MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 55.03.02
AI-based automation increases income inequality
Category: Increased power concentration and inequality
Description
"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 [35, 45, 69], leading to widespread unemployment, and the wages for many remaining jobs being driven down by increased supply."
From A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: 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.
Real-world incidents in this subdomain
- Polish Radio Station Replaces Human Hosts with AI-Generated Presenters to Simulate Interviewing Deceased Poet Wisława Szymborska
- Fast Food Chains' AI Chatbots Failed to Assist Job Applicants with Scheduling Interviews
- Kenyan Data Annotators Allegedly Exposed to Graphic Content for OpenAI's AI
- RealPage Algorithm Allegedly Inflates Rents and Reduces Competition in Housing Market
- Amazon Flex Drivers Allegedly Fired via Automated Employee Evaluations
- Kronos Scheduling Algorithm Allegedly Caused Financial Issues for Starbucks Employees
How other frameworks describe this risk
Other entries from Clarke2023
- Risks from accelerating scientific progress
- Eased development of technologies that make a global catastrophe more likely
- Eased development of technologies that make a global catastrophe more likely
- Faster scientific progress makes it harder for governance to keep pace with development
- Faster scientific progress makes it harder for governance to keep pace with development
- Worsened conflict
- AI enables development of weapons of mass destruction
- AI enables automation of military decision-making
- AI-induced strategic instability
- Resource conflicts driven by AI development
- Increased power concentration and inequality
- Unequal distribution of harms and benefits