Amid the excitement about the possibility of artificial intelligence, the measured voice of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Daron Acemoglu, PhD, offers a sobering perspective.
Dr. Acemoglu calculates a modest 5% of jobs to be replaced or heavily supplemented by AI over the next decade. "A lot of money is going to get wasted," he told Bloomberg. "You're not going to get an economic revolution out of that 5%."
His commentary arrives the same week OpenAI completed a deal to raise $6.6 billion in new funding, giving the generative AI technology company a $157 billion valuation.
Health system executives have expressed varied outlooks on AI while in Chicago at Becker's 9th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference this week. Overall, some of the biggest unanswered questions are those about its value as the cost of AI investments significantly mounts revenue gains that many have seen thus far. There is healthy skepticism about how much transformation is possible when AI solutions are layered on top of fragmented or flawed systems that are widespread in healthcare.
Dr. Acemoglu's outlook is a blend of two possible scenarios: one where the AI hype continues for another year, culminating in a tech stock crash that leaves investors disillusioned, and another where companies blindly invest heavily in AI and cut jobs, only to find themselves scrambling to rehire workers when the technology fails to deliver as expected.
As he put it to Bloomberg: "When the hype gets intensified, the fall is unlikely to be soft."
Dr. Acemoglu is a widely recognized economist and professor at MIT who has specialized in research on the interplay between technology, labor markets and economic growth. He is co-author of the influential 2012 book "Why Nations Fail."