President Trump expressed confidence in the future of artificial intelligence, asserting it would produce an abundance of jobs, and he dismissed the idea that it could fuel cyberattacks.
“Whoever wins the artificial intelligence war is going to be really the leader of the world,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday.
But to him, that war seems primarily an economic contest, not a cybersecurity race.
“I think A.I. is going to be a tremendous job producer,” Mr. Trump said, predicting that the expanding sector would produce “so many jobs” that “we don’t have enough people to fill the jobs, and that’s where robots come in.”
Mr. Trump’s assertions challenge widespread fears that automating tasks through A.I. technology will render wide swaths of the labor pool obsolete. There is also a debate among work force and labor experts whether A.I. will foment sweeping unemployment, or create jobs demanding different skills than are necessary for the positions now available.
As he focused on the potential job-creating promise of A.I., Mr. Trump seemed unbothered by warnings that there could be a dark side to its expansion.
When asked whether he feared that reliance on A.I. could make the United States more vulnerable to cyberattacks by China, Mr. Trump shrugged off the question by saying, “China did that anyway.”
“You know, we do that to China,” he said, adding: “We do everything we can to China, and they do everything they can to us.”
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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