The Arrival of AI
Hello, I hope that you had a good weekend! I spent it in Seattle where I spoke at a festival and had a public Forward Party event, which was a lot of fun.
The Forward Party got its first mayor in Newberry, Florida, where the sitting mayor, Jordan Marlowe decided to join Forward. “I have a party now that that is judging my leadership based on the ability to get things done and to compromise and work with other people.” It’s what a lot of people want.
Last week, a public tech company, Chegg, reported disappointing results. The CEO said that students that use their services had started using ChatGPT. The stock crashed by 50% in response, losing about $1 billion in value overnight.
The same week IBM announced that it would use AI to replace jobs that are readily automatable, estimating that 7,800 new hires wouldn’t be.
Dropbox just cut 500 jobs, 16% of staff, and cited AI as a reason why.
These are public occurrences; there are many similar things happening behind the scenes that aren’t announced. AI is changing the way that we work and learn. The Chegg phenomenon is telling; already thousands of students around the country have turned to AI to inform them about various subjects instead of textbooks and online study tools. People are adopting these new tools quickly. The same will happen in other fields.
One of the foremost authorities on the impact of AI is Martin Ford, whom I interview on the podcast this week. His bestselling book Rise of the Robots influenced me a great deal. Martin writes, “As artificial intelligence continues to advance, it has the potential to upend both the job market and the overall economy to a degree that is likely unprecedented.” Martin compares AI to electricity in its transformative impact. “All of this points to increasing inequality and potentially dehumanizing conditions for a growing fraction of our workforce.”
I talked to a civil rights leader last week who was discouraged. “Things are changing so fast and people can’t keep up. It’s worse in the communities like mine that people often ignore anyway.”
Our being behind the curve in terms of our government’s ability to understand and adapt to new technologies is quickly going from inconvenient to disastrous. I ran for President in part to speed us up.
For my interview with Martin click here. To help speed up our political system with Forward click here – our first mayor is just the beginning.
