November 6, 2023
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues its rapid advance, upskilling is shifting from a luxury good to a necessity for almost all workers. Traditionally, upskilling efforts have focused on frontline and production staff. That approach is unlikely to work when it comes to AI. To reap the benefits of this technology, we need commitments at all…
November 3, 2023
President Biden’s executive order this week on artificial intelligence (AI) brings to mind his split media personality, which consists of the avuncular “Uncle Joe” and the more Machiavellian “Dark Brandon.” This bifurcated political personality has the advantage of keeping his opponents guessing, but in the case of the EO, it creates a policy jumble that is going…
July 27, 2023
So-called ‘soft skills’ are in short supply in the workforce and society at large. AI could help us get better A few weeks ago, McKinsey & Company published updated estimates on when key anticipated characteristics of artificial intelligence might arrive — including things like creativity, logical reasoning, and social/emotional reasoning, sensing and output. McKinsey’s timeline for increased capacity across a range of such capabilities…
July 14, 2023
It is hard at times to tell which is likely to be more disruptive: artificial intelligence (AI) or the multiplying efforts to regulate this powerful, potentially transformational, and highly beneficial technology. With multiple calls for pauses and increasing calls for new regulation, we are clearly at a critical moment in a debate that could either…
June 7, 2023
Just as I was preparing an article titled “Calm Down About Artificial Intelligence”—one in a series—Marc Andreesen has preempted me with an 18-page blog post inventorying the main threads in the “AI doom-loop” and why these concerns are either wrong or substantially overblown. In fairness, Andreesen is open to the criticism that he is engaging in…
April 6, 2023
Last week, the Future of Life Institute released an open letter that included some computer science luminaries calling to freeze deployment and research on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for six months. One prominent AI ethicist insisted that the letter did not go far enough and proposed that the world’s governments prepare for “airstrikes” against rogue developers and data processing…
March 31, 2023
AI is best positioned to augment the workforce, not replace it. The U.S. Chamber’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence Competition, Inclusion, and Innovation report outlines recommendations for preparing the workforce for the continued integration of AI tools across our economy. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the “end of work” have been greatly exaggerated – more…
March 27, 2023
A new analysis estimates that a fifth of all U.S. jobs are in the category most vulnerable to disruption. Researchers at OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT—and the University of Pennsylvania came out last week with a first look at the potential labor market impact of chat technology. If these initial “guesstimates” hold up, we might be looking at…
March 6, 2023
The future is fast arriving—as the last year’s developments in artificial intelligence make clear—but the national government is nowhere near ready. Over the last year, we’ve seen the explosion into the public consciousness of major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence in the form of new tools that were immediately widely available. First came the release of…
February 8, 2023
Companies are cutting programmers, human resources, and DEI staffers. The hiring burst of 517,000 new jobs in January ran contrary to the conventional economic wisdom, namely that the Federal Reserve’s war on inflation is slowing interest-rate sensitive sectors like finance and technology and presaging a broader slowdown. Tech and finance did, indeed, show some losses—just not enough to…