Could Technological Change Solve the Problem of Inequality?

Today, a lot of people are making claims about how AI will be able to equalize many things by making it possible to have individualized teaching of many basic subjects, greater access to pre-digested information tailored to your demands, serving as a free research associate, democratizing access to dealing with bureaucratic drudge tasks, etc. And yet, we have heard these claims before.

The computer, coupled with the web, was supposed to have been a democratizing agent by bringing information to people’s fingertips while making easier the solution of semi-technical tasks such as creating and filling out business forms, doing a large number of advanced calculations without need of supplementary equipment, access to orders of magnitude more books and papers than any physical library contained, cheap access to music, and videos, as well as promoting learning through recordings of classes in many subjects from some of the most renowned universities in the world. Etc., etc. This is eerily similar to many of the more modest promises made for the invention of movies or the phonograph, and likely goes back to the earliest tools and innovations such as the ax, the wheel, writing, and paper.

Yet most of the time, while these innovations did revolutionize the world, they merely changed the channels through which inequality flowed. The winners and losers from these changes shifted quite a bit, but often a new elite or parts of the elite benefited even more relative to those less fortunately impacted by the change.

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