AI Can Give Us a Productivity Boost, But Will Everyone Get a Fair Shot at It?

pcmag.com:

RIO DE JANEIRO–After months of headlines about the existential risks of artificial intelligence, a Google scientist came to the Web Summit conference(Opens in a new window) here with a different warning about AI: The key danger lies not in the advent of omnipotent software entities, but in the human-maintained economic systems that determine who gets to use specific AI tools.

“It's not an AI revolution,” said Chief Decision Scientist Cassie Kozyrkov in the Tuesday-evening talk that closed out this conference’s first day. Instead, she said, AI has evolved from being something that lived inside specific apps to help them work better to something more akin to a command-line prompt that awaits whatever input you may have.

“If you used a Google product five years ago, you were interacting with AI,” she continued. “But it wasn't in your face.”

Kozyrkov suggested that “AI” might make more sense as an abbreviation for “Automated Instructions,” “Accelerated Inspiration,” and “Augmented Individuals,” and touted AI’s potential to help humans gear up their talents. 

“It's massive,” she said. “It opens up so many avenues for creativity." 

If you are now wondering “did an AI help her write that?”—the answer is yes: Kozyrkov credited the AI-powered apps that helped her put together the presentation.

First she dealt with writers’ block by rambling aloud into the Otter voice-transcription app, then she fed that transcript into Google’s Bard conversational AI and asked it to generate an outline. Then she used the Midjourney image-generation AI to illustrate her presentation with a set of smiling-robot nesting dolls. Finally, she turned to ChatGPT to write code to generate an animated GIF from images of vintage computing hardware. 

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