When Congress held a series of hearings on jobs and technological advancement in October 1955, the head of a railroad worker organization took the stand to express his fears about automation. “There is uneasiness among our workers as they assess the advance of the new technology,” said W.P. Kennedy, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. “Will it bring increasing unemployment rather than economic security?” The same question could have been raised before Congress last week in its hearing on artificial intelligence. In effect, it was. Sam Altman, chief executive of the San Francisco start-up OpenAI, testified last Tuesday before members of a Senate subcommittee, urging the government to regulate the fast-growing A.I. industry. Congressional leaders shared their worries about the threats that A.I. could pose, including the spread of misinformation and privacy violations. One of their most emphatic concerns was job displacement: Who will assume responsibility to protect workers whose jobs might be transformed, or even eliminated, by generative A.I.? Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, declared that his “biggest nightmare in the long term” is the job loss that A.I. could cause, before saying to Mr. Altman, “Let me ask you what your biggest nightmare is.” “There will be an impact on jobs,” Mr. Altman replied. “And I think it will require partnership between the industry and government, but mostly action by government.”
Full commentary : A.I.’s Threat to Jobs Prompts Question of Who Protects Workers.
