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peter coy
By Peter Coy
Review Editor
I took three trips on Waymo this month while I was in San Francisco for an economics conference. The fluid has given rise to an unsettling vision of the future future of synthetic intelligence. Inside the taxis, there was comfortable New Age music and there was no one in the driver’s seat. .
Such could be the future of the economy in general if artificial intelligence substitutes for human labor in more and more occupations. The unemployed masses could come to depend on the charity of billionaires and trillionaires who own the means of intellectual production.
But AI can also be designed to empower other people rather than upgrade them, as I wrote a year ago in an M. I. T. Shaping the Future of Work.
Which of those A. I. Futures will be learned as a vital topic at the San Francisco conference, featuring the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, the American Financial Association, and 65 small teams from allied social science associations.
Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford was one of the busiest economists at the conference, dashing from one panel to another to talk about his hopes for a human-centric A.I. and his warnings about what he has called the “Turing Trap.”
Alan Turing, an English mathematician and World War II codebreaker, proposed in 1950 to compare the intelligence of computers based on their ability to think they were human. Their “imitation game” took the box in an unfortunate direction, Brynjolfsson argues: toward creating machines that behaved as closely as possible to humans, rather than as human assistants.
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