James Manyika: Extending AI's Benefits to Society as a Whole

The challenges of reskilling at scale and the role of humans in fine-tuning and embedding AI systems into society

• The challenge of reskilling at scale is greater due to faster progress in technology
• Current AI systems are intelligence machines, not learning machines like children
• There will be millions of jobs around fine-tuning and guiding AI systems
• Social technical embedding is necessary to effectively put AI systems into the world
• The 'other' job category is the fastest growing and reflects new and emerging activities
• Ethical use of AI is a concern that needs to be addressed

The 'other' job category was initially used to classify emerging activities like web design and is now the fastest growing job category

James Manyika, Senior Vice President for Technology and Society at Google, will sit down with Alexandr Wang, Scale founder and CEO, to discuss the best ways to ensure that AI models assist work and grow the economy, even as they replace certain mundane tasks. Manyika will describe how prioritizing utility and focusing on harm reduction should be at the core of principled use and deployment of AI. Manyika will point out the need to allow people to know whether they are interacting with an AI agent or a human, versus scenarios in which it’s permissible to use algorithms and human workers interchangeably. Learn how to adapt to new forms of work and activities that evolve as AI systems become more capable, how to develop AI policy to ensure no harm comes from the use of AI, and about the geopolitical impact and importance of AI principles. Manyika will also discuss his recent work for the Academy of Arts and Sciences, as editor of the Spring 2022 issue of Dædalus. For this journal, he invited a number of noted AI researchers and tech luminaries to write about different aspects of AI and society, including how the technology is being used for climate change, healthcare, and the economy—particularly how it can be made even better in those use cases.