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- Under-recognized work
"Without training data, ML cannot take place. Much of this data comes from paid clickwork (also called “platform work” [170] or “microwork” [558]), unpaid crowdsourcing, and unpaid user behavior captu...
- Job loss
"Replacement/displacement of human jobs by a technology system or set of systems, leading to increased unemployment, inequality, reduced consumer spending and social friction"
- Labor exploitation
"Use/misuse of labour to help train, develop, manage or optimise a technology system or set of systems, including under-paid and/or offshore"
- Inequality of wealth
"Because a single human actor controlling an artificially intelligent agent will be able to harness greater power than a single human actor, this may create inequalities of wealth"
- Direct competition with humans
"One or more artificial agent(s) could have the capacity to directly outcompete humans, for example through capacity to perform work faster, better adaptation to change, vaster knowledge base to draw...
- Competing for jobs
"AI agents may compete against humans for jobs, though history shows that when a technology replaces a human job, it creates new jobs that need more skills."
- Labor market
"The labor market can face challenges from generative AI. As mentioned earlier, generative AI could be applied in a wide range of applications in many industries, such as education, healthcare, and ad...
- Disruption of Industries
"Industries that require less creativity, critical thinking, and personal or affective interaction, such as translation, proofreading, responding to straightforward inquiries, and data processing and...
- Income inequality and monopolies
"Generative AI can create not only income inequality at the societal level but also monopolies at the market level. Individuals who are engaged in low-skilled work may be replaced by generative AI, ca...
- Usurpation of jobs by automation
"Eliminated jobs in various types of companies."
- Labour Displacement
"While virtual AI applications will likely displace certain types of human cognitive labor, EAI systems could significantly replace or displace physical human labor [90]. At a minimum, EAI will likely...
- Socioeconomic Inequality
"Along with displacing labor, EAI could significantly exacerbate wealth inequalities. Those who have access to or own EAI systems will be able to automate labor and perform many tasks significantly be...
- Data and Content Moderation Labor
"Two key ethical concerns in the use of crowdwork for generative AI systems are: crowdworkers are frequently subject to working conditions that are taxing and debilitative to both physical and mental...
- Ethical Risks (Risks of exacerbating social discrimination and prejudice, and widening the intelligence divide)
"AI can be used to collect and analyze human behaviors, social status, economic status, and individual personalities, labeling and categorizing groups of people to treat them discriminatingly, thus ca...
- Labor Market Disruption and Economic Displacement:
"Rapid automation enabled by general-purpose AI could trigger widespread unemployment across knowledge work sectors, creating skill mismatches faster than retraining programs can address. Unlike previ...
- Social Cohesion and Equity Disruption:
"Systemic deployment of biased AI systems could exacerbate existing social discrimination and prejudice at unprecedented scales, while unequal access to advanced AI capabilities may widen socioeconomi...
- Economy
"Economic disruptions ranging from large impacts on the labor market to broader economic changes that could lead to exacerbated wealth inequality, instability in the financial system, labor exploitati...
- Ability to automate jobs
"The ability to automate jobs by AI models and systems can lead to significant job displacement, economic disruption, and social inequality."
- Capabilities that enable substitution of humans
"The progressive replacement of human roles by AI models and systems can lead to societal disruption."
- Exploitation in AI development
"Outsourcing tasks like data labeling to low-income countries can perpetuate inequality."
- Increasing inequality and negative effects on job quality
"Advances in LMs, and the language technologies based on them, could lead to the automation of tasks that are currently done by paid human workers, such as responding to customer-service queries, tran...
- Increasing inequality and negative effects on job quality
"Advances in LMs and the language technologies based on them could lead to the automation of tasks that are currently done by paid human workers, such as responding to customer-service queries, with n...
- Inequality and precarity
"Amplifying social and economic inequality, or precarious or low-quality work"
- Exploitative data sourcing and enrichment
"Perpetuating exploitative labour practices to build AI systems (sourcing, user testing)"
- Workforce substitution and transformation
"Frey and Osborne (2017) analyzed over 700 different jobs regarding their potential for replacement and automation, finding that 47 percent of the analyzed jobs are at risk of being completely substit...