THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF AI

As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves, here are the likely implications for your job and your money

- SANDRA BLOCK

IN LATE MAY, A PHOTO CIRCULATED on social media that showed smoke billowing from the Pentagon, triggering a brief dip in the stock market. The photo wasn’t real—a close inspection revealed that the building looked nothing like the Pentagon—but the reaction to the AI-generated image exacerbated concerns about the rapid growth of this technology.

The leaders of OpenAI, the research lab that developed ChatGPT, warned in a letter posted on their website that “super intelligent” AI technology— also called generative AI—“will be more powerful than other technologies humanity has had to contend with in the past.… We can have a dramatically more prosperous future, but we have to manage risk to get there,” they wrote. Even more ominously, a group of industry leaders warned that AI poses an existential risk, on par with pandemics and nuclear war.

Millions of workers have a more immediate worry: whether they’ll be replaced by an automated program. A recent report by Goldman Sachs Economics Research concludes that generative AI could cause “significant disruption” in the job market. The report estimated that roughly twothirds of current jobs in the U.S. and Europe are vulnerable to some degree of AI automation and projected that generative AI could replace up to onefourth of current work tasks, from writing memos to analyzing data. The report estimates that up to 300 million global jobs could be automated through generative AI.