This message comes from the Center for U.S. Voters Abroad Foundation.
If you're a U.S. citizen living abroad, the Center for U.S. Voters Abroad
turnout projects online form will walk you through requesting your ballot in just five minutes.
Visit internationalvoter.com.
This is Planet Money from NPR.
Greg Grzelski.
Darian Woods.
You write the Planet Money newsletter. You've been writing a lot recently about artificial
intelligence and whether or not it's too overhyped.
Yes, I have. But, you know, publishing this kind of stuff can be a little bit risky. Like, you know,
if AI does end up transforming the economy, like, I don't want to be the guy who,
like, once said, like, predictions like that were overblown.
Yes, you do not. So today, Greg and I are gonna face off. We make the case for why AI
will have a massive effect on the economy and for why it won't.
And just so nobody confuses each segment with our own, you know, personal prognostications,
we are going to decide who reports on which side with a coin flip.
A digital coin flip. Let's get chat GPT to decide.
What? I didn't even know we were gonna do this. This is freaky.
So, Greg, heads, you take AI is overrated, tails, AI is underrated.
Chat GPT, can you please flip a heads or tails randomly?
Sure. It's heads.
It's heads.
Greg, you're gonna look at where the AI is overhyped.
Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Darien Woods, co-host of The Indicator.
And I'm Greg Rosalski.
Today on the show, we bring you two episodes from Planet Money's daily show, The Indicator.
First, I'm gonna make the case for why AI, like, chat bots and image generators
will have a huge effect on the wider economy.
And then I'm gonna argue the opposite.
May the best human win.
Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wwise,
the app that makes managing your money in different currencies easy.
With Wwise, you can send and spend money internationally at the mid-market exchange
rate. No guesswork and no hidden fees.
Learn more about how Wwise could work for you at wise.com.
All right, Greg, I want to convince you that
generative AI will have massive effects on the wider economy.
Okay, I guess I'm all yours.
I'll start with some examples of how existing products and services are being made more
productively right now with AI. Paul Daugherty is the Chief Technology and Information Officer
for Accenture, which is an IT consulting company.
We've had $2 billion of generative AI sales just partway through our fiscal year.
So in a gold rush, you are teaching the gold miners where to look for gold.
We are, yeah, we're maybe providing some of the maps as to where to go.
Where do you find the value and how do you get there exactly?
Okay, so AI is great for consultants, huh?
Yeah, that is true. I understand your cynicism, Greg. But Paul gives a bucket load of real
examples. Take this government agency in Europe for pensions and welfare.
They received 20,000 plus emails and letters every day. They didn't have enough people to
even read them all.
So generative AI could analyze the letters, it summarized what they were about, and it
flagged those that required more attention. And it eliminated a backlog of 8 million
letters. It reduced how long people were waiting to hear back from that government agency.
So six to eight weeks faster response time, big increase. This would have taken a 700%
increase in their human staffing to do it if they had to do it with people.
Also, there's an example of call centers.
Classic AI use case here.
Yes, so one company used it to understand what the customer was inquiring about and
find the right solution.
The result in this case was over 30% improvement in productivity,
and it was over a 60% increase in the measure of customer satisfaction.
Paul says generative AI is also helping businesses expand. So take the insurance industry.
Insurance, you might not think of it as the most exciting new industry to adapt technology,
but in this case, they are at the forefront of applying generative AI.
So when you apply for insurance, the company has to assess your risk.
And for certain types of insurance, that's a lot of work. So let's take business interruption
insurance and other commercial insurance. Paul says many insurance companies only take in about
20% of new requests. And that's because they simply don't have enough qualified underwriters
to assess all of the thousands of pages of documents.
With generative AI, you can do that a lot more effectively. And in fact, we're seeing them add
new underwriters because they can now onboard people with this technology to help them become
proficient much more quickly. And look, Greg, I admit these examples are not the sexiest.
Yeah, it's no AI generated video of like an alligator in space.
Yeah, maybe that would convince you. But you know, I would argue that this is the point.
A lot of the boring behind the scenes processes that make our economy tick
are being quietly transformed in ways that will make all of our lives better and easier.
Maybe, but like, we're not talking like plumbing and electricity here.
Bear with me, Greg, I've got more examples. So those were examples of how generative AI
is helping existing products. There is a second category of how AI is reshaping the economy,
which is completely new products. Like there's this company called Game Changer,
and it has this product where you add in the scores for your kids little league team.
And then using a type of AI, it spits out this new service style article afterwards with a recap.
Play by play coverage of your son or your daughter or the kids on the team. And yeah,
you could envision all sorts of creativity and fun with this. I think it shows, you know,
the promise of potential that the technology will have.
You know, the wider implication of thousands and thousands of companies doing little things like
this all across the world could be pretty vast. Tyler Cowan is an economist and a friend of the
show. We're already using them to find new materials in the laboratory, to find new antibiotics,
to crack problems in biology. Tyler sees those examples of what we're already doing now,
and he thinks there is real promise ahead. It's going to increase the pace of scientific advance.
So 20, 30 years from now, we're going to have much higher living standards because of generative AI.
Tyler says generative AI has gifted us a tool that we've never had before. What is really scarce
in our world is intelligence. Material resources matter, but the way you get more of them or get
them more cheaply is to somehow apply intelligence. Now, for really the very first time in human
history, we've created a fairly general kind of intelligence that for many tasks is already
smarter than we are. Think of it this way. Every person has at his or her disposal now
a free research assistant, a free colleague, and a free architect. That's not everything. It doesn't
mean you have a free carpenter or free energy, but that's an awful lot. And just the number of
projects that will stem from human ingenuity, I think it's going to astonish us. Tyler puts
generative AI on par with one invention in Europe in the 1400s. I'm inclined to cite the printing
press, which brought great benefits and a lot of knowledge and intelligence. It did make the world
more chaotic in some negative ways. I think we need to work very hard to make sure we do better
the next time around. But this seems to be a truly transformational breakthrough. You know,
even if we're not seeing it exactly now, the way Tyler sees technology is that it takes time for
it to diffuse through the economy. What we do now is we have processes already in place and we tack
the AI on top of those processes. And that can be a gain, but the real gain is much longer run
when you reorganize how the whole thing is done. So to truly benefit the wider economy,
all our processes, our norms, and our businesses need to adjust. Just because we had the technology
of video conferencing software didn't mean that many people were working remotely pre-2020.
The norms needed to change. There's human bottlenecks, institutional bottlenecks, inertia,
fear. So again, that's a 10 to 20 year project, even in cases where the quality of the AI is good
enough. And Greg, I'm not sure if you're aware, but Tyler has been using generative AI in his own
work. He wrote this book himself. It was called GOAT, who is the greatest economist of all time.
And why does it matter? And it has this accompanying chatbot based on the book.
Also on his podcast, Conversations with Tyler, he has this interview with the long dead Irish
writer, Jonathan Swift. The answers were from chatgbt and a human voiced the answers. I did
enjoy the Jonathan Swift interview. Oh yeah, yeah. He was very good. He was, yeah, better than many
human guests. Not as good as you though, Greg. Wow. Was there some sarcasm in your voice there?
I'm saying there is the promise of AI, but we'll have things that can't do like,
you know, the warm human touch of Gregorzowski. Okay. Well, for a nice and warm human touch
and a counterpoint to Darien's argument, stay tuned for the case for why AI is
overrated. That's coming up after the break.
It's a high stakes election year, so it's not enough to just follow along. You need to understand
what's happening. So you are fully informed November every weekday on the end for our
politics podcast. Our political reporters break down important stories and backstories from the
campaign trail. Do you understand why it matters to you? Listen to the NPR politics podcast,
wherever you get your podcasts. This election season, you can expect to hear a lot of news,
some of it meaningful, much of it not give the up first podcast 15 minutes, sometimes a little
less, and we'll help you sort it out. What's going on around the world and at home? Three stories,
15 minutes up first every day. Listen every morning, wherever you get your podcasts.
Christian nationalists want to turn America into a theocracy, a government under biblical rule.
If they gain more power, it could mean fewer rights for you. I'm Heath Drewson,
and on the new season of Extremely American, I'll take you inside the movement. Listen to
Extremely American from Boise State Public Radio, part of the NPR network. What does the
future of food look like as the climate continues to change? We'll bring you innovations and answers
during NPR's climate solutions week. Explore with us at npr.org slash climate week.
All right, so I've made the case for why AI is underrated. Now, Greg, it is your turn. Tell us,
why is AI overrated? Darian, there are just so many reasons to believe AI is overrated. I could
talk about the fact that productivity growth remains super disappointing. If AI were revolutionizing
the economy, we would see it in the data. We're not seeing it. I could talk about the fact that
AI companies have yet to find a killer app and that perhaps the biggest application of AI could
be like scams, misinformation and threatening democracy. I could talk about the ungodly amount
of electricity it takes to power AI and how it's raising serious concerns about its contribution
to climate change. But alas, I will hold off on those, Darian. Very disciplined. Instead,
I will focus on just three reasons why AI is overrated and I will be enlisting the help of
an economist extraordinaire, B1, the only MIT economist, Deron Asamoglu. Okay, so Deron Asamoglu,
if you haven't heard of him, maybe you should Google him. Big deal. He's like one of the leading
economic scholars of technology. So a lot of hype around AI. Oh boy, yes, you can say that again.
Given that hype, should we expect AI to usher in revolutionary changes for the economy in the next
decade? No, no, definitely not. I mean, unless you count a lot of companies overinvesting in
generative AI and then regretting it a revolutionary change. Ouch, those are some barbed words.
That's right. I mean, I guess you could call that a change or like, you know,
a huge bubble popping. Anyways, Deron not bullish on AI's impact on the economy in the near future.
And let's talk about why. Reason number one, this so-called artificial intelligence we have
isn't actually that intelligent. I think most importantly, it's overrated because we are
overrating its current capabilities. When you first use something like chat GPT, it might seem
like magic. Wow. A thinking machine able to answer questions or write or generate anything in an
instant. But when you look under the hood, it's more like a magic trick. These chat bots are a
fancy way of aggregating the internet and then spitting out a mishmash of what it finds.
Okay, I have a slightly more optimistic view about the sophistication of the underlying
technology. But I guess the metaphor you're using is a glorified photocopier passing human work as
its own. I mean, basically, yeah, it's a copycat. And perhaps the worst part of it is a good chunk
of the stuff AI is copying is copyrighted, which is why there are at least 15 high profile lawsuits
against AI companies asserting copyright infringement. Yeah, we actually have an
episode about this as an artist that are suing AI companies. I've also read that AI companies have
gone paying media companies for their content. Do you know, have AI companies used your academic
papers and books in their models? And did you give them authorization? No, I didn't. I didn't
give them authorization. And yes, they do. I don't even have to be talking to you right now. I could
just talk to chat GPT and have them regurgitate your thoughts. They came to some extent,
although, you know, I did try it just out of curiosity, how it would summarize some of my
thinking. It's not horrible, but you'll do a better job. Greg, you'll do a better job.
So you can talk to yourself. You can talk to yourself.
I'm just a humble homo sapien.
He's flattering you, Greg. Watch out.
Oh yeah, I was blushing. You can't see that on a podcast. But yeah, sure. Generative AI,
it is a breakthrough, but the hype around it has gotten out of control. The reality is the
so-called AI we have now is not even close to the holy grail of AI researchers, so-called
artificial general intelligence. What we have now, it's a bit lame. The technologist Dirk
Hundl has called it autocorrect on steroids. These models learn from patterns in heaps of data
to predict the next word in a sentence. So what's your perspective on that? Is AI
actually intelligent? Is this all just like a misnomer?
Yeah, I would have been so much happier if the whole word intelligence wasn't part of this
discussion. The reality is these systems do not have judgment. They cannot tell right from wrong.
They cannot tell true from false, which brings me to the number two reason why AI is overrated.
Reason number two, AI lies. The industry has come to call AI falsehoods and errors
hallucinations. But like artificial intelligence, that actually also might be a misnomer because
that makes it sound like, you know, it works well like always. And then every once in a while,
it drinks some ayahuasca or like, you know, eat some magic mushrooms and says some like trippy
made up stuff. But this issue seems to be bigger and more common than that. Do you have any data
to spot this? Yeah, well, there's one study that found that chatbots hallucinate somewhere between
3% and 27% of the time. Here's a real world example. Google was recently forced to revamp
its AI overviews feature because it was giving users some pretty bizarre results. CNBC covered
this. Kelly, some of those questionable bizarre results centered around the AI overview telling
users that you can eat a certain amount of rocks a day for your health. It's healthy to do so.
Many AI researchers are saying we cannot end the problem of hallucinations anytime soon,
if not ever with these models. That's because they don't know what's true or false, which brings me
to reason number three, why AI is overrated because AI is not intelligent and because
hallucinations make it unreliable. It's proving incapable of doing most, if not all human jobs.
There are all of these jobs that AI was supposedly supposed to kill like right away, like computer
coder jobs or like translator jobs, but AI is proving to be unreliable and too dumb to replace
humans. Here's a recent example. Drive-thru attendance for about three years. McDonald's
piloted a program to use AI at some of its drive-thrus. Yeah, I saw this and it was not
the best look for AI. Yeah, there were all of these viral videos showing AI making ridiculous
errors like trying to add $222 worth of chicken nuggets to someone's order. And then there was
this instance where there was a bizarre addition to someone's dessert. You added bacon to my ice
cream. I don't want bacon. Don't knock it to you. I tried it. I mean, it could work. I don't know.
Maybe AI has something there. I don't know. But yeah, even the jobs AI was supposed to be like
really good at, it's having big problems. At best, AI is proving to just be like a tool for humans to
use. Humans still have to be there though. They have to probe the work of AI. And this has some
like serious economic implications. Deron recently wrote an academic paper that analyzed AI's
potential effects on the economy over the next decade. First off, he says, they're just humongous
chunks of the economy that generative AI will barely touch, like construction or food and
accommodations, factories, basically anything outside of an office AI won't even come close
to being able to do in the next decade. Then Deron narrows in on office work and finds that there are
just a whole bunch of tasks that current AI models are just incapable of doing. Deron finds that AI
will impact less than 5% of human tasks in the economy, less than 5%. And here there will only
be some mild cost savings. In the end, Deron predicts AI will not boost productivity or
economic growth very much in the next decade. And here's the other big thing. People claim
that AI is getting like exponentially better, but there's actually mounting evidence that
improvements to AI, it may be slowing down. AI companies may be running out of data to train
their systems. There are all these problems with the microchip supply chain, and it's proving
costly to create data centers and pay the power bills to run AI systems. So yeah, AI may not end
up having a big effect on the economy, at least not anytime soon. And a big reason why is because
human beings are just way more capable and impressive than these machines.
So a lot of people in the industry don't recognize how versatile, talented, multifaceted
human skills capabilities are. And once you do that, you tend to overrate machines ahead of humans
and underrate the humans. That's right, Deron. It's not AI that's underrated. It's humans that
are underrated. Go team human. Well, Greg, you've made your case. I'm inspired, but I don't know.
I think we will see AI do more and more that we haven't even dreamed of yet.
Well, Deron, I guess you got to keep dreaming.
Hey, and by the way, me, human being, warm touch, I write the Planet Money newsletter.
If you're interested in this topic and want to learn more, I wrote a newsletter that goes into
way more detail about the reasons why AI is overrated. Check it out in our show notes. Also,
subscribe to the Planet Money newsletter, npr.org planet money newsletter. By subscribing,
you are keeping human jobs in existence. These episodes of The Indicator were originally
produced by Corey Bridges and they were edited by Patty Hirsch. They were engineered by Valentina
Rodriguez Sanchez and Neil Rauch. They were fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Cannon
is The Indicator's editor. I'm Deron Woods. And I'm Greg Rizalski. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
For a while now, you've probably been hearing about book bands,
how they're gaining momentum everywhere in Texas, in Missouri, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
On the Code Switch podcast, we're taking a look at why. Why are so many books suddenly considered
so dangerous to kids? Listen to our new series on the Code Switch podcast from NPR.
From how we grow crops, to what we put on our plates, climate change is influencing
the future of food. That's what we're exploring this year during NPR's climate solutions week.
Learn more at npr.org slash climate week.
