Renowned economist Sanjeev Sanyal on Monday backed artificial intelligence, calling it “a great social leveler”. Sanyal, who is also a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, said, “Those who invest only in learning the right jargon and tone, rather than ideas, will perish.” “Why is this a bad thing? If anything, it’s a great social leveler,” he said, responding to a user who pointed out that higher-paying jobs are more exposed to AI disruption.
The prospect of job losses has intensified following the launch of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT has surprised many with its ability to generate human-like responses to complex questions on a variety of topics. This has led many to believe that it will eat up many high-paying jobs.
A Twitter user recently pointed this out by sharing a list of most affected jobs. However, Sanyal said that if someone’s job can be replaced with a language program, it should not have been high paying in the first place. “You were enjoying the rent for an expensive education, not for the quality of your ideas. Technology has eliminated market inefficiency,” he said.
However, another user, Mayur, asked: “Doesn’t the joy of rent range from a highly paid salaried individual to a billionaire who will reduce savings as he/she has the means to develop/deploy AI??” To this, Sanyal said that every technology produced its billionaires – railway billionaires, cotton mill billionaires, and so on. “When losers got low pay, it was called progress; now it would be high pay…” he wrote.