About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


30 Brown J. World Aff. 161 (2023-2024)
Generative AI and the Future of Work: A Reappraisal

handle is hein.journals/brownjwa30 and id is 161 raw text is: Generative Al and the Future of Work: A Reappraisal CARL BENEDIKT FREY AND MICHAEL OSBORNE INTRODUCTION Like now, the early 2010s was a time of excitement about new technological wonders. The world had bounced back from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and, despite residual financial malaise, America seemed to be on the cusp of a productivity boom.' Artificial intelligence (AI), long regarded as an academic backwater, was finally bearing fruit. In 2011, a question-answering computer system known as IBM Watson beat the world champion in Jeopardy. 161 Machine learning-a subfield of AI-further expanded the possibilities of what computers could do; in 2012, a machine learning team from Google trained a deep neural network that, without ever being told what a cat was, proved independently capable of recognizing cat videos on YouTube. Gone were the days when a computer programmer needed to write explicit rules to guide the actions of a machine in every contingency. Computers could now infer rules by tapping into the data trails left behind by increasing numbers of humans online. This phenomenon was most clearly visible with the development of autonomous vehicles. No programmer could be expected to foresee every situation a human driver might encounter in city traffic, and even less to capture these in a sequence of If-Then-Do commands. Instead, autonomous vehicles made progress by collecting vast amounts of data on drivers' actions in city traffic to predict what humans would in any given situation. CARL BENEDiKT FREY is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of Al & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and an Official Fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He is also Director of the Future of Work Programme and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School. MIKE OSBORNE is a Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford, an Official Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a co-founder of Mind Foundry. Copyright © 2023 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs FALL/WINTER 2023 * VOLUME XXX, ISSUE I