A few weeks ago, I’d written about inequality and the role of meritocracy in shaping its future. Another related force, whose influence has been rising rapidly, is technology. I had written about it earlier in a post – Algorithms of Wealth – and my thoughts ended in at least three directions! At least two are relevant here. In the post, I had mentioned the abundance that The Second Machine Age promises and whether the disparity we see now is an inevitable step towards that. But I had also wondered whether any notion of sustained reduced disparity is a lost cause and that as we advance further, the gaps will keep widening.
A recent HBR article titled The Great Decoupling, based on an interview with the authors of The Second Machine Age, indicates that the authors themselves now believe in the second path – while digital technologies will help economies grow faster, not everyone will benefit equally. In my earlier post I had also brought up how I had hoped that the internet would be the great leveller, and my disillusionment since then when I realised that it created its own hierarchies. (on a related note, read)
The internet though, is only one aspect of technology. I can see at least one other manifestation whose impact will be felt, as this superb article aptly states, like the proverbial frog that sat in a slowly warming pot of water. That is Artificial Intelligence. Just so we are clear, I am not even chiming in on the incessant ‘robots will take over the world’ debate. I think we are far away from that, my selfish interest is in the more immediate impact. Even as advances in AI will make many jobs redundant, our dependence on it will grow exponentially. In the latter stream, it will actually help humans do their jobs better.
But I fear that just like meritocracy, and the internet, the access to this technology will not be truly open, and it will be just another factor that increases the divides the other two are creating. AI is indeed capable of profoundly changing mankind, (read The Three Breakthroughs that have Finally Unleashed AI on the World) in fact I’d say it is an inevitability. But the direction it will go in is in the hands of humans, for now. Whether we use it to approach utopia, or as a tool to further the interests of a select few remains unanswered. As always, it will not be one big decision, but a series of small decisions that define our trajectory. Either,
The lesson of history seems clear. Human values are biologically evolved adaptations, just like the values of other primates; but the way we interpret those values are culturally evolved, and this makes us different from all other animals. ~ Ian Morris
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