Peter Howitt warned that AI offers 'amazing possibilities' but needs regulation due to its job-destroying potential. Photo / Getty Images
Peter Howitt warned that AI offers 'amazing possibilities' but needs regulation due to its job-destroying potential. Photo / Getty Images
A winner of this year’s Nobel prize in economics warned today that artificial intelligence offers “amazing possibilities” but should be regulated because of its job-destroying potential.
The remarks from Canadian Peter Howitt, professor emeritus at Brown University in the United States, came amid growing concerns about how AI willimpact society and the labour market.
California Governor Gavin Newsom today signed a first-of-its-kind law regulating interactions with AI chatbots, rejecting a push from the White House to leave the technology unchecked.
Howitt was one of three economists honoured today by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for work on how technology drives and affects growth.
His research with fellow winner Philippe Aghion of France focused on the theory of “creative destruction” in which a new and better product enters the market, and the companies selling the older products lose out.
Howitt told a news conference that it remains to be seen who will be the leader in AI, and “we don’t know what the creative destruction effects are going to be”.
Brown University Professor Emeritus of Economics Peter Howitt. Photo / Ashley McCabe, AFP
“It’s obviously a fantastic technology that has amazing possibilities.
“And it also obviously has an amazing potential for destroying other jobs or replacing highly skilled labour.
“And all I can say is that this is a conflict. It’s going to have to be regulated,” he said.
“Private incentives in an unregulated market are not really going to resolve this conflict in a way that’s best for society, and we don’t know what’s going to come from it.”
Howitt, 79, said it was a “big moment in human history” and likened it to past periods of technological innovation, including the telecoms boom of the 1990s, and the dawns of electricity and steam power.
He said those innovations all demonstrated how technology can enhance and not just replace labour.
“How we’re going to do it this time? I wish I had specific answers, but I don’t,” he added.
The third economist to be honoured today, American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, was more sanguine about the impact of AI on the labour market.
“Machines don’t replace us. They move us to more interesting, more challenging work,” Mokyr, 79, told a news conference live streamed from Northwestern University in the suburbs of Chicago.
“Technological change not only replaces people, it creates new tasks.”
American-Israeli scientist Joel Mokyr. Photo / Northwestern University in Illinois, AFP
Mokyr won his Nobel for his work on identifying the “prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”.
He said his main concern about the labour market of the future was not “technological unemployment” but labour scarcity as the population ages and fewer people enter the workforce.
Howitt said that when he and Aghion first wrote their seminal 1992 paper on creative destruction it took five years to get it published, but his collaborator knew they were on to something special.
“Right from the beginning, from our very first research, I remember back in 1987, Philippe saying we’re going to get a Nobel Prize for this. I said, ‘Sure, sure, sure,’” Howitt recalled.
“He said, ‘Our time will come. Our time will come,’ okay, and now it’s come. Amazing.”
