In a recent article in
The New York Times, Kaifu Lee, founder and former president of Google China, predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will result in large-scale unemployment, a widening wealth gap, unprecedented economic imbalances, and even a change in global power patterns. Liang Jianzhang, co-founder and chairman of the board at Ctrip – an online platform that offers hotel reservation and other booking services – presented a different take on the issue for the financial news portal
yicai.com.
First, Liang doesn’t believe AI will lead to significant unemployment. There are at least three decades to go before about half of the existing job positions – like cleaners, flight attendants – will be replaced by robots. In economic terms, this means that productivity and daily wages will double. If people choose to work long as before, Liang said, they will earn twice as much as before. They can spend on better education, medical care and other high-end services. A large demand for employees in the service sector will thus be created in turn, which would absorb the displaced workforce.
AI won’t cause the wealth gap to widen. AI technologies are largely based on a sea of data, which put large companies at an advantageous position, however, according to Liang, as long as there are three comparable competing companies in the market, they won’t be able to make unusually large profits.
Lastly, he said, work related to innovation will be primarily undertaken by humans in the foreseeable future, because innovation requires judgement on beauty and taste – things that humans will always understand better than robots. In the long run, innovating is more about exploring the unknown. If people lose the desire to explore and let robots do the work, then the human civilization will be in jeopardy – a problem greater than the wealth gap, Liang concluded.
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