MIT AI Risk Repository · domain 6: Socioeconomic & Environmental
6.2 Increased inequality and decline in employment quality
Widespread use of AI increasing social and economic inequalities, such as by automating jobs, reducing the quality of employment, or producing exploitative dependencies between workers and their employers.
- 55
- 12
- 6
- 3
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Human | 25 |
| AI | 18 |
| Other | 11 |
| Not coded | 1 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Other | 23 |
| Intentional | 19 |
| Unintentional | 12 |
| Not coded | 1 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Post-deployment | 40 |
| Other | 8 |
| Pre-deployment | 6 |
| Not coded | 1 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| 2014 | 1 |
| 2015 | 1 |
| 2016 | 1 |
| 2021 | 1 |
| 2023 | 1 |
| 2024 | 1 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Risk Category | 7 |
| Risk Sub-Category | 48 |
Risk entries
Browse and export all- Job loss/losses
"Job loss/losses - Replacement/displacement of human jobs by a technology system, leading to increased unemployment, inequality, reduced consumer spending, and social friction."
- Labour exploitation
"Labour exploitation - Use of under-paid and/or offshore labour to develop, manage or optimise a technology system."
- Societal destabilisation
"Societal destabilisation - Societal instability in the form of strikes, demonstrations and other types of civil unrest caused by loss of jobs to technology, unfair algorithmic outcomes, disinformatio...
- Societal inequality
"Societal inequality - Increased difference in social status or wealth between individuals or groups caused or amplified by a technology system, leading to the loss of social and community wellbeing/c...
- Political instability
"Political instability - Political polarisation or unrest caused by increased inequality, job losses, over- dependence on technology making societies vulnerable to systemic failures, etc, arising from...
- Economic
"AI is predicted to bring increased GDP per capita by performing existing jobs more efficiently and compensating for a decline in the workforce, especially due to population aging, the potential subst...
- Increased income disparity
"While AI is predicted to bring increased GDP per capita by performing existing jobs more efficiently and compensating for a decline in the workforce, especially due to population aging, the potential...
- Effects on the Workforce
"Rapid advances in LLMs pose three distinct sets of challenges for workers’ incomes (Korinek and Stiglitz, 2019; Susskind, 2023). First, they are likely to accelerate the rate of job turnover and disr...
- Effects on Inequality
"LLMs could potentially worsen socioeconomic inequalities (Capraro et al., 2023). Effects on inequal- ity are closely linked to the effects of LLMs on workers but ultimately depend on how the fruits o...
- Global Economic Development
"Many of the themes and challenges that we discussed above come together when analyzing the socioeconomic effects on developing countries. The workforce of developing countries may suffer from a retre...
- Labour market risks
"Unlike previous waves of automation, general- purpose AI has the potential to automate a very broad range of tasks, which could have a significant effect on the labour market. This could mean many pe...
- Labour market risks
"Current general-purpose AI is likely to transform the nature of many existing jobs, create new jobs, and eliminate others. The net impact on employment and wages will vary significantly across countr...
- AI-based automation increases income inequality
"It seems quite plausible that progress in reinforcement learning and language models specifically could make it possible to automate a large amount of manual labour and knowledge work respectively [3...
- Labour market disruption
"Economists view disruption and displacement in labour markets as one of the risks through which rapid advances in AI may affect citizens and reduce social welfare.170"
- Labor Manipulation, Theft, and Displacement
Major tech companies have also been the dominant players in developing new generative AI systems because training generative AI models requires massive swaths of data, computing power, and technical a...
- Job Automation Instead of Augmentation
"There are both positive and negative aspects to the impact of AI on labor. A White House report states that AI “has the potential to increase productivity, create new jobs, and raise living standards...
- Devaluation of Labor & Heightened Economic Inequality
"According to a White House report, much of the development and adoption of AI is intended to automate rather than augment work. The report notes that a focus on automation could lead to a less democr...
- Economic Harms
"These harms pertain to an individual’s or group’s economic standing. At the individual level, such harms include adverse impacts on an individual’s income, job quality or employment status. At the gr...
- Building an AI able to adapt to humans
"This category involves almost 9% of the articles and deals with ethical concerns arising from AI's capacity to interact with humans in the workplace."
- Human rights harms from exploitation of human labour
- Inequality
"More broadly, bad decisions or errors by AI tools could lead to discrimination or deeper inequality"
- Impact on labor markets (job loss and displacement)
"Currently, a significant share of workers (three in five) worry about losing their jobs entirely to AI in the next 10 years—particularly those who already work with AI. Some studies conclude that AI...
- Labor displacement - Economic impact
The literature frequently highlights concerns that generative AI systems could adversely impact the economy, potentially even leading to mass unemployment. This pertains to various fields, ranging fro...
- Impact on Jobs
"Widespread adoption of foundation model-based AI systems might lead to people's job loss as their work is automated if they are not reskilled."
- Human exploitation
"When workers who train AI models such as ghost workers are not provided with adequate working conditions, fair compensation, and good health care benefits that also include mental health."