Now we know what it must’ve felt like for all the poor bastard craftsfolk on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. More or less. We’re eating fewer turnips, and most of us probably smell better, but the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries was, in my dope’s rendition of world history, the last time such fundamental change affected so much of the workforce over so wide of an area and in such short of an amount of time.
Given that OpenAI’s ChatGPT was only just released to the public in late November 2022 and we’re already seeing layoffs and reduced work opportunities in hiring because of employers’ increasing adoption of AI, there’s a pervasive sense of the dread settling down upon white collar workers.
As a public benefit corporation, Anthropic—known for its Claude AI, a competitor of ChatGPT—has been more forceful in pushing for greater regulation of AI technologies. They haven’t been shy about publicly saying that unbridled AI creates society- and industry-wide problems. On June 27, it launched a few new programs that it says will help guide AI down a path that manages some of its worst tendencies.
meetings, grants, and data
“We believe it’s fundamental to ground these conversations in real-world data and invest in ongoing empirical analysis to track AI usage trends over time,” they wrote in a June 27 announcement. “That’s why we launched the Economic Index—publishing research and public datasets on AI usage across the economy—as a first step.”
Then, in addition, it announced the Anthropic Economic Futures Program, “a new initiative to support research and policy development focused on addressing AI’s economic impacts,”
It includes offers for research grants of up to $50,000, plus a series of symposiums designed to gather a bunch of AI experts in one location to develop and discuss “concrete policy recommendations based on empirical evidence, with clear implementation pathways.”
The first symposium is planned for this September in Washington DC, followed by one sometime in the fall in Europe.
Anthropic closes its announcement with some words that remind us that a sense of fatalist passivity will do us no favors: “Society’s response to AI is not predetermined. The decisions we make today about how to develop, deploy, and govern AI will have long-term ramifications.”
The post Anthropic AI Says It Has a Plan to Save the Job Market From AI appeared first on VICE.
