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AI could split society into two groups: people who use it to think harder, becoming more productive, and those who let it think for them, losing cognitive skills. The result might be extreme inequality and a mental underclass.
AI could split society into two groups: people who use it to think harder, becoming more productive, and those who let it think for them, losing cognitive skills. The result might be extreme inequality and a mental underclass.
So, you may have noticed that the future I'm describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like 2 different species. So, the high need for cognition people, so these are people who work hard, they enjoy hard problems, right? They will get more and more productive, happier and happier. The rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass. So I actually think what this is, Neal, is I think this cognitive polarization piece is going to increase the wealth gap.
