An Optimistic Take on AI and Inequality

0:00Today on the AI Breakdown, we're talking about a very different vision for AI that's optimistic about how it might level the playing field. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to Breakdown.network for more information about our YouTube, our newsletter, and our Discord.

0:22Hello, friends. Welcome back to the AI Breakdown. It being the weekend, you know that what we have here is a long-read edition. Now, with this one, we're going to read an essay that posits a particular view of AI, and then we're going to look at how the science and evidence reinforces that potential optimism. The piece is by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times and is called, For All Our Fear of AI Dystopia, It May Help to Level Up Society. Gillian writes, Will.i.am, the Grammy award-winning rapper from the Black Eyed Peas group, has long mesmerized millennials with his music. This week, however, he grabbed the attention of economists, government ministers, and corporate leaders with a different tune, a vision for artificial intelligence.

1:02As debates about AI dominated this year's World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Will.i.am was among the loudest extolling the technology's putative power. That is partly because it is sparking his own creativity. This week he launched the first music radio show with a bot. However, there is another reason too. He thinks AI could pull marginalized people into the mainstream economy in future years, and thus be a tool for social leveling. In particular, he told me, in a lively, expletive-laden speech on stage, he thinks AI will, quote, break down barriers for people who have nothing in a near-unprecedented way.

1:36Is this just another bit of Davos hype? Many might think so. It is true that in recent months a host of economists have predicted that AI will deliver a big boost to growth. Michael Spence, a Stanford University professor, for example, thinks it will add at least$4 trillion annually to global gross domestic product. But this chatter about a putative productivity miracle usually occurs amid fears about rising social inequalities due to the displacement of jobs. Indeed, at the start of this week's WEF meeting, a survey from PwC revealed that a quarter of global chief executives expect generative AI to lead to headcount reductions of at least 5 % this year.

2:09Meanwhile, the IMF predicted that AI will change 40 % of all global jobs, and 60 % of those affected will be in developed countries. Editors note that's not exactly what that IMF piece said. It said that AI will change 40 % of all global jobs, and in developed countries that number would actually be 60%, slightly different than how it was phrased here. Back to the essay. More alarming still, there is a widening digital divide in terms of uneven levels of digital literacy and access to the technology across platforms, and one that cannot be easily closed by education alone. No wonder a poll from Edelman Public Relations Group shows that only 30 % of the global public want to embrace AI, while 35 % reject it.

2:47However, there are two key factors that help explain the alternative, more optimistic view about inclusion, espoused by Will.i.am and others. One concerns how AI might hit head, hand, and heart jobs, to cite British author David Goodhart, or those deploying cognitive, manual, and caring skills. In the 20th century, digitization primarily hit jobs done by hand, and the displacement of factory workers in the West by robots did fuel income polarization, even if other jobs were created elsewhere, as economists such as David Autore have noted. But the difference between AI today and automation in the 20th century is that the new tech is hitting head jobs, and to a lesser extent, heart rolls.

3:23As Josephine Tao, Singapore's digital minister, told a WEF meeting, that hurts the elite professions arguably for the first time. Hence the squeals of alarm from pundits, which might leave some annual workers feeling some justified shot in Freude, observes Tao, herself a former union leader. The second factor is that history also shows that technological revolutions undermine incumbents, says Andrew McAfee, an economist at MIT Business School. This is the case be they companies, countries, or economic cohorts. That might seem hard to imagine today, since the elite who have developed and deployed AI have become fabulously wealthy.

3:54But if the acronym is presented in terms of augmented rather than artificial intelligence, it is possible to see why hierarchies might yet be challenged by a tool that enables workers to execute complex cognitive tasks far more easily than before. Consider the jobs of writing legal contracts, advanced computer code, or medical diagnoses. Today, they are dominated by an educated elite. But if less educated workers can deploy AI to perform these roles in the future that will break some of the barriers to entry for headwork. That is scary for the elite, not so much for the others. Hence why some AI leaders, such as James Menyeka of Alphabet, argue that this is already sparking a more positive attitude towards AI in the developing world than the developed world.

4:33And why social activists, including Will.i.am, hope that putting AI tools in the hands of more disadvantaged children will be empowering. The cynic in me would retort that there are endless obstacles that could torpedo this. Wealthy elites are often extremely good at finding ways to protect their privilege, and at building professional moats. And one grubby aspect of AI is that its development to date has hitherto been dominated by elites in the West. This means that there is an urgent need to get wider participation in the creation of the technology, says Alex Sato of Alliance for AI, a lobby group promoting access in African countries.

5:03Without this, the tech will reinforce biases and hierarchies. Proactive, smart, and holistic government policies must be developed to bolster education and IT access, and to ensure open-source AI development. But here's the key point. If a rapper who grew up in a poor district in Los Angeles can dare to dream of a leveling upside for AI, other pundits should try to do so as well, even amid the dystopian chatter. I just wish the Black-Eyed Peas would create a song that urges governments to deliver the policies to support this. It might finally grab attention from voters. Alright, so back to NLW here.

5:35I actually want to talk about that IMF survey that Jillian referenced, because I think that it shows just how unknown the real impact of AI is going to be. So when it comes to those 60 % of jobs that they said would be affected in developed countries, the IMF said about half of those would see an augmentation and an increased productivity, and potentially gains in their income. The other half could be significantly challenged or even replaced. I don't know if the numbers are exactly half and half, or if that's the effective equivalent of an IMF shrug, because who the hell knows? Now, what we are starting to be able to observe is that workers who are less experienced gain even more from generative AI than their more experienced colleagues.

6:16For example, last summer, we got a paper from MIT that found that contact center agents with access to a conversational assistant overall saw a 14 % boost in productivity. The largest gains came from the new and low-skilled workers. As an MIT blog post about this put it, in other words, the workers were upskilled, not replaced thanks to the technology. It said one of the paper's authors, associate professor Danielle Lee, Generative AI seems to be able to decrease inequality in productivity, helping lower-skilled workers significantly but with little effect on high-skilled workers. Without access to an AI tool, less-experienced workers would slowly get better at their jobs.

6:51Now they can get better faster. Now, of course, this is just one study, but I think that broadly speaking, it does align with what many people have observed anecdotally. If you take the thing that you are best at, and a thing that you barely know, and use AI to help you with both. The relative improvement around the thing that you barely know is going to dwarf the relative improvement of the thing you know really well. That creates, as MIT observed, a real flattening, which does come with consequences for the people at the top. This could lead to a flattening of wages as well, and thus there might be a backlash in a very different way than we've seen backlashes before.

7:25The flip side, though, and the optimistic take, is that the increase of more skilled workers will simply increase the demand for stuff that skilled workers can make. This is what people like Sam Altman believe. That the reason that AI isn't going to be just an absolute jobs cataclysm is because humans don't have small wants and needs. We have an unlimited, voracious, never-ending, always-ready-to-enlarge appetite for everything. The logic then goes that the market will adjust to the reality of these tools being available, and more specifically, the capacity of people using these tools in terms of what can be created.

8:00People then will want more of everything. To put it simply, the supply of more skill and more intelligence will lead to more demand for the things that more intelligence can make. I find myself largely in agreement with that position. At the same time, I don't think it's quite a binary between that and a real chaotic disruptive process along the way. I think that even if that is the ultimate outcome, and not necessarily on a super long time scale, there still will be enormous disruption along the way, and policymakers should be thinking about that. What I'm glad to see, though, is more of this sort of optimistic take making it into mainstream outlets.

8:37For the last few months, the only optimism around AI has come from dyed-in-the-wool techno-optimists and accelerationists like Marc Andreessen. No disrespect to any of those voices, but they're not necessarily the voices that are going to capture attention among people that don't already largely agree with them. Now, I don't know if Will.i.am is the greatest ambassador either, but he at least represents something different than the Sand Hill Road set. Anyways, really interesting stuff. One of the more interesting things coming out of Davos over the last couple days. I hope you guys are having a great weekend wherever you are.

9:08Until next time, peace.

9:21Thank you.