Two stories recently published in the Guardian’s Reworked series pose the question: who is AI enriching?
The first story details how the AI boom is leaving women out of the single largest engine of growth in the US economy. One visible example: Donald Trump’s all-male summit of AI leaders last week: not a single woman in sight as the president preached the power of “superintelligence”.
“We’re talking about who captures a major new source of economic mobility,” said Felicia Newhouse, founder of AI Powered Women, an organization that promotes women’s participation and leadership in AI. “The deepest risk is that a participation gap becomes a power gap.”
Read more: The AI industry is booming. Women are getting left behind
Across AI-related occupations, the median pay of men is $45,000 higher than that of women, partly due to the types of jobs men and women are more likely to have, according to research by LinkedIn: men are still typically hired for higher-paying roles in the AI industry.
When pitching investors, one female co-founder of an AI startup said she has found through trial and error that she and her male co-founder are more likely to get an investment if he does the pitching.
Another story in the series examines how dire working conditions can become under the pressures of AI and automation. Refugees in Kenya are completing tasks for foreign technology companies under bizarre and opaque conditions.
The stories of desperate remote data workers used to highlight the low pay and horrid content they were exposed to. Today, workers who spoke to the Guardian say they aren’t even sure they will be paid, as their compensation is tied to a so-called “reward” system that decides whether they receive payment based on the quality of their work. Many of the workers called the system unfair but also said with dismay that they had few, if any, other options.
Read more: ‘Someone else will do it for less’: refugees in Kenya are powering tech for dwindling pay
The workers in Kenya also expressed a desperation to earn any money at these jobs before AI could carry out the rote tasks they were assigned.
Contrast these stories of unequal benefit with Sam Altman’s recent remarks on a podcast: “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”
Altman was referring to the consequences of AI like the hack of Hugging Face or the attempted creation of bioweapons by would-be terrorists. Bad, to be sure, but lacking the moral outrage of human consequences.
.jpg?quality=85&dpr=2&width=650&s=03d6c459312bed88a81546e80ec2ef23)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.