AI in 2031
Written in 2021 for AILA but I think it's still on the money :)
AI is going to increase the income and opportunity gaps in the USA by over optimizing systems for profit.
Meet Sophia who lives in a city in the US where there is good internet, cell service, even 5G. Whereas Isabella lives in the one third of the USA which has no, slow or very intermittent access. Where in ten years there are still programs to get the schools and hospitals online but the kids still have to sit in the carpark crashing the critical care systems while trying to get their homework done.
If Sophia our city girl is lucky enough to be smart, middle class, upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial, attractive and under the age of forty, then she will get a role in a tech company, because everything will be a tech company in ten years time with infinite demand for young, tireless, family free, naive twenty-somethings, who don’t realize how badly they’re getting screwed over by the system until they’ve been resignated. If she’s really lucky then she’ll be working on tech that is going to make the world a better place… before that very same tech company goes bankrupt, or becomes very profitable for a few, with a lot of lawyers, lobbyists and a giant carbon footprint.
But lucky Sophia has everything she needs from healthcare, to groceries to housing provided through her company authorized discount plans. Whereas an unlucky city Sophia is on Universal Basic Income but has to spend all day on her tablet navigating chat bots and phone robots trying to shop, or find a dentist. Everything is either forcing ads on her, or has been gamified so that she is constantly doing content labeling labor for our voracious need for datasets.
Isabella in the cutoff country regions can’t perform data labor, so she is likely to be batch transported into the cities for weeklong shifts of labor - cleaning, nursing, retail or restaurant assistants. With AR training and AI oversight - you really don’t need continuity anywhere anymore. And it’s cheaper to transport low city wage workers and stuff them into podcamps for a week than it is to fix the housing crisis or raise everyone’s wages.
But if Isabella is smart and studies robotics, biotech, or chemistry, then maybe with a grant, or thru an impact investment fund, then she can rent a disused local shopping mall, hook it up to a private satellite network and convert it into a lithium or rare minerals extraction plant, an additive manufacturing cell, a vertical indoor aquaculture, insect or algae farm.
I do believe that robotics can fix many of the problems that AI and the internet are going to exacerbate in the coming decade. The incentives and disincentives around communications and computation are converting control of data into profit for the few. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg for how our current AI will be incorporated into everything. And I think it’s AIpocalyptic.
But there are so many ways that we’ll also be able to deploy precise, customized and individualized changes to the molecules and materials of our world, that there are enormous new possibilities out there. And I believe that the incentive structure is different, because the costs and risks are higher, so we’ll be more vigilant.
You can see that I’m team Robotopia, not team AIpocalypse.
https://www.theverge.com/22418074/broadband-gap-america-map-county-microsoft-data