Will AI Make the Poor Poorer? ft. Siqi Chen

This transcript features a conversation between Cindy and Siqi (the founder of Runway) on AirChat.

Cindy: I’d be concerned if this AI revolution is only gonna widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

Siqi: How would you feel Cindy, if it did widen the gap between rich and poor but also made the poor a lot richer?

Cindy: I think it depends on your definition of the situation and also the time frame. In the long term, I’d like to draw a parallelism with the Industrial Revolution. I think overall people’s standard of living will increase, but in the short term, say in the next one or two decades, people already with a lot of resources, can invest a lot of capital in AI and leverage what they already have, whereas the poor lose jobs and they don’t have any advantages.

Siqi: The reason why I asked the original question is that seems to me to be a different situation than a widening gap between rich and poor where the people who have advantages that can leverage advantages. That seems like a good thing. We want people to be richer and the problem that we want to prevent is actually we don’t want the poor to become poorer. We want the poor to become more rich. And that is a real risk you want to mitigate against AI.

I’m just always kind of sensitive to this idea that the gap between rich and poor is the thing that we want to optimize against because there are many ways to close that gap and when time tested, the way that we have historically tried to close that gap is by just make everyone poorer and that seems to be morally bad and has led to some bad outcomes.

Cindy: Now my question would be how can we mitigate the problem to prevent the poor from being more poor in an AI revolution? What are the practical short-term solutions?

Siqi: I guess I’m not yet entirely convinced that the poor getting poorer is even an inevitable short-term consequence of an AGI Revolution scenario. It could early be the case for example that because AGI exists, the basic goods that have utility, things like food and education will become abundant and free in the same way that plastic bags or chairs are made extremely affordable through mass production and IKEA. And so in that world, the poor may actually become richer immediately.

The other factor here is which jobs actually get displaced first right? And if you were to rewind say 10, 20 years ago, no one would have probably guessed that the first jobs that are at risk are going to be artists and engineers right? As for applied AI, those are the two things that we have co-pilots to increase the productivity of engineers and generate art for us that would not have been your guess. Your guess would have probably been a truck driver for example or a factory worker. But if you look at the way it’s evolving probably one of the last jobs to go is gonna be a plumber you know traditional manual labor type of jobs that are not knowledge jobs which are today highly paid.

So the way the AI revolution might play out it might be the quite reverse and so I’m not sure that it’s a given quite yet. But if it were I think the way AI will produce the cost of basic goods is the way in which the poor is unlikely to become poorer.

Cindy: If I have to play that person and dig deeper, I would say the artists and engineers especially artists are not necessarily rich. For the context, my audience, a lot of them are artists or people who work in the office but do not necessarily have advantages so it would be really helpful if they could have some advice too.

Siqi: I think two things. One is I personally believe that a lot of the reasons why people are worried about poverty in the AGI world in a good case outcome that I’m optimistic about will no longer exist. Right when we’re afraid of poverty what we’re afraid of is not being able to eat, not being able to afford a good education, not being able to have kids, sort of not being able to afford healthcare, the basic necessities of life. Those are likely to become abundant and be available for basically free.

Do you know what money and being rich mean in AGI World and how do you become rich where the sort of productive utility becomes freely available and automated? My personal belief is that the things that become valuable in that world are the equivalent of luxury goods. And so you know if you imagine we live in a world where you could go to an equivalent McDonald’s and it costs like 25 cents and, for the 25 cents, you can get a meal as pleasurable as high quality as a meal that you get in French Laundry. What do humans do and what is valuable?

I think the things that become valuable are the things that are created by human beings that serve as luxury goods that serve as a way of signaling status. So things like an approvably home-cooked meal by a chef or a piece of writing that is provably not written by AI or with any AI assistance or a painting or a handmade crafted bag equivalent of a Birkin bag. So things that other people desire in order to be able to better status signal are gonna be things that are valuable and that’s what I think artists or really any other kind of person should focus on.

What can you build in this new AGI world that helps people invent and play new status games is my personal belief.

Cindy: Basically we will be living in a better world where AIs work for us assuming no AI takes over.

For those who are watching this video, do you think AI will lead to even worse wealth inequality? Leave your comment below.