When AI is your assistant

POWER POINT GENERATIVE AI WON'T REPLACE HUMANS. RATHER, HUMANS WHO USE AI WILL REPLACE HUMANS WHO DO NOT

- SHYAMAL MAJUMDAR

IN HIS BOOK A Farewell to Alms, economist Gregory Clark posed a dramatic question: Can you name the type of employee whose job was the first to be affected by technology? The answer was simple: The horse.

In 1901, 3.25 million were at work. By 1924, there were fewer than 2 million working horses left. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage became so low that it did not pay for their feed.

We have covered a long distance from the days of Industrial Revolution that Clark was referring to. The changes have been rapid and swift, leading us to the days of generative artificial intelligence (AI) which has become the latest buzzword. But what hasn't changed is the widespread concern over "technological unemployment"-a phrase coined by John Maynard Keynes, who in 1930 had talked about a "new disease", which is the inability of the economy to create new jobs faster than jobs lost to automation.

The latest debate has been sparked by Goldman Sachs, whose research says generative AI systems such as ChatGPT could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and Eurozone. What that means is a "significant disruption" to the labour market, exposing the equivalent of 300 million full-time workers across economies to automation.