If the class struggle is the motor of history, as Marx wrote, it is time to move on to mechanical inspection. Over the next ten years, generative AIs like ChatGPT could both create untold wealth and threaten hundreds of millions of jobs. But don’t panic: Silicon Valley has the solution.
Everyone suspects that current advances in artificial intelligence will have a transformative effect on societies everywhere. The American bank Goldman Sachs goes further and predicts the magnitude of this transformation.
In an analysis published at the end of March, she confirms that new technologies are the engine of change that is booming the loudest these days. Whether Marx likes it or not, they hardly affect the working class. Above all, they threaten middle managers and some of the most prominent professionals in the knowledge economy: lawyers, notaries, writers, etc.
According to Goldman Sachs, generative artificial intelligence as embodied by the popular ChatGPT of the Californian company OpenAI could eliminate no less than 300 million of these generally well-paid jobs around the world in the next few years. Above all, it could affect workers mainly located in developed economies.
Canada, the United States and Europe are in the crosshairs of these really not omniscient, but certainly very versatile robots, says the American bank. In these three regions are about two-thirds of the jobs threatened by expanded language models, dubbed LLM by AI experts (for “ large language models “), says the American bank.
A new struggle
ChatGPT and its various imitations will make 300 million jobs obsolete. But they could at the same time create an added value of 6650 billion US dollars.
Because without raising the irony of such a prediction, Goldman Sachs predicts that these generative AIs – in the sense that they can generate images or text that seem to make sense to our eyes of human beasts – will inflate GDP by 7% globally over the next decade.
No one at Goldman Sachs dared to predict that the wages of the affected workers would be enhanced to match the productivity gains promised by the emergence of these AI applications. If we rely on the latest economic booms stimulated by the marketing of disruptive technologies, we can already guess who will benefit from this wave of innovation.
To the bosses, of course. Alone on her website, Dall-E is drawing a picture of Karl Marx laughing in his beard…
The best of worlds
Sam Altman is the CEO and founder of OpenAI, the lab that created ChatGPT. He doesn’t get a very big salary from his job. The resale of his early businesses made him a wealthy independent person. He regularly rubs shoulders with the wealthiest investors in Silicon Valley, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He is one of those bosses who are most likely to get rich thanks to AIs like ChatGPT.
He is the archetypal Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur: capitalist by day, socialist by night. It supports the concept of guaranteed minimum income, the payment on a regular basis of a basic salary to all citizens. This concept was talked about in Canada just before the pandemic. Then, during the first months of the pandemic.
Thanks to Altman, guaranteed minimum income is back in the news. It is being touted as the universal solution to the coming turbulence caused by AI.
“The main reason for automation is to concentrate wealth (and therefore power) in a very small number of hands. America has repeatedly challenged this kind of situation in the past, and we must do so again. »
“What I’m proposing today — where we agree to create a floor but not a ceiling — would produce a huge boost in US prosperity and keep us ahead of the global economy. Countries that concentrate their wealth in a small number of families do worse in the long run; if we don’t move radically towards a fairer and more inclusive system, we won’t be a world leader much longer. »
“Automation promises to create more abundance than anyone can imagine. It will change our relationship with work. If everyone benefits, we will move faster towards a better world. »
Sam Altman wrote this…in 2017. Six years later, he brought forth a technology that, if extrapolated from Goldman Sachs’ predictions, could have two major consequences.
Either it will further exacerbate a wealth gap that has already been widened over the past twenty years by previous digital revolutions. Or it will make workers so productive and so wealthy that they will have more time to devote to other activities, such as hobbies or family.
On one side, Karl Marx. On the other, Sam Atlman. Which of the two theories seems more likely?