week, but so far there aren't any notable .

At this point, humanity is in a “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it” mode.