Davos, the man who played a key role in starting the AI hype with ChatGPT: black sweater, jeans, hands clasped in his lap. “Of course jobs will change, obviously some jobs will disappear completely,” OpenAI chief Sam Altman said in Davos, almost as if this had little to do with him and his company.
Nearly 14 months after his company OpenAI released the now-famous text robot ChatGPT, the technology behind it is shaping one of the most socially, politically, and economically important debates at the World Economic Forum.
The crucial questions: How does the rapid development of artificial intelligence affect our work? And what does this mean for the labour market? The focus is primarily on generative AI, which can be used to automatically create text, images, computer code, and more.
The great hope: artificial intelligence should make us more productive. Altman mainly provides anecdotal evidence in this regard. He’s heard from programmers that they’ll never want to write code without these new tools again. AI assistants like ChatGPT are an “incredible productivity tool” that allows people to do more things “by a factor of two or five” than before.
The world needs a lot more code than we have people who can write it,” says Altman, and that’s not just the case in the IT industry. “It’s not that we’re running out of demand, it’s just that people can do more.”
If this were to happen – this is clear – artificial intelligence would represent a huge economic advantage. However, the economy has been hoping for such a leap in productivity through digitalization for decades. It hasn’t been realized yet, at least not in a measurable way. Will things be different with artificial intelligence?
If we all suddenly became more productive thanks to a new magic tool, the problem of skilled workers in the economy would soon become a thing of the past, with the same level of prosperity we might need to work less