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Does AI Really Benefit the World Economy?

By Julian L and Jadon W



Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the lives of many people, from being a simple chatbot to a human robot. On November 30th, 2022, OpenAI – a non-profit AI research company that seeks to advance AI in the hopes of benefiting humanity – was launched. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, AI has the potential to contribute an additional 13 trillion US dollars to the global economy by 2030.


First, AI has been seen to be beneficial for our economy because of its ability to complete complicated tasks in a short time. For tasks like creating a PowerPoint presentation, drawing digital art, writing essays, and creating books, AI can do them in a few minutes, if not in a few seconds. This means that using AI to complete tasks will save us lots of time and effort and direct human effort to completing tasks that are not easily done by AI, such as emotional counseling and university careers and counseling. Another advantage of AI is its high accuracy in its performance, which is lacking among humans. This may be crucial to major global projects like skyscraper construction, space exploration, and airplane manufacturing.

Second, AI has the potential to create new jobs for humans. Although they might replace some jobs, they can also create new jobs for humans such as AI development, deep learning engineers, modern Pop Arts Adobe artists, Information Technology engineers, and many more. According to many research institutes, AI will reshape many more jobs than it can possibly replace, which is said to total to 2 million jobs in the United States of America.

While many jobs could be created by artificial intelligence, the loss of certain jobs is inevitable. Jobs like coding, software engineering, journalism, market research analysis, teaching, and accounting are mostly likely to disappear by the end of the century. In addition, some of the lower-income jobs could be replaced by AI as wages could pose a financial burden to most companies amid a time of high inflation. Those jobs were sought to employ huge amounts of people. And if those jobs were to be replaced by AI, living standards would significantly decrease for those at the lower end of the income bracket.


Furthermore, Elon Musk, the co-founder of OpenAI, has once stated that ‘AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,’ and that ‘it has the potential of civilization destruction.’ The developmental costs of AI could be very costly, which means that the opportunity cost of its implementation could be quite high. That is, the money used to invest in AI would be money that could have been used to fund programs like education, healthcare, and other welfare payments. If AI’s developmental costs aren’t lowered any time soon, AI could cause a lot of debt in countries and potentially lead to economic instability.

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