next era

By: Nour Attalla

The two sides of AI

In 2022, Sybil, an AI tool developed at MIT, was able to accurately predict whether a person would develop lung cancer in the future by looking at a single picture of their lungs. Using pictures taken in 2015, Sybil was able to predict with 80% accuracy who would have cancer six years later. 

Still, alongside stories of massive developments in AI, we are hearing of the downsides of this new technological revolution as well.

At the same time as Sybil was hard at work predicting cancer, Olivia, a writer in San Francisco, lost her job as her employer decided to replace her with the much quicker and cheaper Chat-GPT. And she’s not alone, with many jobs, from lawyers and accountants, to graphic designers and writers, being at risk from being outcompeted by AI. In fact, McKinsey predicted that 375 million jobs will be lost to AI-based automation by 2030. 

Today, we’re living through a major economic transformation, forcing many of us to question: Is AI the huge threat it is made out to be?

Lessons from the past

To better understand how AI can reshape our lives, we look back at the industrial revolution 250 years ago. 

The invention of new machines allowed the labour of skilled workers to be done quicker, cheaper, and with less training – sound familiar?

In 1763, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny in England. This tool for spinning threads of wool did the work of eight weavers, and ironically helped kick-start the technological revolution that made James’s work obsolete in a matter of decades.

James wasn’t alone either, as all across the economy, jobs were lost at a lightning pace. Often, people migrated to cities, looking for whatever work they could find, and living and working in poor conditions. 

At the same time, the owners of these new technologies were accumulating tremendous profits.

A big delay was seen before efficiency gains improved the average person’s quality of life, until public pressure and new laws created free education, unemployment benefits, and democratic rights.

Still, eventually – after major disruption – a new balance was created, with higher levels of common prosperity than ever before.

So what does this all mean for us?

We are at a similar threshold today. AI will undoubtedly bring massive efficiency gains. Not only will it replace repetitive tasks, but it will also provide new opportunities we could not imagine today.

For example, before Sybil, only 10% of eligible patients were screened for cancer each year, as there simply weren’t enough doctors around. Now, screening can be done much more quickly, and with less human input. This can be huge for the population, as survival rates go up dramatically when cancers are detected sooner. For pancreatic cancer, the survival rate is 20% today, but when detected 5 years in advance, this rate becomes 50%. Benefits like this can come when predicting other diseases or natural disasters as well, and in imagining solutions to these problems.

The human labour freed up by AI can improve our lives as well. Human-facing sectors, like education, medical services, or elderly care have major shortages of workers. Here, especially with ageing populations across the developed world, millions of additional jobs are expected to be created in the coming decades. Often, these jobs will provide more opportunities for physical activity and human interaction than the repetitive office jobs they replace. At the same time, new jobs involving AI are also arising, from content creation to AI ethics and bias management. 

An additional benefit of AI is that we may also see shorter working hours, as the productivity of workers is improved by new tools.

Still, there will undoubtedly be drastic job losses, creation of insecure jobs, and worsening income inequality in the short term. 

An effective political response is needed to spread the benefits of progress, tackle these downsides, and maximise the promise of new technology. Although policy change is often slow, we are already seeing efforts to improve AI’s effect on our lives: the EU is developing new worker’s rights to effectively implement AI whilst protecting jobs, and protections for consumer privacy and fair prices are already being implemented. 

In 2021, the UK supreme court also ruled to treat Uber drivers as employees, guaranteeing online economy workers sick pay and pensions. Legislation like this allows us to gain the efficiency benefits of new technologies whilst protecting workers’ rights.

The future

AI has the potential to massively increase quality of life. And we are already seeing some of the impacts today, like with cancer-detection tool Sybil. 

Social and economic disruption is an inevitable part of this creative destruction. But, by redistributing the benefits of new technologies and re-employing our labour we can adapt most quickly. 

And although politics always plays catch-up to change, we are already seeing meaningful progress here. With a combination of entrepreneurs, elected politicians, and grassroots action, a new, better, AI-future can emerge from this disruption and chaos.