From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

What impact does technology have on the US economy?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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What impact does technology have on the US economy?

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(bright music) - As we continue to develop more applications, as we continue to develop technology, what impact does that have on our economics in the United States? - It's one of the questions that President Obama asked us, was to take a look at this question of what's going to be the impact of AI? And there's two portions in that, which is one is the idea of what people often refer to as general AI versus specific AI. General AI is the idea there's going to be some new species that's been created as an intelligent being. Let's set that aside and really focus on the question of specific AI, which is the idea of spell checkers, to self-driving cars, and all of the things there. And what we produced is the White House report on artificial intelligence, and it lays out a series of frameworks and the questions that need to be addressed, as well as what the national strategy needs to have happen to invest in AI. The first portion of that is actually this very troubling statistic that something like 70% or more even in many cases of the assessments of minimum paying jobs, the low wage jobs could be displaced by automation in a very short period of time, so from truck drivers, to somebody who's working in a restaurant, to dish washers, to you name it. That's actually, I think, since the time we wrote that and looked at it, we're actually seeing another more challenging trend, which is there's a number of very good white collar jobs that are really about to go through an upheaval as well, specifically in finance. What we're not talking about is if you think about the giant bank that typically is in the classic tall skyscraper, those are a lot of white collar jobs that are right in the, think of the belly of the bank. You have one process that leads to another process, and they're all kind of chained together, but each process in its own doesn't require a whole lot of judgment. There's a checklist that each person has to follow, so compliance, et cetera. Those are really ripe for where AI is going to automate that. There's a bunch of the things at the low-paying wage level where many of those jobs are not jobs that people want, but there's going to be real implications there. What happens also is that moves through other portions of the entire workforce. That's a massive change that's about to happen, and we haven't gotten our head around that. And what do we do with the population of people that are displaced by that? What are the next set of skills? How do their skills apply to other places? And we have not as a society been asking that question with the rigor that we need to, given how fast that change is happening. (bright music)

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