Microsoft economist: Risk from ‘bad actors’ using AI outweighs potential job losses

Microsoft chief economist Michael Schwarz on Wednesday warned the potential risk of “bad actors” using artificial intelligence (AI) should be more concerning than the possible loss of human jobs to the rapidly emerging tech. 

“I’m quite confident that, yes, AI will be used by bad actors. And yes, it will cause real damage,” Schwarz said at an event hosted by the Word Economic Forum, adding, “And yes, we have to be very careful and very vigilant to avoid that by all means possible.”

“We have to put safeguards; I think people who worry about AI taking away jobs are paranoid,” he said. “I don’t think people should be worried too much about it. It’s a good thing when the AI makes us more productive. I think we should be worrying a lot more about AI being used by bad actors to cause damage.”

The comments come amid growing concern about quickly developing artificial intelligence technologies and worries that AI could replace human workers in some sectors and jobs.

Earlier this week, a top AI scientist resigned from Google and sounded alarms about the potential dangers of the tech he helped develop.

“Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be,” he said about the chatbots.

Schwartz on Wednesday warned that before AI comes for human jobs, “it could certainly do a lot of damage in the hands of spammers, people who want to manipulate elections and so on and so forth.”