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AI Will Make Our Society Even More Unequal, Economists Warn
- unsupp0rted 3y agoWhat would be a groundbreaking great leap technology that wouldn't immediately result in articles that say "x will make our society even more unequal"? Viable AR/VR? Fully autonomous vehicles? Fusion power? Edit: I'm confused why this question is garnering all these downvotes. Could anyone please help me understand why this is controversial or disliked?
- sharemywin 3y agotor?
- unsupp0rted 3y agoNot exactly a "great leap" technology if most people have never heard of it and less than 0.01% of people have ever used it or benefited directly from its use.
- anonzzzies 3y agoI would say an (in practice; even if in theory it runs in 5 billions years or so) unlimited, low/non polluting power source that is easy to copy and roll out. Unlimited power solves many issues. But most leaps would not result in ‘x will make things unequal’ if the people making would give everyone access to them in an affordable manner. That’s why an unlimited source of energy has to be easy to make and copy and not be hampered by patents on hurdles that prevent that. Otherwise these articles are absolutely right.
- animuchan 3y agoBut the current generation AI is readily accessible to everyone, either for free or very affordably priced.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoTo be fair, the current generation isn't public. The previous generation is. The current generation is whatever is behind closed doors right now being tested by OpenAI and partners and quietly demo'd to big corps so they can prep. Say the version that can solve captchas with better than human accuracy.
- tivert 3y ago> But the current generation AI is readily accessible to everyone, either for free or very affordably priced. I think the "accessible to everyone" rubric is more complicated than the GP described. It's more like provides similar economic benefits to everyone. ChatGPT may be "readily accessible to everyone," but if it and similar technologies allow significant automation of knowledge work it will not provide similar benefits to everyone, since it will allow the elimination of entire categories of jobs. At least in the short-term "elimination of entire categories of jobs" benefits the ownership class and no one else. If these "AI" technologies also inhibit the ability of those masses of laid off workers to retrain an switch jobs to something with equivalently high wages, then they will make our society even more unequal in the long term.
- animuchan 3y agoTo me it sounds like an impossibly high bar to clear: even plainly giving a person $100 in cash, no strings attached, doesn't provide similar economic benefits to different people.
- gl-prod 3y agoIf you're talking about OpenAI, then nope, it's not accessible to everyone. OpenAI is blocking poorer countries from using its services.
- abecedarius 3y agoThere was a classic sf novel that started with the discovery of a matter duplicator which is able to duplicate itself. The society in the story world evolves to bring back slavery. Now, this was totally made up, but it's not too hard to solve the puzzle of how such a response could logically happen. You can basically always find an angle for the story you want to tell.
- tivert 3y ago> There was a classic sf novel that started with the discovery of a matter duplicator which is able to duplicate itself. The society in the story world evolves to bring back slavery. What's the name of that story?
- abecedarius 3y agoDamon Knight, A For Anything. There's a different story by another author where a similar machine brings on an economic depression, but I forget the title.
- techdragon 3y agoA patent monopoly on that hypothetical power generation device would have the potential do a lot of harm actually… Bankrupt many companies, causing the loss of jobs generally around the world and a potential expanding economic shock matched to the rate of production of the new devices Cause the complete devastation of smaller sized communities (villages and towns, very small cities) where the majority of employment is directly in an energy related resource extraction capacity or in supporting jobs maintaining equipment for or supplying services to these primary resource industries The lack of externally needed power supply like diesel fuel or surface supplies for solar farms would enable more people to take up mobile or alternative living situations (van life, mobile homes, camping with appliances) as the need for a house to plug in appliances is one of the anchoring factors in real estate economics which could be the best thing for people in general but also another potentially large scale economic shock.
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- hackinthebochs 3y agoThese low effort historical comparisons are really insidious. It turns out we can do better than an obtuse comparison of the present circumstance to past cases and increase our ability to predict outcomes. Yes, the current case of AI rhymes with past cases of technological progress. But the actual features of the cases show core differences that imply a very different result in the case of AI. Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. Productivity and wages largely remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate as the use of AI proliferates. This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling. This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down. While the rest of us are oblivious to the approaching calamity. The tech crowd with a boner for the supposed techno-utopia imagined in sci-fi needs to ask what costs we should be willing to pay for a chance at that future.
- triceratops 3y agoFusion power would probably make society more equal. Especially if a government cracked it.
- gentleman11 3y agoAI will be great for big businesses, alright for small businesses, and catastrophic for many employees. I imagine a gig economy where self employed workers need to leverage ai to be effective, and it becoming exhausting to keep up. I hope I’m wrong
- zamnos 3y agoHow much do you use Google Search throughout your day? Do you consider that exhausting as well? It seems only those that opt out of using ChatGPT or Copilot will be left to play catch-up and get exhausted.
- ihatepython 3y agoYou have an optimistic view of ChatGPT. What I see happening is the movie 'Idiocracy' becoming a reality. Who am I kidding, Idiocracy is already a reality. Just look at the comments here on HN.
- dmreedy 3y agoGoogle search replaced, or dramatically reduced, an entire industry of skilled labor around research and library sciences. There's a great old Hepburn/Tracey movie, Desk Set, that is a playful treatment of this. The concern is always that there is a finite amount of work[0] to go around in any given iteration of our current style of society. New kinds of work do get invented from time to time. Automation eliminates kinds of work. The two are rarely in sync with eachother and the difference is usually measured in human privation and suffering. [0]work being defined as, "something you can trade for food and healthcare"
- nlittlepoole 3y agoI agree with your premise but ultimately its the responsibility of governments to manage how society distributes what is produced. In the US at least, it seems most of the tension here comes from the fact that we've decided that if you are not doing "work", then you don't "deserve" food, shelter, or healthcare. Trying to stop automation always seems like a fools errand because there is simply too much incentive to automate.
- zvmaz 3y agoI can't speculate on how AI (which type?) will affect our societies, but to counter balance what is generally said about AI (that it will cause major "disruptions" in jobs and economies), I like what Chomsky has to say about it [1] (In a nutshell, according to him, the dangers of "chatbots" [sic] is not that they will take jobs, but that people will take them seriously) [1] https://youtu.be/av_0PhJdw9M?t=3133 https://youtu.be/av_0PhJdw9M?t=3133
- gumballindie 3y agoWe can already see anecdotes from people claiming chatbots saved their dog while some claim it helps their mental health. Instead of prompting google and facebook they switched to bots for their “research”. Both amusing and sad at the same time, but proof that Chomsky is right. Brace for folks doing silly things because a … chatbot told them to.
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- 0zemp2c 3y agothe people who trim trees in my neighborhood will still have a waiting list coders should be worried though
- mym1990 3y agoCoders who are no resourceful*
- triceratops 3y agoTree trimmers will make far less money with the glut of unemployed software developers entering the field. They're already proficient at inverting (binary) trees, trimming them is child's play. More seriously, if a huge chunk of white-collar professionals are made redundant, why would they have the cash to pay a tree trimmer?
- Floegipoky 3y agoI think tree maintenance is a great example of work that we should be automating because it's really dangerous and machines can do higher quality work than a human. The "tipping point" of when it will be cheaper to buy a machine vs hire a skilled laborer is unknown, but I'd be surprised if anything more than the most rote codemonkey programming was automated before this sweet spot of dangerous, skilled labor.
- sremani 3y agoEven though the concerns are genuine, the right answer is we do not know, and I actually think, it is the small guy that has less to lose from using AI models and may actually use it like a speed boat to attack the corporate tankers.
- AlexandrB 3y agoThis was also true of the internet itself, but eventually the speedboats became even larger supertankers by putting up new moats around their internet businesses.
- aigoochamna 3y agoPeople have been using AI and machine learning since the beginning of the web. Googles very search has been using ML for years. I argue we have already been using these technologies, they merely got better and more available.
- kingstoned 3y agoAI is the new Climate Change
- nico 3y agoIt’s not AI. It’s us. We can choose to make it more equal. We can choose to even things, and to work less. It’s us using the AI to do things. Let’s stop pretending like our hands are tied. We can build a better world if we want to. Don’t give me excuses about how everyone else will do something so then you have to do the same. Take responsibility for your own actions. Don’t fire people that you can replace with AI. Instead, re-train them to use AI to make your business better and for everyone to work less. Be creative, be visionary, be disruptive and be compassionate. Care about people over money. Mother Theresa said: “if you want to change the world, go home and love your family” Maybe this time, if you want to change the world, don’t replace people with AI. Do replace their work, but keep the people and find them something more human to work on.
- mc32 3y agoI don't know... whereas before the internet enabled people in poor countries to offer their labor to the international market at competitive rates, AI threatens to undercut their price advantage.
- nico 3y agoThe system doesn’t run on its own. You are talking about people making decisions about price or competitiveness. Luxury things are expensive, yet people buy them anyway. In fact they buy them because they are expensive. Let’s not pretend that price automatically triggers actions on people. We choose. Let’s choose to use AI to make the world a better place. Let’s not use AI to create more inequality. It’s a choice that people will make. Let’s choose better this time.
- xwdv 3y agoSometimes caring for people is ensuring they find better job opportunities elsewhere. Leave glowing reviews, give them warm leads at other companies, give good severance packages. But you do not have to keep them hired. You are running a business, you hire based on your needs, not theirs.
- tivert 3y ago
- t0suj4 3y agoAI (or any other breakthrough tech) will only exaggerate the difference set up by the tax code. As long as there is an incentive to keep corporations growing the divide will increase.
- SirMaster 3y agoWell, fortunately us peons can invest in many of these companies and come along for the ride.
- chrisbrandow 3y agoThis has always seemed like the most immediate, concrete threat of useful AI.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y agoThe ratio of things that need fixing is higher than the ratio of things actually being fixed. Over many years, it will all add up into a hot mess.
- RecycledEle 3y agoSomehow the greatest aid to teaching since writing is going to increase inequality. Wow, we suck at being human.