CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Is Chinese AI the Remedy to Inequality?

The world is leaning on China a lot these days as a counterweight to the lunacy of Donald Trump. No one has illusions that China and its leader, Xi Jinping, are champions of democracy, but at a time when the US president is gleefully bombing boats and countries, and debating which regime to change next, China is an island of sanity.

I’ve made the analogy to Stalin in World War II, which continues to be appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill had no illusions about Stalin’s USSR as a beacon of democracy, but they understood the essential role it played in defeating Hitler. China can play a similar role in protecting the world from the craziness emanating from the White House.

AI is one area where its role may prove to be extremely important. There have been many hugely overblown stories about how AI is going to take all the jobs and leave the rest of us unemployed and destitute.

This is an old theme about technology. Those of us who lived through the tech boom in the 1990s recall similar stories back then. There was even a boom in stories of technology-driven mass unemployment in the 1950s and 1960s. A famous novel of the time envisioned such a world in the not distant future. The fear that a new technology, in this case AI, will take all the jobs is not a new one.

Even if the prospect of mass unemployment is unlikely, there is a real concern that it will lead to even greater levels of inequality. Just to be clear, it is not the technology that creates inequality; it is the laws that govern its use. It’s unlikely that people would be........

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