In the slow recovery of the early 2010s, Northwestern University economics professor Robert Gordon argued that the big leaps that have created a wide variety of jobs (electrification, internal combustion engines, phones) are lagging behind. The future would not have the same power.
Not all agreed, but Gordon’s concerns remain unresolved, at least about creating large numbers of secure middle-class jobs.
But the big leaps continue. Including: Artificial Intelligence.
Microsoft, in a 2018 monograph, defined AI as “a set of technologies that enable computers to recognize, learn, reason, and support decision-making to solve problems in a manner similar to humans.” My colleague Melissa Hellmann wrote extensively about artificial intelligence in 2019.
Now, a new report by Mark Muro and Sifan Liu of the Brookings Institution examines how this new, already ubiquitous technological frontier (such as boxless shopping and Amazon Go autonomous cars) is being shaken by metropolitan areas and regions.
Unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is considered the only undisputed “superstar cluster” based on R&D dollars, federal contracts, artificial intelligence companies, patents, jobs, and other metrics.
But Seattle ranks high as early adopters along with seven other major tech hubs. The others are New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina.
Seattle’s leading AI employers are Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle and Apple.
“AI is already being recognized as one of the next great ‘general purpose’ technologies with the power to transform the entire economy sector by sector,” write Muro and Liu. Act defined AI as a “key technology” that is essential for competitiveness, growth and national security.
The AI industry is still emerging, but also a well-known story: Winner-take-all or Winner take most Cities against everyone else
According to the Brookings report, another 87 locations could become contenders. Here my focus is on power and the competition is limited. Detroit, for example, is home to automakers who will use artificial intelligence. The same goes for finance in Charlotte, North. Carolina, the second largest banking center in the country.
But few of them have the world-class talent, top universities, technology transfer, entrepreneurship, finance, and innovation clusters that would enable them to jump to the forefront of AI. An expansion of federal funding for AI research could give a boost.But it’s a long turn.
Unsurprisingly, the report finds that AI activity is highly concentrated “in a short list of ‘superstar’ metropolitan areas and ‘early adopter’ centers often scattered along the coasts”. Another 261 metropolitan areas are not at stake at all.
San Diego offers some hope that a place will take to the next level. When I worked there in the 1980s it was a pretty quiet place built around the marina and tourism.
But it benefited from research at the University of California at San Diego and their pioneering technology transfer. This created one of the largest biotech clusters in the USA at the turn of the century. Qualcomm has made San Diego a leader in wireless technology.
Not so long ago, Seattle relied heavily on Boeing. Then Microsoft came to Redmond and Amazon became a giant in town.The lower cost of living but high-end amenities made it attractive to large Bay Area corporations that also set up outposts here.
How much of these two examples apply to Oklahoma City or Indianapolis? Little. Too many cities have incentives for low-tech facilities like data centers that produce few and no good jobs. They refuse to do the heavy lifting to expand. Fund higher education and invest in quality services that attract talent.
A fundamental question is whether Artificial Intelligence responds to the challenge posed by the economist Gordon. Will it be a leap that creates lots of jobs?Or will it be disruptive and destructive and contribute to many people struggling to find work and get promoted?
The darkest end was Stephen Hawking, the famous British physicist who warned in 2014 that artificial intelligence “could mean the end of mankind”.
The Terminator films took this to extremes by assuming that the US nuclear arsenal is under the command of a Skynet AI. When Skynet “became self-aware” and scientists tried to disable the system, it launched the missiles to destroy humanity.
Tech CEO Elon Musk weighed in with, “Computers, intelligent machines and robots seem like the workforce of the future. And as more and more jobs are replaced by technology, people will have less work to do and ultimately will be sustained by payments from the government.”
On the less apocalyptic side, the accounting and consulting company PwC published a study in 2018 that found the job picture from AI is basically a wash in the United Kingdom. Some 7 million jobs would be displaced in coming years while 7.2 million would be added.
Source link
