Axios

How AI could help curb global labor shortages

In conversations with a slew of business leaders about the economic implications of generative AI, a recurring theme cropped up: that AI-driven productivity gains are the world's best hope to limit the pain of a demographic squeeze. As computers get better at doing jobs humans have traditionally done, the risk of mass displacement of workers is created. But the flip side is an emerging shortage of working-age humans in most advanced economies and a murky future for globalization, which effectively expands the global pool of workers. The big macroeconomic question for the coming decade is wh

AI's next fight is over whose values it should hold

There's no such thing as an AI system without values — and that means this newest technology platform must navigate partisan rifts, culture-war chasms and international tensions from the very beginning. Every step in training, tuning and deploying AI models forces its creators to make choices about whose values the system will respect, whose point of view it will present and what limits it will observe. AI systems' points of view begins in the data with which they are trained — and the efforts their developers may take to mitigate the biases in the data. From there, most systems undergo an

The news business faces a reckoning in 2024

A new report saying billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong has sunk hundreds of millions of his own money into an unprofitable Los Angeles Times underscores how desperate the news industry is to chart a plan for survival in the digital era. If billionaire owners can't make the L.A. Times or the Washington Post profitable, then the news industry has to ask itself: What can?

AI's road to reality

A middle road for AI adoption is taking shape, routing around the debate between those who fear humanity could lose control of AI and those who favor a full-speed-ahead plan to seize the technology's benefits.

US is leading "AI for good" push at United Nations

The United States is leading a new diplomatic push at the United Nations to mobilize all governments to support "AI for good and for all," according to US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Despite the need for new tools to tackle urgent problems like climate change, the richest and most powerful governments that back international responsible-AI initiatives have steered away from the deeply divided UN as an AI forum—until now. The US wants the UN to explicitly affirm that AI will be deployed consistently with the UN's founding documents—the