Will AI Bring Plentitude or Further Imperil the Planet? | NOEMA

Indeed, the frightening reality is that if we don’t recognize and adapt to the implications of advancing technology, we may face the prospect of a “perfect storm” where the impacts from soaring inequality, technological unemployment, and climate change unfold roughly in parallel, and in some ways amplify and reinforce each other.

Frase argues that we are facing a paradoxical crisis of both scarcity (ecological catastrophe) and abundance (AI & automation) at the very same time. Under these twin pressures, he argues, capitalism is going to end. The question is what will replace it. On intersecting axes of scarcity/ abundance and hierarchy/equality, he maps out a 2 × 2 gri

But besides those issues are challenges seemingly harder to overcome. In isolation each is historically significant, yet taken together they can be viewed as threats whose scale is civilisational, holding the potential to undermine the ability of capitalism to reproduce itself as a system based on infinite growth, production for profit and wage-lab

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumpt