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FILE PHOTO: Vasiliki Kostoula, a Greek breast cancer patient, listens to her doctor after a radiological medical examination in an Athens hospital October 29, 2008.
Hard Numbers: Tax hacks, Breast cancer, Google dinged, AI job risk
294,138: The Internal Revenue Service received 294,138 complaints of identity theft in 2023 and flagged more than 1 million tax returns as potentially fraudulent. AI is set to supercharge tax fraud this season, letting malicious actors more easily impersonate people and obtain sensitive information needed to file fake tax returns in their name.
250 million: The French competition authority fined Google €250 million ($270 million) for failing to notify news publishers in the country that it was training its large language models on their articles. Google has already been forced to pay publishers in Australia and Canada to license their content, and the thorny question of AI training ushers in a whole new squabble for the internet giant.
10: According to a new US government estimate, 10 percent of workers are at high risk of being displaced by artificial intelligence. The findings, from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, show that the highest-risk individuals also are the ones with lowest levels of education and income—a reality that could further disadvantage many struggling Americans.Graphic Truth: Apprenticeships are on the rise
Whether it’s the price of college, the promise of the gig economy, or simply the desire to get paid while training, apprenticeships are having a moment. In the US, this surge has coincided with an 8% drop in undergraduate college enrollment; in Canada, it comes amid high youth unemployment.
In short, young people want options for brighter futures. As a result, apprenticeships are increasingly becoming an alternative to expensive four-year college degrees, or as a way to forge new careers mid-life. Apprentices get all the benefits of other employees, including wages, while getting valuable on-the-job training.
After dipping during the pandemic, the number of apprenticeship registrations jumped 12% in 2022 to an all-time high in Canada. In the US, they rose 22% between 2020 and 2021 and saw an 82.1% jump between 2008 and 2021.
But this isn’t just a COVID-fueled trend. SAIT, one of Canada's largest post-secondary institutions for apprenticeships, has seen a 20% increase in enrollment over the last two years. So apprenticeships are likely to increase even more in the coming years.
A "Help Wanted" sign hangs in a restaurant window.
Jobs are up, but Biden and Trudeau still risk losing theirs
January was an encouraging month for job growth in the US and Canada. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 353,000 new jobs stateside with unemployment holding steady at 3.7%. Meanwhile, Statistics Canada says jobs were up by 37,000 during the same period and unemployment was down to 5.7% – a modest drop of 0.1%. Both countries exceeded expectations.
You might think better-than-expected economic news would herald brighter fortunes for President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but you would almost certainly be wrong. Both men’s polling numbers are nowhere near where they’d like them to be.
Biden’s favorables are flat with roughly 40% of Americans approving of his job performance compared to 55% who disapprove. Meanwhile, 86% of the country thinks he’s too old to run again. North of the border, Trudeau continues to trail Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre by double digits, and his party is stuck in the mud.
There’s a chance numbers will improve for the incumbents, but the December jobs report in the US also exceeded expectations and didn’t boost Biden’s ratings. The Canadian numbers were softer in December, so Liberals have some hope the latest good news will give Trudeau a boost this time.
But so far, and perhaps counterintuitively, their political fortunes do not seem directly tied to economic performance.
Are leaders asking the right questions about AI?
The official theme of the 2024 World Economic Forum held recently in Davos, Switzerland, was “Rebuilding Trust” in an increasingly fragmented world. But unofficially, the hottest topic on the icy slopes was artificial intelligence.
Hundreds of private sector companies convened to pitch new products and business solutions powered by AI, and nearly two dozen panel discussions featured “AI” in their titles. There was even an “AI House” on the main promenade, just blocks from the Congress Center, where world leaders and CEOs gathered.
So, there were many conversations about the rapidly evolving technology. But were they the right ones?
GZERO’s Tony Maciulis spoke to Marietje Schaake, a former member of the EU parliament who now leads an AI policy program at Stanford. Their conversation focused on the human side of AI and what it could mean for jobs and the workforce.
A recent study from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed that as many as 40% of jobs worldwide could be adversely impacted by AI. Schaake said that kind of upheaval could lead to political unrest and a further rise in populism and encouraged corporations and public sector leaders alike to find solutions now before the equality gap further widens.
Watch the full GZERO World episode: Al Gore on US elections & climate change
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at http://gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
AI's impact on jobs could lead to global unrest, warns AI expert Marietje Schaake
The 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos was dominated by conversations about AI and its potential as well as possible pitfalls for society. GZERO’s Tony Maciulis spoke to former European Union parliamentarian Marietje Schaake about the current regulatory landscape, a recent report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) saying as many as 40% of jobs globally could be lost or impacted by AI, and how that might give rise to unrest as we head into a critical year of elections.
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Fellow, Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and former European Parliamentarian, co-hosts GZERO AI, our new weekly video series intended to help you keep up and make sense of the latest news on the AI revolution. Sign up for the GZERO AI weekly newsletter to keep up with all things AI and find out when new episodes are published.
For more about AI at this year's World Economic Forum, watch our Global Stage discussion, Making AI Work for the World.
- This year's Davos is different because of the AI agenda, says Charter's Kevin Delaney ›
- How is the world tackling AI, Davos' hottest topic? ›
- Is the EU's landmark AI bill doomed? ›
- Rishi Sunak's first-ever UK AI Safety Summit: What to expect ›
- UK AI Safety Summit brings government leaders and AI experts together ›
- Singapore sets an example on AI governance ›
- ChatGPT on campus: How are universities handling generative AI? - GZERO Media ›
- AI regulation means adapting old laws for new tech: Marietje Schaake - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Explains: How will AI impact the workplace? - GZERO Media ›
- How AI is changing the world of work - GZERO Media ›
Sep 21, 2023; Washington, DC, USA; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits President Joe Biden at the White House. Zelenskyy is slated to pitch to lawmakers and President Biden on continuing aid to Ukraine as it battles in an ongoing war from the invasion by Russia.
Ukraine’s about the economy, stupid
Over the past 20 months, Joe Biden has framed US backing for Ukraine as, variously, a struggle for the future of freedom, as a deterrent against Chinese designs on Taiwan, and even as part of a fight to tame inflation.
But as polls show waning interest among US voters for sending weapons to Ukraine, the White House is taking a different tack: job creation?
The US has sent more than $40 billion in weapons to Kyiv, and last week the White House asked Congress for $60 billion more in Ukraine aid, about half of which would be for arms.
The Biden administration is now pushing lawmakers to make the case that this money boosts employment: After all, when Washington sends weapons to Ukraine, they’re made in US factories. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News that Ukraine aid had created jobs in 38 states.
Earlier this year, reports suggested that the US arms industry, which accounts for 10% of all US factory output, was having trouble finding enough labor to meet the surge in demand.
The geopolitics of AI
First is disinformation. We know that AI bots can be very confident and they're also frequently very wrong. And if you can no longer discern an AI bot from a human being in text and very soon in audio and in videos, then that means that you can no longer discern truth from falsehood. And that is not good news for democracies. It's actually good news for authoritarian countries that deploy artificial intelligence for their own political stability and benefit. But in a country like the United States or Canada or Europe or Japan, it's much more deeply corrosive. And I think that this is an area that unless we are able to put very clear labeling and restrictions on what is AI and what is not AI, we're going to be in very serious trouble in terms of the erosion of our institutions much faster than anything we've seen through social media or through cable news or through any of the other challenges that we've had in the information space.
Secondly, and relatedly, is proliferation. Proliferation of AI technologies by either bad actors or by tinkerers that don't have the knowledge and are indifferent to the chaos that they may sow. We today are in an environment with about a hundred human beings that have both the knowledge and the technology to deploy a smallpox virus. Don't do that, right? But very soon with AI, those numbers are going way up. And not just in terms of the creation of new dangerous viruses or lethal autonomous drones, but also in their ability to write malware and deploy it to take money from people or to destroy institutions or to undermine an election. All of these things in the hands not just of a small number of governments, but individuals that have a laptop and a little bit of programming skill is going to make it a lot harder to effectively respond. We saw some of this with the cyber, offensive cyber scare, which then of course created a lot of security and big industries around that to respond and lots of costs. That's what we're going to see with AI, but in every field.
Then you have the displacement risk. A lot of people have talked about this. It's a whole bunch of people that no longer have productive jobs because AI replaces them. I'm not particularly worried about this in the macro setting, in the sense that I believe that the number of jobs that will be created, new jobs, many of which we can't even think about right now, as well as the number of existing jobs that become much more productive because they are using AI effectively, will outweigh the jobs that are lost through artificial intelligence. But they're going to happen at the same time. And unless you have policies in place that help retrain and also economically just take care of the people that are displaced in the nearest-term, those people get angrier. Those people become much more supportive of anti-establishment politicians. They become much angrier and feel like their existing political leaders are illegitimate. We've seen this through free trade and hollowing out of middle classes. We've seen it through automation and robotics. It's going to be a lot faster, a lot broader with AI.
And then finally, and the one that I worry about the most and it doesn't get enough attention, is the replacement risk. The fact that so many human beings will replace relationships they have with other human beings. They'll replace them with AI. And they may be doing this knowledgeably, they may be doing this without knowledge. But, I mean, certainly I see how much in early-stage AI bots’ people are developing actual relationships with these things, particularly young people. And we as humans need communities and families and parents that care about us and take care about us to become social adaptable animals.
And when that's happening through artificial intelligence that not only doesn't care about us, but also doesn't have human beings as a principal interest, principle interest is the business model and the human beings are very much subsidiary and not necessarily aligned, that creates a lot of dysfunction. I fear that a level of dehumanization that could come very, very quickly, especially for young people through addictions and antisocial relationships with AI, which we'll then try to fix through AI bots that can do therapy, is a direction that we really don't want to head on this planet. We will be doing real-time experimentation on human beings. And we never do that with a new GMO food. We never do that with a new vaccine, even when we're facing a pandemic. We shouldn't be doing that with our brains, with our persons, with our souls. And I hope that that gets addressed real fast.
So anyway, that's a little bit for me and the geopolitics of AI, something I'm writing about, thinking about a lot these days. And I hope everyone's well, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
- The transformative potential of artificial intelligence ›
- History Of Artificial Intelligence - GZERO Media ›
- Be more worried about artificial intelligence ›
- Larry Summers: Which jobs will AI replace? ›
- The AI power paradox: Rules for AI's power - GZERO Media ›
- Can we trust AI to tell the truth? - GZERO Media ›
- Rishi Sunak's first-ever UK AI Safety Summit: What to expect - GZERO Media ›
- UK AI Safety Summit brings government leaders and AI experts together - GZERO Media ›
- Social media's AI wave: Are we in for a “deepfakification” of the entire internet? - GZERO Media ›
US job growth slows for a fifth straight month, but labor market remains strong.
What We’re Watching: US jobs report & new China, Afghan energy extraction deal
Jobs report: US labor market remains strong
The Fed’s interest rate hikes, designed to battle inflation, have slowed US job growth for a fifth straight month. The American economy added 223,000 jobs in December, well below last year's peak of 714,000 in February but still above expectations of around 200,000. The December numbers put the monthly average for 2022 at 375,000. A slowdown has been in effect since last August, but the labor market is still hot: 4.5 million jobs were created last year, the second highest since 1940. Such resilience likely means more interest rate hikes are to be expected. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate hit a historic low of 3.5%. The leisure and hospitality industry saw the biggest job gains, followed by healthcare and construction, while retail, manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing saw the least. President Joe Biden said the historic job gains are giving American families more “breathing room” amid the “cost-of-living squeeze.”
China, Afghan energy extraction deal reached
The Taliban have signed their first energy extraction deal. A Chinese company has sealed a three-year, $540 million agreement with Afghanistan to drill and extract oil from the Amu Darya basin in the north. The deal spans three Afghan provinces and will create 3,000 jobs. No country officially recognizes the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government, and it has been globally criticized for its treatment of women. Yet, the Chinese have maintained and strengthened their diplomatic presence in the war-torn country, which sits atop an estimated $3 trillion of untapped oil and minerals. Beijing’s presence has been punished by the Islamic State, which attacked and injured several Chinese personnel in Kabul last month. But with tensions rising between Beijing’s erstwhile South Asian ally, Pakistan, and the Taliban, whose offshoots have stepped up their attacks on the nuclear-armed Islamic Republic, we’ll be watching to see whether the new oil deal might convince the Taliban to halt their support of terrorism.