In recent years, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the mainstream trends in human technological advancement, benefiting nearly every field of human life, including medicine, biology, logistics, and education. With the rise of ChatGPT in recent times, the popularity of AI has reached its peak. However, like any double-edged sword, there are two sides to consider. The Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe in 2020, impacting various industries, prompting a large-scale effort to replace some positions with robots or automated methods, achieving significant results. A survey conducted in 2021 across various industries in the United States (as shown in Figure 1) indicated that an average of 40% of work hours in each industry would be influenced by artificial intelligence. In the future, the impact of AI on jobs is likely to become even more pronounced. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that by 2030, automation and AI technologies could potentially replace 400 million to 800 million jobs worldwide[1]. Consequently, people have begun to ponder whether the ultimate goal of AI is to benefit humanity or to replace it.
Reality and Concerns: How AI Affects Humanity
1. Intelligence: The Impact of AI on Employment
Intelligence is manifested as machines imitating human cognitive functions through algorithms and data processing. It is more commonly understood as the ability of machines to perform tasks that typically require some form of cognitive function, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. This powerful capability allows AI to have significant impacts on various aspects of human life in today’s era. In the medical field, AI can improve the accuracy and efficiency of diagnoses by analyzing large amounts of medical records and imaging data. In the logistics and transportation sector, AI can manage supply chains, predict demand, guide warehouse robots, and optimize routes. In the field of education, AI can provide intelligent tutoring systems, personalized learning, and educational data analysis. As shown in Figure 2, by 2022, the adoption and deployment of AI have reached a considerable level globally. At the same time, the rise of GPT has had a significant impact on the labor market. Scientific research [3] has found that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce may have at least 10% of their job tasks affected by GPT, and about 19% of workers may have at least 50% of their tasks affected. This impact covers all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater risks. Consequently, concerns about AI have arisen: Can intelligent AI replace humans and take over human work?
However, Japan and South Korea, as countries with the lowest unemployment rates, are among the countries that use AI robots the most. In fact, many economists have recently put forward a new viewpoint: “From a company perspective, the development of AI actually increases the employment positions within a company, rather than reducing them.” This is because the development of AI and automation brings profits to companies, thus creating new job positions, as new AI technologies always drive companies into new fields of development or may make them focus more on labor-intensive products and services. For example, Daisuke Adachi from Yale University observed the development of the manufacturing industry in Japan from 1978 to 2017 and found that for every robot added, 2.2% of employment positions were created. In a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a company in Finland was found to create numerous job positions for each new AI technology applied. Similarly, industry-specific data indicates that the development of AI does not simply replace humans. For instance, Amazon extensively uses robots in its warehouses to increase efficiency and reduce costs, but the company has also significantly increased its human resources investment. Amazon’s annual report for 2019 showed that from 2014 to 2019, the number of Amazon employees increased from 154,000 to over 750,000. This demonstrates that despite the increasing level of automation, companies are still expanding and creating a large number of job opportunities. Additionally, according to the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs Report 2020,”[4] within the next five years, AI and automation may replace 85 million job positions, but they will also create 97 million new positions.
Even though the development of AI has increased job positions, new challenges have emerged, as two sociologists from MIT have pointed out: “In the future of AI development, rewards will always shift towards higher-level positions.” This also means that lower-level labor positions or their wages will inevitably be impacted and challenged to some extent. Taking the retail industry as an example, Amazon has significantly enhanced operational efficiency and customer experience by extensively applying AI technology to optimize inventory management, personalized recommendations, and logistics distribution, becoming one of the largest e-commerce platforms globally. Traditional retail companies that cannot quickly keep up with this technological trend may face the dilemma of continuously losing market share or even being forced to exit the market. Therefore, in the era of artificial intelligence, continuous learning and evolution are key to survival.
2. Wisdom: Emotions and Ethics in the Development of AI
Wisdom, in contrast to intelligence, encompasses a broader range of dimensions, including judgment, moral concepts, emotional understanding, and the ability to make long-term decisions.
The wisdom of AI enables it to fully understand a person, and it can even provide emotional value for humanity. In modern society, loneliness and mental stress issues are becoming increasingly common. AI can help alleviate these issues in various ways. For example, AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants (such as ChatGPT) can provide emotional support, helping people alleviate their worries. Some nursing homes in Japan have already started using robots to accompany the elderly. These robots can engage in daily conversations, as well as recognize and respond to the emotions of the elderly, providing emotional comfort. Furthermore, the application of AI in mental health is becoming more widespread. Through natural language processing and sentiment analysis technology, AI can assist psychologists in better understanding the emotional state of patients, thus offering more precise treatment plans. For instance, Woebot is an AI-driven mental health application that can help users manage their emotions through conversation and provide advice on cognitive behavioral therapy.
Can AI learn human emotions and even develop self-awareness? For example, in the movie The Wandering Earth, the artificial intelligence Moss, through continuous iteration and learning, has developed self-awareness, posing a threat to human survival. Apart from AI self-awareness, there are many more ethical issues worth considering. If one day AI development enables the transfer of human consciousness into AI systems, granting humans immortality, how should humanity respond? Furthermore, in a distant future where humans can peacefully exist in a virtual world through AI technology, with only a select few controlling the “virtual world” through mastery of core technologies, where does humanity go from there?
These issues may seem very futuristic and distant from us, but today there are concrete AI applications that involve ethical considerations, including democracy and civil rights, surveillance and data privacy, and more. For example, in the U.S. criminal justice system, artificial intelligence algorithms used to assess crime risk have been noted to exhibit racial bias. Incidents involving personal injury from autonomous vehicles and robots have occurred and been reported in recent years. Therefore, the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence need to be constrained by laws, as Hongyi Zhou has mentioned, “Machine learning enables computers to learn and optimize through data, but it requires humans to provide correct guidance and values.” We should also believe that the future of artificial intelligence is to serve humanity, not to replace it.
Future Outlook: Intelligence is meaningless without wisdom.
The emergence of AI has triggered a rethinking of human meaning and existence, challenging humanity’s unique status as beings with thought, autonomy, and self-awareness, and posing complex ethical and moral questions. We need to consider how to integrate ethical and moral principles into the design and decisions of AI systems to ensure that artificial intelligence behaves in accordance with human values and to avoid potential ethical risks. We should remember Stephen Hawking’s warning that while the success of artificial intelligence may be the greatest event in human history, without control, it could also bring catastrophic risks. At the same time, we should approach the future with the confidence expressed by Ray Kurzweil, who believes that by 2045, humanity will reach a singularity moment where artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, bringing about profound societal changes. In the future, artificial intelligence will continue to develop rapidly and profoundly impact various aspects of human society. Google’s Chief Scientist, Andrew Yan-Tak Ng, believes that AI will play a greater role in fields such as healthcare, education, and environmental protection, greatly improving human quality of life. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has proposed even bolder ideas, suggesting that through “brain-computer interface” technology, humans can ultimately merge with AI to achieve “symbiosis between man and machine.” The rapid development of AI presents both opportunities and challenges. As explorers of a new era, we need to embrace AI with an open, cautious, and responsible attitude, finding a balance between technological progress and human care, making artificial intelligence a driving force for advancing human civilization rather than a Pandora’s Box. Only then can we work hand in hand with AI to create a better and wiser future. As scholar Noam Chomsky has said, can artificial intelligence without emotions and wisdom truly be called intelligence? AI with wisdom can help humanity solve problems rather than becoming a problem.
Reference
[1] Manyika, J., Lund, S., Chui, M., Bughin, J., Woetzel, J., Batra, P., … & Sanghvi, S. (2017). Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation. McKinsey Global Institute, 150(1), 1-148.
[2] Accenture Research based on analysis of Occupational Information Network (O*NET), US Dept. of Labor; US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
[3] Eloundou, T., Manning, S., Mishkin, P., & Rock, D. (2023). Gpts are gpts: An early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.10130.
[4] Brown, S., Hingel, G., Ratcheva, V., & Zahidi, S. (2020). World Economic Forum: The future of jobs report 2020.
[5] Huang, C., Zhang, Z., Mao, B., & Yao, X. (2022). An overview of artificial intelligence ethics. IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence.
The work described in this article was supported by InnoHK initiative, The Government of the HKSAR, and Laboratory for AI-Powered Financial Technologies (AIFT).
(AIFT strives but cannot guarantee the accuracy and reliability of the content, and will not be responsible for any loss or damage caused by any inaccuracy or omission.)
