Artificial Intelligence And Income Inequality

While economists debate the extent to which technology plays a role in global inequality, most agree that tech advances have exacerbated the problem.

Economist Erik Brynjolfsson said,

“My reading of the data is that technology is the main driver of the recent increases in inequality. It’s the biggest factor.”

AI expert Yoshua Bengio suggests that equality and ensuring a shared benefit from AI could be pivotal in the development of safe artificial intelligence. Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, explains, “In a society where there’s a lot of violence, a lot of inequality, [then] the risk of misusing AI or having people use it irresponsibly in general is much greater. Making AI beneficial for all is very central to the safety question.”

“It’s almost a moral principle that we should share benefits among more people in society,” argued Bart Selman, a professor at Cornell University … “So we have to go into a mode where we are first educating the people about what’s causing this inequality and acknowledging that technology is part of that cost, and then society has to decide how to proceed.”

Source: HuffPost