TECH NEWS – Strauss Zelnick says the fear that artificial intelligence will take off so fast that it will put people out of work is the biggest nonsense of all.
Speaking at a TD Cowen conference, Zelnick claimed that the rise of AI will not bring about, say, Skynet, nor will it put a lot of people out of work. Rather, the Take-Two CEO predicted the opposite, saying that content-creating (generative) AI capable of creating content will help humans take on more complex tasks:
“Artificial intelligence will allow us to do a lot of things more efficiently, so we’ll be able to focus on other things, and those other things will probably still be expensive and time-consuming. I also don’t think for a minute that generative AI is going to reduce employment. That’s crazy, it’s actually crazy. It’s not going to make people irrelevant. It’s going to change the nature of certain forms of employment. And that’s a good thing.
For those of you who shop online and a little box pops up and says, “Hi, I’m Bob, how can I help you buy a couch today?” you know that Bob is AI, right? You know that Bob is not Bob, right? The person who was ‘Bob’ three years ago sitting in a call center in India is now doing more interesting work because they’re competent people who are highly educated and better jobs have come along that probably pay more.
I’m in a Whatsapp chat with a bunch of Silicon Valley CEOs, and the conventional wisdom out there is, “AI is going to put us all out of work,” which is just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The history of productivity tools is that they increase employment. It increases value, it increases yield, it increases growth. All of those things are going to happen,” Zelnick said.
Maybe a few people will help a lot. For example, 160-170 years ago, more than half of the people were involved in agriculture, whereas today it might be 1-2%, and yet it is their work that puts food on our tables. The same thing could happen with artificial intelligence.
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