𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 […]

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝟓𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬?
I am looking for some new ideas for my part.
“This free virtual event will bring together visionary researchers, executives, and policy experts to examine and discuss the profound impact of AI and digital technologies on productivity, business, and policy.” You can join us at https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-future-work-conference

Here are some of my earlier thoughts on the social impact of technology, especially AI, from similar gatherings over 2010-2020:

What if the nature of technology leads to an accelerating rich-poor gap that is not self-rectifying? Technology raises the bottom of the pyramid for all, and democratizes upward mobility, yet at the same time, transforms it from a “pyramid” to a conical spike — where an ever shrinking percentage of the population controls an even-growing percentage of an information-economy embedded with winner-take-all network effects and power laws.

So, as we bring the next 4 billion online, an ironic byproduct of erasing the digital divide will be a further acceleration of the rich-poor gap. Everyone will have access to the American Dream, writ large, but it will feel like the lottery. And, within many countries, like the U.S., the prior winners of the lottery run the lottery. This does not feel like a firm foundation for trust in the system.

Many of the new jobs in the new economy (like Uber drivers and Mechanical Turkers) are at the edge of automation, and thus, are ever so ephemeral against the unrelenting march of Moore’s Law.

Innovation thrives at the edge, with life flourishing at phase boundaries and at the edge of survival, in evolution and employability. This edge inexorably expands outward, as do the new employment opportunities. But can humanity adapt to ever accelerating change? Will it be exponential, as yet another refraction of humanity’s compounding capacity to compute?

AI in particular, will have profound effects:
1) Inevitability accelerating inequality in our current economic system
2) Concentrating influence from compounding power laws across fractal scales (individuals, companies and cultures)
3) Creating abundant opportunity in a post-employment era
4) Bifurcating technological evolution between classical engineering and iterative algorithms