Economic guru Peter Morici told Newsmax TV that American workers shouldn’t view artificial intelligence as a job-stealing, robot technology but rather as a tool to make tasks easier and much more efficient.

“Artificial intelligence isn't going to be a robot knocking on your door that tells you ‘I'm going to take your job,’ but rather it's going to be devices and software that assist you in doing your job more efficiently,” Morici recently told Newsmax TV’s "Income Generation."

“It's Watson helping the neurologist or the oncologist diagnose eight tough cases in a day instead of four,” Morici told host David Scranton.

“It's the increase in technological advances and efficiency that are going to help us move forward,” the economist and business professor at the University of Maryland said.

“The next 20 years is going to be defined by artificial intelligence, but who are the big artificial intelligence companies, who are the companies that can monitize artificial intelligence?” asked Morici, also a Newsmax Finance Insider.

“It's where we were with automobiles in the early 20th century, with eight or 10 manufacturers and no one had yet emerged” as leader.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Morici also said:

• There probably won’t be another round of Trump tax cuts. “There isn’t going to be a phase two. Democrats are interested in raising taxes not lowering them,” he said, referring to the recent midterm elections where Democrats took control of the House while the Republicans retain the Senate.
• Steady economic growth is likely to continue through next year. “We can continue adding about 200,000 jobs a month by getting people off the bench - that is people who left the labor market coming back.”
• Democrats “put out a lot of good disinformation” during the midterm campaign, and even last summer, that recent robust economic growth was “a sugar high” that it can't be sustained and that it was just a brief spurt of demand from consumers having more money in their paycheck.
• With companies such as Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, “we're starting to hit a realization that several of these stocks have got real problems.” He said Apple has essentially sold iPhones and other gadgets to everyone who can afford and wants one, so it is forced to raise prices. Netflix is facing the problem of finding long-term “residual value” in their programs, while Amazon and Google face antitrust challenges.
• He doesn’t expect a truce anytime soon, but he is amazed at how everyone is using the China trade tariff squabble to pin the blame on everything. “Even people who grow tomatoes are blaming the steel tariffs for their troubles. That's absurd,” he said.

"The Income Generation" airs on Newsmax TV every Sunday at 10 am ET.

Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist. He tweets @pmorici1

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