Abstract:
A senior Meta executive said that the coming "population collapse" means that society urgently needs to rely on AI to improve productivity. Tech industry leaders are trying to convince a skeptical public that this powerful technology will bring benefits to people's lives. Alex Schultz, chief data officer of Meta, said at the British Media Future of Artificial Intelligence Summit on Wednesday that the continued decline in birth rates means that the global population will be significantly reduced in 50 years.
“The world as a whole is not thinking seriously about issues like population collapse... We desperately need higher productivity.” He said, “How do we care for the elderly? What do we do to make the most of the existing workforce on the planet?”
The global population is expected to peak as early as 2064; at the same time, due to the impact of extended life span and declining birth rate, the working population will shrink faster.
Schultz’s remarks come as Meta is catching up with industry leaders such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and has invested billions of dollars in AI layout.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview last month that the company's new model MuseWonder has caught up with its opponents and joined the ranks of cutting-edge large models; the Muse intelligent agent for ordinary users has been downloaded millions of times since its launch in September.
At the same time, the market is generally concerned about the sustainability of the huge investment behind the AI boom. Meta announced last week that it plans to raise another US$95 billion to support continued increased spending.
In the United States, resistance to the construction of AI data centers in local communities has become one of the reasons why voters abandoned the current Republican candidate in Tuesday's midterm elections.
But Schultz strongly promotes the productivity dividends brought by AI: This rapidly developing technology is already "speeding up" the work of software engineers and also saving lawyers a lot of time - lawyers use AI tools to predict court trial questions.
He introduced that within Meta, AI has helped software engineers avoid tedious and tedious tasks such as data warehouse alarm monitoring. Currently, more than 10% of tasks in this scenario can be completed independently by intelligent agents without manual intervention.
However, he also admitted that not all AI applications can improve productivity, and some users just "consume tokens but do not produce obvious value." Even in his own team, less than half of the people can effectively use AI.
Schultz said productivity gains from AI are improving as barriers to entry for new models are lowered. He also mentioned that before OpenClaw became popular with vibe coding at the beginning of this year, he himself was very slow to get started with AI.
Regarding concerns that AI will cause mass unemployment, he expressed a different view: "Having tools will not eliminate jobs, but will only change the work content of the jobs." He added that productivity improvements will instead create new jobs.
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