Several experts have said the world is on the verge of a high-tech version of the Industrial Revolution.
The United Kingdom’s second-in-command thinks that the spread of artificial intelligence will significantly affect the country more than the Industrial Revolution.
“This is a total revolution that is coming,” Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, told The Times. “It will completely change almost every part of life over the next few years, and in some cases, even over the next few months.”
“It is happening much faster than other revolutions we’ve seen and is much bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the invention of the internal combustion engine,” he said.
Since the release of ChatGPT and the public’s easy access to the robot that can talk like a person, the use of artificial intelligence has grown in the past few months. Businesses, states, and the military are already using the tech to make work easier and help people.
Dowden said that in the U.K., AI is already being used by the Home Office to speed up how the government handles refugee claim forms.
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“What AI does really well right now is take huge amounts of data from different datasets and get you to a point where you can make decisions,” he told a U.K. news station.
“Ministers will never give AI the job of making choices for them. But all the work that has to be done to get to that point… You can speed it up with AI.”
Dowden said that using the tech could change the U.K. economy. He used the example of how cars put “blacksmiths and farriers” out of work.
He said, “We have a very tight job market, and it’s the government’s job to make sure people can move.” “AI should eventually be able to do the boring parts of jobs so people can focus on the more interesting parts.”
Dowden’s comments come after Heritage Foundation economist Peter St. Onge told Fox News Digital in April that lawmakers should stay out of artificial intelligence. St. Onge said that AI will probably change jobs and the economy, just like other technological revolutions in the past.
“There have been many big changes in technology throughout history. St. Onge said at the time that, in general, new tools kill jobs. “What went wrong? We had a lot of new jobs, though. Almost no one works on a farm anymore.”
“This is kind of how the world works,” he said. When technology is used to do something that used to be done by hand, the goal is to kill jobs, which is also called “saving work.”
In an email this week, St. Onge told Fox News Digital that “AI will disrupt millions of jobs, but we’ll automatically replace those jobs at higher wages ONLY IF governments can proactively get out of the way of job creation.”
St. Onge said, “The market can’t work if the government gets in the way,” he compared Detroit’s loss as a giant automaker to how Hong Kong went from being an industrial center in the 1980s and 1990s to a financial hub.
Dowden told The Times that hackers, bad players, and terrorists pose a threat because AI is being used increasingly.
“You can hack faster with AI. You can use AI to help you do things that hurt other people or things. There are already unhappy people. When you connect them to AI, the things they can do grow and improve. “We need to be careful not to exaggerate these things and do them based on evidence, but there is a risk that needs to be dealt with,” he told The Times.
He also said that AI could spread false information and make deep fakes, which are videos and pictures that can be changed to look like real pictures of other people.
“You think about how that picture of the Pope in the puffer jacket went worldwide. How many people saw that and knew it was a deep fake at first glance? He asked this about a fake photo of Pope Francis wearing an expensive puffy jacket that went viral earlier this year.
Sir Patrick Vallance, who used to be the chief science assistant to the U.K. government, also thought in the spring that AI would be as significant a change as the Industrial Revolution. Still, unlike St. Onge, he wanted the government to step in.
Vallance told the Commons’ Science, innovation, and Technology committee in May, “There will be a big effect on jobs, and it could be as big as the Industrial Revolution.” “AI will be able to do some jobs, which could put a lot of people out of work or give a lot of people jobs that only humans can do.”
“At first, the Industrial Revolution had a negative effect on the economy because people had to change their jobs, but then it turned out to be good,” said Vallance. “We need to do something about that.”
