Leaders all agree: AI will be good – or bad – for the future

FII

• Musk praises force for good
• Warnings about inequality
• Fears of a ‘Terminator future’

Elon Musk thinks it has a 90 percent chance of being for the good of humanity, while critics say it is certain to decimate jobs across the developed world. 

Artificial intelligence, or AI, dominated the discussions at Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative (FII) summit this year like never before, with increasingly upbeat – and dire – predictions about what the technology means for the world. 

Global finance leaders, tech entrepreneurs and politicians gathered at “Davos in the desert” under the shadow of war in Gaza and Lebanon, and a US election on November 5 that could return former president Donald Trump to power. 

But it was the rapid advances in AI – which only sprang to global attention with the launch of OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence app ChatGPT two years ago – that took up most sessions over three days of the FII. 

“I feel comfortable saying it’s getting 10 times better per year … I think we’ll be able to do anything that any human can do possibly within the next year or two,” Musk, founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, told FII delegates via video link. 

“It’s most likely going to be great, and there’s some chance, which could be 10 to 20 percent, that it goes bad.” 

A number of speakers dampened the enthusiasm with warnings about what bad could look like. One potential outcome cited was inequality. 

Jeffrey Sachs, a development economist at Columbia University, said economic advances “are not touching 74 countries who are literally half the world’s population”.

“So what kind of world are we building? A world of increasing health, no doubt, increasing technology, no doubt, but shocking inequalities that are unimaginable,” Sachs said.  

“If Elon Musk is right … wages will plummet for most people. Elon, who is now worth $280 billion this morning, will be worth some trillions and most of the rest of us will be worth very little and the social consequences will be very complicated,” Sachs said. 

FII

Venture capitalists were no less concerned about AI’s economic impacts. 

“When we look function by function inside companies, 80 percent of customer service people will go away, 50 percent of legal teams will go away, all basic software programming goes away, 50 percent of bank analysts go away,” said Dan Schulman, vice chairman and managing partner at New York-based Valor Capital Group. 

“So a potential scenario is that you can see 15-20 percent unemployment as a result of AI. In democracies 15-20 percent is really problematic as well. There are less tax revenues coming, less services being provided. Do we have enough work for five-day working weeks going forward?” Schulman said.  

Saudi Arabia has made AI a central plank of its economic development plans, as it tries to position itself as a “super connector” between the West, Africa and Asia, funding and manufacturing AI and green technologies. 

“At the Public Investment Fund, we are strong believers in the power of AI and machine learning,” said Ahmad Kordi, PIF’s head of investment research.

“Machine learning is used to predict manager performance.” 

The Saudi government has already developed an Arabic chatbot called Allam but is mindful of risks to jobs as it tries to end reliance on foreign labour and US concerns over the transfer of chip technology to China. 

The US State Department said this week it was committed to working with Saudi Arabia towards “safe, secure, and trustworthy and responsible AI”. 

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Saudi foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan told the forum that the US and Saudi Arabia are working towards a bilateral agreement on AI. 

But Antonio Gracias, founder and CEO of Chicago-based Valor Equity Partners, said that, outside the commercial sphere, international competition in AI could become a new arena of conflict.

“It’s like nuclear energy or nuclear weapons, that’s the reality. I’m hoping something that comes out of this conference is people think about it [as] ‘How do we create a global regime where models are taught to cooperate as opposed to compete?’” Gracias said. 

“Each country, each culture will have its own models … If these are weaponised and it goes bad, it’s taught to hurt humans, that will lead to a Terminator future.”