Malta experts: AI will cost jobs, but create new ones and reduce business costs

Malta’s IT Law Association (MITLA) released a white paper highlighting the need for better policy-orientation around emerging technologies.

The paper, which summarises a discussion held before MITLA’s AGM, calls for urgent action to address issues such as misinformation, education, and legal responsibilities.

Experts from Malta’s information technology and legal fields have called for nationwide policy and regulation of the coming dominance of AI technologies, in a bid to equip the island’s job market for sweeing changes.

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They said that unless the education system trains people to adapt to the new AI technologies, whose effects will displace jobs, they will be left out of the job market of the future.

“OpenAI’s ChatGPT has introduced AI to the masses and can be very useful as a tool to assist people in written tasks. While there are dangers associated with AI even in terms of job displacement, there is also a reality that AI developments will create new jobs that today cannot even be imagined. ChatGPT could also make up for certain skills shortages and make people and organisations to produce higher quality work faster and at lower costs,” MITLA said in its white paper.

The panellists who contributed to this discussion were Antonio Ghio, Gege Gatt, Daniel Vella, Kenneth Terribile and Deo Falzon.

However MITLA warns that although OpenAI began as a non-profit organisation, it is now a for-profit entity, “creating concerns that the company may ignore wider ethical implications in a race for profits”.

MITLA’s recommendations include the regulation of emerging technologies to minimise biases inherent in the datasets that feed them, as well as to prevent the abuse of machine learning to the point that tools like ChatGPT can be sabotaged or manipulated to give false, inaccurate or dangerous information.
MITLA also said there was a need to analyse the education system to ensure that students are being equipped with the necessary tools to adapt to emerging technologies. “Unless education is focused on training people to adapt to new skills and technologies, they will be left out of the job market of the future,” they said.

The lawyers and IT experts said there was a need for educators to be assisted to adapt to technologies like ChatGPT which may radically change the way homework and exams must be deployed.
And they also said legal changes would be needed to map out the responsibilities and liabilities of AI companies, to ensure that they are either held accountable for the repercussions of misleading information or that they give adequate warning to users.
“MITLA urges stakeholders to work together to ensure that emerging technologies are developed with ethical considerations in mind, and that the benefits they bring are balanced against the potential risks.

“MITLA believes that by taking proactive measures to address these issues, we can help to ensure that AI technologies such as ChatGPT can be deployed in a way that serves the public good, while protecting individuals, institutions and society at large,” the association said.