Artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) impact on the jobs market could take up to 25 years to play out fully, according to Brad Smith, one of the most senior executives at tech giant Microsoft.
Speaking to Inside Business, a podcast from The Irish Times, Smith said: “So far we are not seeing AI displace a lot of jobs, but I think it would be a mistake to just assume that the future won’t create new challenges. We need to double down on giving people the skills so they can put AI to work.
“Really understand how jobs are evolving … and we’re probably going to need some creative Government policies as well. This is a journey that I think will be ahead of us for the next 25 years.”
Smith, who is vice chair and president of Microsoft, was speaking in Dublin at the International AI Summit at the RDS organised by the Government.
Smith reiterated his view that AI needs to be regulated.
“The power and capability of AI has moved ahead faster than safety. We need safety to catch up, and we need to take the steps to ensure that the benefits of AI accrue across the economy and not just to the AI lab companies on the west coast of the United States.
Microsoft president Brad Smith: Ireland ‘well-positioned for future of AI’
Listen | 19:07
“Right now, there are more safety rules for a carton of milk than for the most powerful AI on the planet. That doesn’t make common sense in my view. That doesn’t mean we should want regulation to stifle innovation or become bureaucratically heavy-handed, but we need a bit more of the rule of law to keep people safe.”
On whether recent warnings from senior tech executives that AI could kill us all, Smith said: “I always think we’re better off taking things seriously even if we think the risk of something truly awful happening is low.”
Smith said the regulation of AI would probably involve multiple layers involving international collaboration.
He expects national governments to become “fast movers” on AI regulation. “It won’t surprise me if it starts with incident reporting, a legal rule that says that if you create an AI agent and it breaks into somebody else’s network, that you have a legal duty to inform the victim of what happened.
“It won’t surprise me if Australia is the first mover or at least an early mover. They were one of the victims of one of the [hacking] incidents. Australia has a parliament that tends to be capable of moving quickly. It may be them, it may be someone else.”
On the State’s role in regulation, he said: “Ireland quite rightly always thinks about whether for each issue it wants to move at the national level or as part of the EU.
“The thing that gives me hope about Ireland … is that the Government here tends to be farsighted, tends to develop a vision, have clear goals and actually executes effectively.”
Based on Microsoft research, the Republic ranks number three in the world on the percentage of the population using AI.
“Some 49.9 per cent of the Irish population is using generative AI. That says a huge amount [about] how well positioned Ireland is into the future,” Smith said.