Do you think AI will ultimately make society more equal or more unequal? Why?
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I know of an employer that employs asian females almost exclusively in their production area. The job is mostly soldering through hole components. The pay isn't very high. There are about 40 people working in that production area and it's 95% asian females. The odd part is there are two leads and a supervisor in that area and they are all white. It really seems like race based hiring practices.
I’m currently managing a project where the Product Manager and the Lead Designer are exes, and my life has become a high-stakes telenovela. Every single roadmap meeting turns into a passive-aggressive debate about user flows that feels way too personal. The rest of the engineering team just sits there on mute. Should I take this straight to HR?
The work culture on my team is pretty bad. There is high burn out, lots of fighting, finger pointing, working 24/7. When I bring this up, the leaders mention that this is just how tech culture is. It is worse at other companies. I haven’t worked at another company so I feel like I can’t counter. What should I say?
Of course it will make it unequal - it already has and will continue to. It has minted more billionaires while killing millions of jobs, increasing inflation while the same billionaire class proposing cuts to social welfare. They are prioritizing building data centers over housing , drinking water and environment. We have 70-80 year old “leaders” running countries with no vision other than land grab, stoking racist ideologies, promoting divisive messaging and again, just catering to billionaire class. In my view, inequality getting worse is best case scenario …this will lead to societal collapse. There is no competent political leadership to influence anything or the will. And good luck counting on tech bro CEOs to do anything
AI alone will disrupt white collar, AI with robotics may disrupt many blue collar/service professions. Unless strong societal protections are established we will revert towards a more feudalistic structure - ultra wealthy and then everyone else. Universal Basic Income (UBI) while potentially necessary will further solidify this model.
What if you used AI to elevate your position and become closer to the ruling class?
AI as it stands today meaning Major LLM providers like Anthropic and OpenAi? More unequal. It’ll widen the gap between the haves and have nots. Right now it only benefits billionaires and CEOs who need a justification to layoff their workforce. It’ll also deskill and devalue our laborz
I'd say unequal. Yes, jobs in tech will become obsolete, but those people will pivot, pivot or become irrelevant (just like the typists of the past). Large companies will start downsizing because they can have a handful of workers plus AI run things for cheaper. I wouldn't be surprised to see a boom in the trades, eventually leading to an over supply. That could negatively affect tradespeople. And, mind you, this is assuming they don't start putting AI into robots that can work autonomously. Once that happens... even physical jobs would be at risk. Basically, if you work for someone else, making a living becomes more difficult as you now have to hope your employer values humans more than pure profit and bottom lines
Maybe we will see growth in companies with good human focused leadership that do things slightly more expensively for the benefit of society? Unfortunately not everyone is cutout for trades. I used to think people have the same hands and eyes and should be able to do the same things with varying levels of effort. I also believe professionals of all types were the experts. I was wrong, some people just can't understand how things work and I also think machines would have a hard time troubleshooting if it's beyond a standard yes/no sequence chart which a lot of technical troubleshooting is. Too many variables to replace humans anytime soon and too few people have the skills to do that kind of work. If more people understood how things actually worked there wouldn't be so many disagreements between those that think ideas sound good but have no clue the downstream affects, and the people who can actually see things play out and recognize the true complexity of a system even if they can't understand it completely and have the humility to ask the right questions.
Its already ruining jobs and the earth so it will continue to do so...
This is literally the most common and most VAGUE answer we get when we ask anything about AI. Funny thing is the people that say this can't provide any tangible data on what they think is getting "ruined". Ironically 10/10 of the people that answer this are AI illiterate & plan to remain that way because "change is bad". Ask yourself this: did the typwriter "ruin jobs & the earth" like your fellow technology deniers claimed back in the 1800's, or automated assembly line "robots that would take everyone's jobs"?? What about electricity, indoor plumbing? All technological advances that save us from being a 3rd world country. The resistance is more damaging than learning how to thrive in a new world. If you have some secret knowledge of how to save everyone's job and the Earth at the same time, how about letting us all in on it? If not, maybe learn something new & use your technical knowledge for good instead of just hiding behind a keyboard & complaining about it on an anonymous internet forum? As it stands, you're not helping anyone...especially yourself.
More unequal, hands down. Why? Because it's being developed and overwhelmingly employed by those who already have wealth and power. And while there's occasional exceptions, the rule is that those with wealth and power will use that wealth and power to guarantee their future wealth and power. You rarely get to the top of the economic pyramid through altruism, and once you reach the top you gain access to more and more tools to remain at the top and go even higher.
Then they all end up in a ditch
I'm actually not worried about "ultimately". I am, however, very concerned about the transitional impacts which will come hard and fast. Harder and faster than many people realize.
The way its heading now....unequal. It could make things more equal, but it would require making AI a public utility, like China has. But, even that would rely on data centers which are too expensive and resource consuming to justify. If we go along with the fever dreams of Altman, Musk, Theil, and co, it will be a disaster for everyone. The BEST outcome is that all products and media and "art" becomes mediocre because AI creates the average. If people are raised to use AI rather than create things themselves, nobody will learn how to make non-mediocre things. Plus, its uncontrollable when given too much autonomy, and often incorrect. Worst case, it will put us in a dark age by supplanting all human knowledge with whatever its masters want to prioritize. Generations of discoveries and human advancement will disappear as "truth" becomes whatever tech leaders think. However, this is not the only path that AI can go. Smaller, specialized, local AI agents run from your own computer could be very helpful in tasks. I think what needs to happen, is the tech billionaires need to bankrupt themselves when it is revealed to their shareholders that there is no way for this to be profitable ever, and the public HATES it, and its kind of shitty at everything and getting worse. But, I think they will weasel out of that somehow.
What we’ve seen so far makes me think that if we let it this will become down right distopian…
I think we are already there. I know many many people living right on the brink. All American institutions are now in shambles by design. The next few years are not going to be pleasant for the bottom 50%.
Unequal, because the wealthy will still control all means of production, instead of industrial and banking corporations, it will be tech, tech adjacent, and banking in control.
The only thing that makes or lessens equality, is humanity. AI did not build itself. It did not place itself in IT. Programmers built it. Mangers bought it. But fear not, the pendulum swings back towards humanity- as it always does. Companies are realizing they bought a bunch of hype and that maybe people, with their intuition and ability that greatly exceed artificial "intelligence," are the better bargain. If you must make someone pay for their lack of vision, it should be the companies that laid you off.
I think I would genuinely prefer death over the world being produced by AI tech bros. We either reverse course entirely, and soon, or "Deaths of Despair" will surpass heart disease.
There will always be differences in effort so there will be differences in outcomes.
Agreed but that is a different problem. Ai is taking away opportunity to make effort. Like it or not there are people who can only do jobs that aren't worth much either by choice or ability and they are usually the ones that need the most social help and we need this. One step up from there are a lot of desk jobs, measuring jobs, some creative jobs that required more ability and/or effort that often benefited from the human touch, like customer service, that can be replaced by Ai but nobody has ever said it is done better, maybe not even cheaper. If a job doesn't take much skill and anyone can be plugged into it an trained, you are always at risk, now more so than ever. Programming is a higher level highly skilled job that benefits from the human understanding but can actually be augmented by Ai but still needs human design and oversight. It sounds like it's already being misused by the lazy to replace themselves. I like Ai to check my syntax, grammar, and spelling for basic tasks, I don't ask it to do my work for me but the predictive text and phone keyboards tend to mess up what I am trying to type or say. It's a tool not a replacement for thinking. A lot of jobs exist digitally in sort of a fake world set up in finance and computing where people can do things without moving. That already removes much from the human experience. Some hope we will have more time for being creative and human without jobs but not having a need to do something does not make people happy. The entire human experience has been about survival and now basic needs are met and we create that purpose in that fake online world where many of us work but if we lost it, it wouldn't necessarily be bad. Now Ai can manage much of that and that sounds terrible to anyone who considers what that means. For people who still exist and work in the real world, they will be managed by Ai middle management, dispatched, told what to do, measured, by a computer somewhere and probably also replaced by a robot at some point. All our resources and electricity to go towards making products cheaper and selling robots and Ai bots to people who can't afford any of it because they don't have jobs. It will start at the bottom and work it's way up but Ai is the first disruption to really reach so far up the food chain while decimating the market for itself.
Y'all have said quiet part out loud. A.I. is the Dark Side. Evil cloaked friendly face. Tech Bros will be our demise. Sarah Connor for President!
AI isn’t the problem. The billionaires pioneering for it to replace humans are the problem.
Exactly!
Surely this can't be a serious question
Unequal, i already lost my job due to AI, after 28 years of expertise, i was laid off... so unequaly, the CEO and the board have returned home half ~150 staff, while maintaining the same level of income. yeah this is unequal. but the next level of unemployment will be the CEO themselfs and the directors... ai will do things better. that's how i see it. in Canada, since the begining of the years for many reason but not only that one, 168000 job loss... unemploment rate jumped high, and well... its not a good place and time to live right now. cant find a job, been searching for the past 4 months, disapointing!
Define equal.
Horse breeders and buggy whip makers didn't understand that the winds blown by the automobile were not something they could fight.
More unequal because not everyone will have access to it, and it amplifies biases. It also lacks critical thinking skills which is a disaster if people are using it for decision-making.