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Increased power concentration and inequality

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

Category
Risk Domain

AI-driven concentration of power and resources within certain entities or groups, especially those with access to or ownership of powerful AI systems, leading to inequitable distribution of benefits and increased societal inequality.

"Power and inequality: there are a lot of pathways through which AI seems likely to increase power concentration and inequality, though there is little analysis of the potential long- term impacts of these pathways. Nonetheless, AI precipitating more extreme power concentration and inequality than exists today seems a real possibility on current trends."(p. 9)

Sub-categories (3)

Unequal distribution of harms and benefits

"AI-driven industries seem likely to tend towards monopoly and could result in huge economic gains for a few actors: there seems to be a feedback loop whereby actors with access to more AI-relevant resources (e.g., data, computing power, talent) are able to build more effective digital products and services, claim a greater market share, and therefore be well-positioned to amass more of the relevant resources [14, 39, 45]. Similarly, wealthier countries able to invest more in AI development are likely to reap economic benefits more quickly than developing economies, potentially widening the gap between them."

6.1 Power centralization and unfair distribution of benefits
HumanIntentionalOther

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 [35, 45, 69], leading to widespread unemployment, and the wages for many remaining jobs being driven down by increased supply."

6.2 Increased inequality and decline in employment quality
HumanIntentionalPost-deployment

Developments in AI enable actors to undermine democratic processes

"Developments in AI are giving companies and governments more control over individuals’ lives than ever before, and may possibly be used to undermine democratic processes. We are already seeing how the collection of large amounts of personal data can be used to surveil and influence populations, for example the use of facial recognition technology to surveil Uighur and other minority populations in China [66]. Further advances in language modelling could also be used to develop tools that can effectively persuade people of certain claims [42]."

4.1 Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale
HumanIntentionalPost-deployment

Other risks from Clarke2023 (19)