Nobel laureate economist Michael Spence Thursday cautioned software engineers that Artificial Intelligence can disrupt their role and render them less productive. He was speaking at Bengaluru's Azim Premji University during a public lecture series on ‘Artificial Intelligence in the age of uncertainty.' He said, “.so it’s going to be a huge productivity increase in software engineering because it’s (AI is) writing the first draft code. And I think everybody acknowledges that it’s already happening. And so, the question is, do we need fewer software engineers? And the instinctive answer sometimes comes back, yes. But then you think about it, we’re building entire economies essentially on software platforms. Seems to me at least something that you probably want to put a question mark over before we jump to that conclusion. But there will be disruption and distributional consequences (because of AI). And it will be important not to ignore them.” “Talking about jobs specifically, I’d be willing to bet a little bit of money anyway, that the number of people writing media copy 10 years from now will be smaller than the numbers that are writing now. If there’s a whole bunch of people taking newspapers and magazines and running one language and translating them laboriously in another, they probably won’t be doing that,” he also warned during a lecture at the Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Spence, however, allayed fears of AI creating an overall shortage of jobs in India. He said, “I think when powerful tools (like AI) are put in the hands of Indian entrepreneurs and technologists, they’ll go after different problems and start automating a whole lot of stuff. In a way that doesn’t make sense. What I’m trying to say is (that) the answer to this is context… you could probably produce a shortage of jobs if you systematically went out to do that. That is to allow the automation bias to run. My best guess is that that’s not what’s going to happen. But I can’t prove it.” The Nobel laureate also cautioned about the use of AI by governments and militaries, and called for the signing of a treaty among countries to prevent the ‘exploitation’ of AI over security matters. Spence lauded India’s shift towards digitization. “I think that the architecture in the digital economy that has been put in place in India, especially in the financial side, is the best in the world. And I think it’s going to be exported. India’s going to build other people’s infrastructure. I mean, the UPI model is, I think, the right model to be replicated,” he said.
