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It doesn’t live up to the hype and doesn’t justify radical redistribution or draconian regulations.
So far, artificial intelligence hasn’t lived up to the hype. It hasn’t cured cancer or doubled the human lifespan. That doesn’t mean it never will, but it does suggest that the more sober takes on how—and how soon—the technology will affect our daily lives are closer to reality.
Daron Acemoglu of MIT, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity,” speculated in a 2024 paper that AI will profitably automate about 5% of all tasks and add roughly 1% to the global economy over the next decade, a modest boost. Mr. Acemoglu argues that while AI models have emerged that can engage in sophisticated reasoning, they don’t match human cognitive abilities.
Nor does he believe that AI is on the cusp of rivaling human creativity. The models can learn what they are trained to learn through algorithms, and that’s useful, Mr. Acemoglu told an interviewer last year. “But no task that we perform in reality is just recounting already established knowledge,” he said. The tasks “are much more complex. They involve interactions. They involve a lot of things that are based on tacit knowledge or that are based on matching your contextual understanding of a problem with the specific task at hand.”
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.