Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Risks and Opportunities in an Increasingly Complex AI World

On July 13 I participated in an online panel on Board Governance: Risks and Opportunities in a Complex World, sponsored by eCornell, Cornell University’s executive education unit. The panel was organized and moderated by LizAnn Eisen, acting professor of the practice at the Cornell Law School, and former corporate partner at Cravath.

In addition to me, panel members included Bill Priestap, former assistant director of the FBI, head of the FBI Counterintelligence Division and now founder of the risk consulting startup Trenchcoat Advisors; Noah Phillips, former commissioner at the FTC and now anti-trust partner at Cravath; and David Kappos, former director of the USPTO and now IP partner at Cravath.

The panelist discussed a range of topics that board members should pay attention to when considering risks and opportunities. Each of us foced on our respective areas of expertise. I discussed the potential business impact of artificial intelligence; Phillips focused on regulatory issues that are arising as AI is used in an increasing number of business applications, like the need for consumer protection; Kappos discussed the extensive IP and legal implications posed by AI; and Priestap focused on the challenges posed by an increasingly dangerous global geopolitical environment.

A recording of our panel can be found here.

The Era of AI Is Here: Why the Panic?

“The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out,” wrote technologist, entrepreneur and VC investor Marc Andreessen in the opening sentence of his article, Why AI Will Save the World  posted in his personal website. The article argues that not only will AI not destroy the world, but that it might in fact help save it.

While a computer sciences student at the University of Illinois, Andreessen was the leader of the team that developed the Mosaic browser in the early 1990s, the first easy-to-use graphical web browser that could be ported to a wide range of computers. Soon after its release in 1993, millions started using Mosaic to access the fast growing World Wide Web. After getting his degree in 1993, Andreessen moved to Silicon Valley and became a co-founder of Netscape, one of the first companies focused on bringing the fast growing World Wide Web to the commercial world.

The Mosaic browser and Netscape played a major role in the explosive growth of the internet in the 1990s. To give us a sense of the world-changing transformations we might expect from generative AI, a recent essay in The Economist cited the browser, along with the printing press as two major historical analogues to generative AI. Given his accomplishments, Andreessen is clearly someone whose opinions we should pay attention to when discussing the potential impact of generative AI, large language models, chatbots, and related AI technologies.

His article is organized in a number of sections. The first two sections give a detailed explanation of why he believes that AI can make everything we care about better, and why in contrast to his positive view, so many people are panicking. He then systematically discusses and refutes each of the major AI risks that are causing the fear and panic. He adds that the real risk is not aggressively pursuing AI in the US and the West in general, and proposes a simple plan on what’s to be done. 

Let me summarize a few of the key points in each section.

Data-Centric AI: the Systematic Engineering of Data to Build AI Systems

After decades of promise and hype, artificial intelligence has finally become the defining technology of our era. Over the past few decades, the necessary ingredients have come together to propel AI beyond universities and research labs into the broader marketplace: powerful, inexpensive computer technologies; advanced algorithms, models, and systems; and huge amounts of all kinds data.

Like the steam engine, electricity, computers, and the internet, AI will have a historically transformative impact across economies and societies. But, over the past two centuries we’ve learned that historically transformative technologies have great potential from the outset, but realizing that potential requires major complementary investments including business process redesign; innovative new products, applications and business models; and the re-skilling of the workforce; as well as a fundamental rethinking of organizations, industries, economies, and societal institutions.

In the early 1990s, for example, it was clear that something big and exciting was taking place with the advent of the internet and World Wide Web, but it wasn’t at all clear where things were heading, how to sort out the growing hype from reality, and the implication to industries, companies and jobs. As was the case with the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, there’s now a combination of rapid technology adoption, new standards-based open source infrastructures, exciting new applications, — some of which will turn out to be truly innovative and some rather silly, — and a speculative frenzy that is likely to end with the bursting of the current AI bubble.

However, while sharing many attributes with previous historically transformative technologies, AI is in a class by itself, especially when it comes to the kinds of concerns, fears and uncertainties it’s been generating.

The Economic Potential of Generative AI

In September of 2018, McKinsey published a report on the impact of AI on the world economy. The report’s overriding finding was that AI has the potential to incrementally add 16 percent or up to $15.4 trillion by 2030 to annual global economic output, — an average contribution to productivity growth of about 1.2 percent. McKinsey’s 2018 report was published before the advent of generative AI and related technologies lik large language models (LLMs) and chatbots like ChatGPT that have been taking AI to a whole new level in the past few years.

In June of 2023, McKinsey published, “The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier.” This new research study aims to take a first look at generative AI’s economic impact over and above the projections in its 2018 report. The 2023 report study evaluated the potential economic impact of generative AI by identifying 63 concrete use cases of generative AI that would lead to measurable outcomes. In addition, the study estimated how generative AI would affect the productivity of the global workforce by analyzing its potential impact on each of more that 2,100 detailed work activities across 850 occupations.

Not surprisingly given that generative AI is still in its early stages, the new report explains that “While generative AI is an exciting and rapidly advancing technology, the other applications of AI discussed in our previous report continue to account for the majority of the overall potential value of AI. Traditional advanced-analytics and machine learning algorithms are highly effective at performing numerical and optimization tasks such as predictive modeling, and they continue to find new applications in a wide range of industries. However, as generative AI continues to develop and mature, it has the potential to open wholly new frontiers in creativity and innovation.”