The artificial intelligence era needs its own Karl Marx
reality. By all indications, AI will hit white-collar jobs hardest. Job losses are not the only problem that AI could create in an economy.
Daron Acemoglu, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, has found compelling evidence for the automation of tasks done by human workers contributing to a slowdown of wage growth and thus worsening inequality in the US. According to Acemoglu, 50% to 70% of the growth in US wage inequality between 1980 and 2016 was caused by automation. This study was done before the surge in the use of AI technologies.
Acemoglu worries that AI-based automation will make this income inequality problem even worse. In the words of Diane Coyle, an economist at Cambridge University and the author of Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is and What It Should Be: “An economy of tech millionaires or billionaires and gig workers, with middle-income jobs undercut by automation, will not be politically sustainable." In the past, democratic governments had initiated several steps to redistribute economic resources such as land to larger populations in their efforts to avoid the concentration of wealth in too few hands. As in the past, governments across the world have started moving to loosen the stranglehold that Big Tech has on defining the AI agenda.
The Digital Public Infrastructure initiatives of the Indian government are an example of large-scale digital empowerment. But the crucial question for policymakers is what more they need to do to manage the fallout of AI adoption, not just in terms of massive job losses, but more so the huge economic inequality that AI could result in. How many existing jobs will AI take away? Carl Frey and Michael Osbourn from Oxford University posit that AI technologies
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