Lately, it's felt like technological change has entered an incredible speed. Companies like OpenAI and Google have unveiled new Artificial Intelligence systems with incredible capabilities, making what once seemed like science fiction an everyday reality. It's an era that is raising big, existential questions for us all, about everything from the future of human existence to the future of human work.
"Things are changing so fast,"says Erik Brynjolfsson, a leading, technology-focused economist based at Stanford University. As he notes, this new wave of technological change looks like it could be pretty different. Unlike before, experienced and skilled workers benefited mostly from AI technology. In this new wave, it's the less experienced and less skilled workers who benefit the most."And that might be helpful in terms of closing some of the inequality that previous technologies actually promoted," Brynjolfsson says. So one benefit of intelligence machines is-maybe-they will improve the know-how and smarts of low performers, thereby reducing inequality.
But it's also possible that Al could lower the profit of the experienced, smart, or knowledgeable ones.AI could reduce inequality by bringing the bottom up, and it could also reduce inequality by bringing the top and middle down.
Of course, as Erik put, it's also possible that Al could end up increasing inequality even more. For one, it could make the Big AI companies, which own these powerful new systems, wildly rich. It could also empower business owners to replace more and more workers with intelligent machines. And it could kill jobs for all but the best of the best in various industries, who keep their jobs because maybe they're superstars or because maybe they have seniority.
The effects of AI, of course, are still very much being studied and these systems are evolving fast, so this is just an assumption. This machine intelligence could upend much of the previous thinking on which kinds of jobs will be affected by automation.
