This article is part of:World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
- Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to transform the economy, as well as the lives of people around the world, ushering in the Intelligent Age.
- It’s important to pay attention to the disruption that AI could cause, particularly to those already left out of the digital economy.
- To fully harness AI, everyone needs access to the technology, as well as the tools, education and infrastructure that underpin it.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) has been stunning in its speed and impact. AI could add $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy annually, according to McKinsey. And while we often hear about the promise of AI, we also need to pay attention to the careers, lives and communities it will disrupt – including those who have already been left out of our global digital economy.
In the US, for example, Black Americans are 10% more likely to be working in jobs slated for AI automation. AI is anticipated to disrupt 4.5 million jobs for Black people and affect jobs in sectors that employ many women such as administration, retail and customer service. This would impose billions of dollars of economic harm on both groups.
Further, biases in the data used to train AI models can proliferate existing prejudices, including by reinforcing discriminatory housing, lending, hiring and pay practices. Economic gaps between nations are also projected to widen as a result of AI because wealthier countries are better equipped to more immediately adopt and benefit from it.
Our urgent task, therefore, is to prevent new social and economic gaps from appearing in the Intelligent Age. This can be achieved by empowering all people to participate and lead in AI. That includes building infrastructure that supports AI enablement for everyone, including education on AI tools and access to the internet and computing power.
Closing the digital divide
At a minimum, we must eliminate the existing digital divide. Despite the rapid proliferation of the internet across the globe, over 2.5 billion people still lack access to it. Nearly a third of the world’s population cannot take advantage of online services that are essential in today’s digital world such as finance and banking, education and healthcare.
Divides exist within developed countries, too. In the US, nearly 24 million people still lack access to high-speed internet. This prevents millions of Americans from accessing the services only broadband can provide and from fully participating in the economy.
Closing these gaps will give the next generation of leaders the resources, education and technical access needed to master evolving technologies. We must also double our efforts to provide education around these tools. A combination of critical thinking and technical skills is essential for interacting effectively with GenAI.
One model for closing the digital broadband divide in Black communities in the US, for example, is the work being done by Student Freedom Initiative (SFI) at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) – 82% of which reside in broadband deserts.
In partnership with Stats Perform, an AI solutions provider for the sports industry and a portfolio company of Vista Equity Partners, SFI launched an “AI in Basketball” course at Morehouse College in 2023. This has since expanded to other HBCUs. These courses provide hands-on instruction in AI-use cases, preparing diverse students to be leaders in this field.
Another notable example is the work being done at internXL, which offers opportunities such as free training and certifications in AI, data science and machine learning, including access to over 500 AI courses. It also connects highly-qualified HBCU students with AI experts and employers for internships, enabling them to gain practical experience in the field. This work is bridging access gaps and ensuring that underrepresented talent thrives in the rapidly growing and in-demand field of AI.
It is critical that we do even more to close these access gaps in the US and across the globe, so that everyone can take advantage of AI’s benefits. But we must also ensure widespread access to compute, or processing power, to run these new tools and their applications.
Using the example of smartphones, compute was made possible thanks to telecommunication companies updating their infrastructure to handle 4G, 5G and LTE. But many communities did not receive these investments, and now lack equitable access to these resources.
To fully harness AI, communities need to have access to the tools and infrastructure that underpin the technology: computing power, requisite energy sources, and large language models and other machine learning and reasoning tools. This would also enable more diverse inputs to be included in the data on which GenAI systems are trained, enriching the models.
Equitable development of GenAI
The racial wealth gap will cost the US economy $1-1.5 trillion between 2019 and 2028, and it is estimated that gender discrimination costs the global economy up to $12 trillion.
Instead of becoming a new economic wedge, AI could become a prolific source of generational wealth. So long as we take appropriate steps to prevent these tools from mimicking and reinforcing racial and gender biases, the innovation and economic growth AI would spur has the potential to generate prosperity for all.
With AI’s current trajectory, there will be three distinct waves of opportunity through which value will be captured. We are already seeing the first wave of value creation benefiting hardware vendors. The second wave will go to super scalers like Microsoft, Google, Oracle and other large companies that have the ability to broadly offer connectivity to compute. The third wave will benefit enterprise software vendors who provide AI and GenAI solution sets on top of their existing products.
These are the three distinct verticals on which we must focus efforts to enable equitable development and deployment of GenAI.
The good news is, unlike the digital revolution, we have the luxury of foresight. As AI evolves and established companies and new start-ups scale products, develop features and capture value at each stage, we must commit ourselves to ensuring everyone in every nation has access to the internet, AI education and tools, and processing power.
As we stand at this crossroads, we must think expansively and act decisively to ensure we unlock GenAI’s full potential.
(Source: www.weforum.org)
