“Artificial Intelligence and life in 2030” provides helpful insights into the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on the nation. However, this paper underestimates the impact that high level artificial intelligence could have on the job market and the economy.
	The article states “AI will likely replace tasks rather than jobs in the near term, and will also create new kinds of jobs.” Pg. 8 The article makes references to the mechanization of assembly lines and how we have seen in the past that machines have taken some of the more tedious jobs. Workers pursued training for better jobs and the overall quality of the job improved. The AI revolution is not like those of the past. AI has the capability not just to take over the blue-collar jobs but also to absorb the white-collar jobs as well.
	Most jobs that we refer to as high paying college degree required jobs are very mechanic in that, even if they seem complicated they can be broken down into a series of steps. The article provides a great example with the automation of 1st year law jobs. Often these jobs are just to sift through mounds of paperwork and determine what is relevant to a case. Now with machine learning this process can be automated. The AI can simply sift through all digitized documents and can, with high accuracy, determine what is relevant and what is not. These entry level jobs, although tedious, are where many law students get their careers started. AI has the potential to disrupt job markets by replacing entry level positions.
	The problem with having AI overtake more and more jobs in the manufacturing sector is that no matter how productive and efficient AI is, if there is no one who is employed and has the resources to buy the product the AI makes, then what is the point of all that productivity and efficiency. The article states “Since the 1990s, the US has experienced continued growth in productivity and GDP, but median income has stagnated and the employment to population ratio has fallen.” Pg. 38 The United States continues to produce more and more per person but unlike in the past when productivity would rise wages would rise, today productivity is rising but wages have stayed the same.
	The panel argued that we need to treat AI as a public resource and that its products should be spread to the population. The issue with this theory is that to develop an AI sophisticated enough to replace a human, it would take a tremendous amount of funding for research and development. If we let AI be privately funded, then the people who invest the money initially are going to be looking for a return on investment. To mitigate this problem, we need to start treating artificial intelligence like the space program in the 1960s. We need to poor public money into research and development so that the result is owned by the public and not private companies.
	The potential for artificial intelligence to devastate the world economy is a very real possibility. As we move forward we must keep asking ourselves will the end justify the means.

Citation:
Peter Stone, Rodney Brooks, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Oren Etzioni, Greg Hager, Julia Hirschberg, Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Ece Kamar, Sarit Kraus, Kevin Leyton-Brown, David Parkes, William Press, AnnaLee Saxenian, Julie Shah, Milind Tambe, and Astro Teller.  "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030." One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: Report of the 2015-2016 Study Panel, Stanford University, Stanford, CA,  September 2016. Doc: http://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report. Accessed:  September 6, 2016.
