Is Artificial Intelligence the Frankenstein's monster?

Mary Shelley, wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, created the fictional figure of a mad scientist, Frankenstein, whose arcane research led to the development of a human resembling a real life one, both in image and conduct. Frankenstein's euphoria at success in laboratory soon became a nightmare for him, as well as for others, when the artificial human went out of control and became a monster, wreaking horrifying disasters. The monster, in its destructive spree, destroyed men and women and ultimately, its creator. Though fictional, the experiment of eccentric Frankenstein has a moral lesson for mankind: you play God at your peril. Developments in robotics in recent years seem to indicate that the warning has been lost to scientists and researchers in the tech world. Motivated by both the excitement and profit motive, research works on imparting ever powerful robots with artificial intelligence (AI) have gone apace, pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery in the digital world.
Slowly but steadily, robots equipped with AI, have appeared in the workday life saving humans life from the drudgery of hard and monotonous work and also increasing productivity in work places. This has improved efficiency and through it lowered costs of production, giving a fillip to economic growth. Displaced labour in industries like automobiles, made redundant by AI powered robots, grumbled but managed to survive through relocation in other workplaces. The few cases of AI powered equipments that performed works requiring intricate skills, as in surgical operations in human bodies, have been less controversial, even welcomed by medical practitioners and patients alike. But scientific progress, financed by money in the market place, is guided more by profit motive than by considerations of human welfare, as seems to be the case with the future of robotics powered by next generation AI. The momentum gained in cutting edge research and laboratory success in the tech world spells dark forebodings for both human welfare and their security. Two recent pieces of news make this possibility appear as real as a knock on the door in the morning.
According to the latest finding by the United States (US) investment bank Goldman Sachs, published in the paper National News recently, AI-powered robotics and other devices will add to productivity phenomenally across sectors and accelerate growth of global economy at unprecedented pace in the near future. But this will be at a high cost in terms of employment, causing millions of presently employed their jobs, from semi-skilled to skilled. According to a rough estimate, about 300 million will become unemployed to begin with, the report said. According to the analysts of the bank, AI powered technology will be able to significantly increase economic growth through higher productivity by reducing costs of labour, creating new high paid jobs and adding to permanent employees within the next 10 (ten) years. Even if half of the production units in different sectors use AI-based technology, global economy will grow at a rate of 7.0 per cent. According to the report published, global productivity can be increased by 1.40 per cent within the next ten years, even though the increase will not be evenly spread, the industrially developed countries leading the pack and emerging economies lagging behind.
Commenting on this possible future scenario, the chief economist of Goldman Sachs has said the impact of generative AI (a type of artificial intelligence that can create a wide variety of data, including images, videos, audio, text, and 3D models) will ultimately depend on its effectiveness and application. According to him, if the assumptions and expectations about the AI are correct and it is successful in its applications and proving its effectiveness, then it can be said to augur a huge economic possibility in future.
The business management firm, Grand View Research, has estimated the tech (AI technology) market will grow to US$1.70 trillion in 2030 from the figure of US$9.35 billion in 2021, registering a growth of more than 38 per cent at a compound rate annually. The Goldman Sachs report indicates if 'task automation' of manual work proceeds as predicted, about 18 (eighteen) per cent of work worldwide can be performed with the help of AI. Here again, developed countries have greater potential than emerging ones and will have an edge over them. Most of the American economists envisage that labour productivity is likely to increase by 1.5 per cent annually through extensive use of generative AI. But they, too, think that the productivity increase will depend on the effectiveness and application of AI. In America at present, two-thirds of all professions have already come within the ambit of AI. Many industrial and business entities are saying that from 25 to 50 per cent works can be performed through AI.
According to the report published by Goldman Sachs, two thirds of jobs in America and Europe have already come within the jurisdiction (potential coverage) of AI partially. The new technology can replace one fourth of the present volume of economic and non- economic activities, it is estimated.
It is not the potential of applying AI in real life situation, nor its impact on increasing productivity that deserve close attention. What is more important is the labour displacing consequences of the new technology. If people in the 300 million jobs that are likely to be replaced by AI cannot find alternative employment with pay equal to what they would have without the new technology, then policy makers will have to calculate the costs and benefits in terms of human welfare. And it is not the abstract idea of human welfare alone that should engage the minds of policy makers. If more people become redundant because of AI and pushed out of gainful employment, wherefrom will come effective demand for goods and services produced with AI? Machines can produce more than human labour but they are not their consumers. The greatest fallacy indulged by the proponents of the 'brave new world' is looking at the supply side, to the neglect of the equally, perhaps more important, demand one. 'Supply creates its own demand,' the Says law does not work in real life. 'Necessity is the mother of all invention' is not an old fashioned adage that has outlived its utility, not in every respect. True, some new products find their users if they are useful as have been the cases with dish washers, washing machines and other 'labour saving' devices. But the same cannot be said about 'labour displacing' technologies that force people out of the labour market to join the army of unemployed or to ill-paid jobs. Whether unemployed or ill-paid, they no longer figure as consumers with effective demand for both old and new goods and services. Like the one-eyed deer in Aesop's fable, investors and tech companies are only looking at one side that pre-occupy their minds, the supply side. Even economists do not seem to be overly concerned with the impact of the new technology of AI on employment and human welfare. So far, the only voice of importance that was heard against reckless use of AI was from a scientist, the late Stephen Hawkins, who said artificial intelligence 'could spell the end of the human race'. He further said, 'it will either be the best thing that's ever happened to us, or it will be the worst thing if we are not careful, it very well may be the last thing' (Wikipedia).
It is natural for businessmen and investors to look only at the bottom line, profit, because that is their business. Even for economists, it is consistent with their profession's pre-occupation with growth even though economics has grappled with issues of welfare for quite sometimes. But the impact of AI on economy and society as a whole pertains to public policy and as such governments should be seized with the socio-economic problems of widespread use of AI across sectors. As Claus Schwab, the founder of World Economic Forum, wrote in his book, The Future of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, 'Debates around technology governance in previous industrial revolutions have tended to focus on the role of the government in ensuring that innovations are safe for human health or the environment. This remains a critical priority for the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but emerging technologies (including AI) raise new sets of concerns, from labour market (employment) impacts to protecting human rights'( 2018).
In his book Klaus Schwab has proposed eight cross-cutting governance questions that are particularly important for ensuring the benefits and risks of the Forth Industrial Revolution (including use of AI) among which the important ones are: (a) What new policies, approaches and social protections are required to manage the disruptions to labour markets? ( b) In what ways should skills development, employment models and technological systems be (re)designed to ensure that human labour and creativity are augmented rather than replaced? (c) Given the power by new AI technology to individuals and groups, how should societies avoid creating trade-offs between individual freedom and sectoral prosperity of a particular group?
As of now no government seems to have taken any steps to place any guardrails for AI as had been the case for genomics that prompted the US government to set up a Presidential Commission in 2010 on establishing bioethics guidelines for responsible experimentation. A group of Harvard academics and artificial intelligence experts has just launched a report aimed at regulating development of dystopian technologies such as Microsoft-backed Open AI's sentient chat bot, which was inaugurated in a new version as GPT4 last week. The group believes that AI research and development have reached a critical moment of change that requires an entirely new regulatory framework. From the super computer Hal,9000 in '2001- A Space Odyssey ' to ' Terminator ' , the risks of intelligent machines dominating humans and calling the shots had been delineated in science fiction films long ago. Now real life developments appear to have caught up and poised to replace fiction with fact. It is not only jobs in labour markets that are at risks, the human race as a whole face existential threat, politically ( disinformation ), economically ( unemployment and inequality ) and culturally (loss of privacy) if the new Frankenstein's monster of AI is allowed to run amok. Yet the Silicon Valley titans believe their tech utopia, a place with no government regulation, is preferable for mankind.
Of late, alarm bells have been heard from the most unlikely quarters, the tech industry itself, at least a part of it. CNN TV channel aired the news on 28 March regarding a call from 1100 tech leaders, including Tesla, Twitter and Spacex owner Elon Musk, for a moratorium on further research and development in AI. This came as a surprise to me as I had noticed that the post of janitor in Twitter was automated soon after his take over. So I consulted Google and soon the worms came out of the can. I found that Elon Musk had co-sponsored with Microsoft a AI research company under the name of Open AI, making it a non-profit, open source public service. But now Microsoft has established a subsidiary of Open AI on its own, making it closed, profit-based and exclusively owned by Bill Gates. Left out in the cold, Elon Musk must have raved and ranted in private. Ganging up with other tech leaders he has now assumed the role of a canary in the coal mine, warning of impending disaster. His ploy is to invoke government intervention to thwart Open AI's monopoly in the development of chatbot whose latest version, GPT4, was launched in the third week of March. Out and out a malevolent person, Elon Musk may have done a good turn this time around, by drawing the attention of the government. Policy makers who watched from the sidelines so long, can be expected to realise that the honeymoon with AI platforms is over and it is time for action.
The launching of the latest chatbot GPT4, with its self-learning capacity by Open AI, has been the 'Frankenstein moment' in the development of AI. To treat it otherwise will be suicidal for mankind.
N.B. After the above write up was drafted it was learnt from CNN news on March 31 that the present Italian government has banned all versions of chatbot, including GPT4. My original draft has not been changed because one swallow does not make summer. Let fingers be crossed to see if other governments will follow suit.

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