The greatest fear we all should have about the rise and rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that the people meant to protect us i.e. politicians haven’t got the collective brains or guts to control the big businesses and scam merchants who’ll use the formers’ social platforms to swindle people out of our hard-earned wealth.
History has shown that anything is legal in the US as long as 100 businessmen say it is. The Supreme Court is often an accessory to such criminal stupidity in the States, with that court ruling that Donald Trump has immunity from prosecution for any criminal acts when he was president! Only in America!
This comes as Wall Street is a little worried that after the disastrous debate for President Joe Biden, the Republicans could have a clean sweep, with both the House of Reps and the Senate in the November poll.
Of course, a Trump win would at least bring a weird kind of politician who might either jump on board with everything AI or take the other side and put restrictions on it.
While Trump is not your usual kind of politician he has guts, albeit on issues many of us doubt as being appropriate. He is a man of action, unlike the political pygmies he often clobbers in the political arena.
When it comes to the dangers of AI, we don’t need political pygmies, who haven’t got the stature to put limits on big businesses currently exploiting AI.
I should say that the ACCC has contacted me about the ‘deep fake’ ads connected to me on Facebook and they’re going after Meta legally on its role in making scamming too easy. And it was good to see a US court give the green light to Andrew Twiggy Forrest to sue Meta for being an accessory to criminal actions by scammers who used his image to flog cryptocurrency products.
Back in February, the AFR told us that: “Artificial intelligence will create 200,000 jobs in Australia by 2030, according to a report backed by Industry Minister Ed Husic. “More than 160,000 of those jobs will be in tech-related occupations, but the rest will be for
non-tech roles such as sales managers, accountants and human resource managers, all of whom will be required to help pave the way for AI.”
Called Meeting the AI Skills Boom, the Report found that Australia and New Zealand already had the second-highest uptake of generative AI software anywhere in the world, with 84% of knowledge workers reporting that they used software such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s CoPilot or Google’s Gemini for their jobs.
But there’s a downside with AI, and it’s not just the scam threat, with the AFR’s John Davidson reporting that “…another study, conducted in the US by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, found that 47 per cent of companies employing AI admitted they were doing so in the hope of reducing staff numbers and associated wage costs.”
Adding to these concerns for workers, Goldman Sachs research suggests AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs by 2030, affecting about a quarter of work tasks in the US and Europe!
But it’s not all bad, with Goldman also telling us that “AI is showing ‘very positive’ signs of eventually boosting GDP and productivity.”
One guy who understands AI’s potential is Tesla’s Elon Musk, who late last year at the summit organised by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned: “I think AI is one of the biggest threats to humans. We have for the first time the situation where we have something that is going to be far smarter than the smartest human.”
Given this, we have to have politicians with the brains and the guts to control the owners of AI. There has to be regulators who are given the freedom to restrict what needs to be restricted.
By the way, with a new financial year for investing, check out our latest Switzer Investing TV, where we look at seven potentially hot stocks:
