Howitt told a news conference that it remains to be seen who will be the leader in AI, and \u201cwe don\u2019t know what the creative destruction effects are going to be\u201d.<\/p>\n
Brown University Professor Emeritus of Economics Peter Howitt. Photo \/ Ashley McCabe, AFP<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s obviously a fantastic technology that has amazing possibilities. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it also obviously has an amazing potential for destroying other jobs or replacing highly skilled labour. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd all I can say is that this is a conflict. It\u2019s going to have to be regulated,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPrivate incentives in an unregulated market are not really going to resolve this conflict in a way that\u2019s best for society, and we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to come from it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Howitt, 79, said it was a \u201cbig moment in human history\u201d and likened it to past periods of technological innovation, including the telecoms boom of the 1990s, and the dawns of electricity and steam power.<\/p>\n
He said those innovations all demonstrated how technology can enhance and not just replace labour. <\/p>\n
\u201cHow we\u2019re going to do it this time? I wish I had specific answers, but I don\u2019t,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The third economist to be honoured today, American-Israeli Joel Mokyr, was more sanguine about the impact of AI on the labour market.<\/p>\n
\u201cMachines don\u2019t replace us. They move us to more interesting, more challenging work,\u201d Mokyr, 79, told a news conference live streamed from Northwestern University in the suburbs of Chicago. <\/p>\n
\u201cTechnological change not only replaces people, it creates new tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n
American-Israeli scientist Joel Mokyr. Photo \/ Northwestern University in Illinois, AFP<\/p>\n
Mokyr won his Nobel for his work on identifying the \u201cprerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said his main concern about the labour market of the future was not \u201ctechnological unemployment\u201d but labour scarcity as the population ages and fewer people enter the workforce.<\/p>\n
Howitt said that when he and Aghion first wrote their seminal 1992 paper on creative destruction it took five years to get it published, but his collaborator knew they were on to something special.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight from the beginning, from our very first research, I remember back in 1987, Philippe saying we\u2019re going to get a Nobel Prize for this. I said, \u2018Sure, sure, sure,\u2019\u201d Howitt recalled.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018Our time will come. Our time will come,\u2019 okay, and now it\u2019s come. Amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n
– Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Howitt told a news conference that it remains to be seen who will be the leader in AI,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,59981,49816,9556,363,364,17517,1951,1138,9557,59982,59980,5971,111,139,40141,69,8617,24397,6046,10512,50368,6122,312,3271,145,1361,1961,1865,8222,10508,1530],"class_list":["post-76879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ais","tag-amazing","tag-artificial","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-because","tag-economics","tag-firm","tag-intelligence","tag-jobdestroying","tag-laureate","tag-need","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nobel","tag-nz","tag-offers","tag-possibilities","tag-potential","tag-prize","tag-regulated","tag-rules","tag-says","tag-should","tag-technology","tag-that","tag-this","tag-today","tag-warned","tag-winner","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}