The Blubber

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who joined the board of directors of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, late last year, shared his perspective on this debate at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Hong Kong on Thursday. He stated, “The right general rule with respect to technological innovation is that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”

Unlike many AI proponents, Summers believes that AI's full potential won't be realized anytime soon. He stated, “I don’t think that this is going to drive a productivity miracle in the next three to five years.”

Summers explained that the final stage of technological development, known as the “last mile,” where a revolutionary technology becomes accessible to the general public, often takes longer than anticipated. He referred to the “productivity J curve,” suggesting that it takes years of investment, research, and development to see productivity gains from a new idea.

“For example, think about autonomous vehicles. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of workers have for years been devoting themselves to autonomous vehicles…and as yet, there have been no chauffeurs or truck drivers or taxi drivers who have lost their job,” he explained. “We’ve had a bunch of labor being devoted to autonomous vehicles, and no output that is measured in the statistics.”

However, despite his caution, Summers is not skeptical about AI's potential. He stated, “If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution.” He believes that AI has the potential to replace nearly every human job, especially white-collar workers' “cognitive labor.”

Summers predicted that AI will eventually be able to perform almost every human job, from building homes to making medical diagnoses. This shift, he believes, will make emotional intelligence (EQ) more important than intellectual intelligence (IQ).

“AI will substitute for a doctor making a difficult diagnosis…before it substitutes for a nurse’s ability to hold a patient’s hand when the patient is frightened,” he concluded.