Sorry Europe, but government regulation won’t save anybody’s job from AI
A European Tech Insights report by IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change (CGC) about the attitudes of Europeans towards artificial intelligence (AI) and technology shows that 68% of those surveyed want governments to restrict the use of AI to protect their jobs.
In short, for almost three quarters of Europeans, the solution to their fears of being displaced from their jobs by an algorithm is direct government intervention; something like “companies are prohibited from replacing workers with algorithms.”
Is this all we’ve learned from years and years of technological disruption? Do we really believe that, with some kind of regulation that supposedly “limits” that possibility, we would be better protected? Let’s think: what would happen if companies in the European Union were prevented, by law, from replacing workers with algorithms? Forced to keep people whose work could be perfectly carried out by algorithms that would do that work better, faster and with fewer errors, those companies would quickly become less competitive than those in the United States, China, etc. — where such limitations would not exist. As a result, these less competitive companies would eventually disappear from the market, replaced by more efficient competitors.
