The boom in artificial intelligence will not deliver more jobs but will mean higher utility bills for consumers, top economists have warned.
Experts polled by the World Economic Forum overwhelmingly expect artificial intelligence adoption to rise and result in meaningful productivity gains.
The World Economic Forum is an international lobbying organisation based in Switzerland, best known for its annual meeting of political and business leaders in Davos. The organisation regularly publishes reports on global economic trends and technological disruptions.
But the survey of chief economists across the public and private sectors casts doubt on the wider public benefit of the technology.
The findings will do little to quell a growing backlash, notably in the United States, against the building of vast data centres to process artificial intelligence computations.
Data centres are massive industrial facilities that house the thousands of computer servers required to train and run complex models. Many critics worry the technology will kill jobs and consumers will be adversely affected by the huge electricity and water requirements of data centres.
These sites rely on immense amounts of power to run their hardware and consume millions of gallons of water for their cooling systems, placing severe strain on local utility grids. Residents living near proposed data centre sites have increasingly protested against the developments, citing the potential for their local electricity rates to surge.
Data centre pushback
According to the survey, 78 per cent of experts believe data centre investment will drive a big share of global growth. But 79 per cent expect "pushback" from local communities.
The report comes amid growing concerns over artificial intelligence and regulation.
United States President Donald Trump has dismissed worst case scenario predictions for the technology as "a hoax", but calls for regulation are growing louder.
Technology bosses are trying to take the lead to prevent intervention and are even joining forces. Alphabet, the parent company of search engine Google, is working with Anthropic and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to allay concerns.
Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, a division of Elon Musk's SpaceX, which are usually bitter rivals, are even advocating stricter safety checks and a pause in the development of new systems.
Stricter safety checks
OpenAI sparked a global investment rush into the sector following the public release of its chatbot in late 2022. Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers with a stated focus on developing safer models, while Musk launched his own firm as a direct challenger to both.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, declared: "We Must Pace the Frontier."
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Instagram and WhatsApp owner Meta, and Jensen Huang, chief executive of semiconductor giant Nvidia, claim that artificial intelligence firms "face significant liability" if their products cause damage.
Meta is the corporate parent of Facebook, while Nvidia is the world's most valuable chipmaker. Nvidia produces the advanced graphics processing units that serve as the industry standard for training major artificial intelligence models.
Huang was one of the biggest industry figures at the King's summit. Governments around the world have been hosting high level summits to debate the societal risks posed by rapid advances in machine learning.
But some analysts are saying that the calls for a pause are not principally motivated by the desire to avert catastrophic harms.
Battle for supremacy
Chinese artificial intelligence players are reported to be only months behind Anthropic and OpenAI in the evolution of their systems.
The United States and China are currently engaged in a geopolitical and technological competition to dominate the sector, with both nations investing heavily in research and development. The Chinese government has prioritised artificial intelligence as a strategic industry, prompting Washington to impose stringent export controls on advanced semiconductors to restrict Beijing's access to cutting edge computing power.
One analyst said that tougher guardrails risk enabling the Chinese to pull ahead of the United States at a time when Beijing and Washington are battling for artificial intelligence supremacy.
A pause would allow the fuss to die down, allowing Anthropic and the rest to proceed largely as before.
