AI Is a Choice: The Narrow but Feasible Path to Collective Good
Foreign Affairs · Alex Imas, Mohamed A. El-Erian, and James Manyika ·
Alex Imas, Mohamed El-Erian, and James Manyika, leading voices at the intersection of business and technology, argue that realizing AI’s potential requires giving workers, communities, AI labs, infrastructure developers, and big companies a share of the gains. Using insights from game theory, they argue that increased cooperation can make AI work for all.
Few technologies in history have matched the potential of artificial intelligence to transform the economic landscape in which they emerged. Deployed broadly and effectively, AI can make workers more efficient, enable more dynamic entrepreneurship, and lift economic growth, all of which could be necessary bulwarks against the powerful economic headwinds brought on by aging populations and mounting public debt. AI can also make possible revolutionary new advances in science and medicine and democratize access to knowledge once reserved for the select few.
But the acceleration of AI also carries risks. It could be applied in ways that displace workers, disrupt how students learn, create new bioweapons and cyberweapons, and strain current supplies of energy, water, and land. Compounding these challenges is a mismatch: the benefits of this new technology may take a long time to become visible and widespread. As with earlier transformations, such as the Industrial Revolution, people are likely to experience the disruptions that come from adopting AI before they feel its benefits. And whereas users directly feel the effects of tools like chatbots, some benefits that AI is indirectly making possible, including more accurate predictions of natural disasters and improved medical diagnoses, may not be perceived as owing to the technology at all.
Public opinion has already begun to turn against AI, especially in the United States. One of the main targets has been data centers, with polls showing that a significant majority of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their communities. Opposition to data centers needed for the new AI economy now cuts across party lines and age groups. Numerous surveys have found that residents worry about data centers using too many resources, creating endless noise, and raising their utility bills, all while developers benefit from public subsidies at the communities’ expense.
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