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00:00 Will artificial intelligence be a blessing or a curse?
00:04 History may be able to offer us a few clues.
00:07 A certain amount of fear is justified.
00:09 I don't think we're facing the robot apocalypse, the Terminator scenario.
00:12 Take the medieval plough.
00:14 If advances in the tool didn't lift Europe's peasants out of poverty,
00:18 it was largely because their rulers took the wealth generated by the new gains in output
00:23 and used it to build cathedrals instead.
00:26 Economists say something similar could happen with artificial intelligence
00:31 if it enters our lives in such a way that the benefits are enjoyed by the few, not the many.
00:36 AI definitely has the potential to increase inequality.
00:41 Simon Johnson is a professor of global economics and management at MIT Sloan School of Management.
00:47 It may benefit other people also, but that could also take a really long time.
00:50 So a lot of times technological transformations eventually do help a lot of people,
00:54 but it eventually might be 100 years or even more.
00:58 So I think the question with AI is how quickly can you share the benefits?
01:02 Backers of AI predict a productivity leap that will generate wealth and improve living standards.
01:08 Consultancy McKinsey estimates that it could add between $14 trillion and $22 trillion of value annually,
01:16 that higher figure being roughly the current size of the US economy.
01:21 Some techno-optimists go further, suggesting that, along with robots,
01:26 AI is the technology that will finally free humanity from humdrum tasks
01:31 and launch us into lives of more creativity and leisure.
01:37 Yet worries abound about its impact on livelihoods,
01:41 including its potential to destroy jobs in all kinds of sectors.
01:46 Witness the strike by Hollywood actors who fear being made redundant by their AI-generated doubles.
01:52 31-year-old Belle works in property.
01:55 I guess the people who've created it are worried about what they've created.
01:58 Such concerns are not unfounded. Innovation, it turns out, is the easy bit.
02:03 Harder is making it work for everyone.
02:06 History shows the economic impact of technological advances is generally uncertain,
02:11 unequal and sometimes outright malign.
02:14 The track record of the Internet, for example, is complex.
02:18 It has created many new job roles, even as much of the wealth generated has gone to a handful of billionaires.
02:25 But the productivity gains it was once lauded for have slowed down across many economies.
02:31 So AI is up there in terms of potential impact, but it's also really fast, right?
02:36 It's coming at us much faster than electricity did.
02:39 For example, that was a big deal in the early 20th century.
02:42 That took about 20 or 30 years to roll out fully.
02:45 AI already, I mean, within a few days, changed.
02:48 GPT was affecting jobs around the world.
02:50 And I think within five years, the effects are going to be quite profound in many places.
02:54 many places.