A dress worn this week by Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, which bore the message tax the rich, set off a wave of debate over how best to address wealth inequality as Congress weighs a $3.5 trillion spending bill that includes tax hikes on corporations and highly focused individuals.
The debate coincides with the ongoing pandemic in which billionaires, many of them founders of tech companies, have added $1.8 trillion in wealth while consumers increasingly rely on services like e-commerce and teleconference, according to a report released last month by the Institute for Policy Studies.
In a new interview, artificial intelligence expert Kai Fu-Lee — who worked as an executive at Google GOOG, GOOGL Apple AAPL and Microsoft MSFT — attributed the rise of wealth inequality in part to the tech boom in recent decades, predicting that the trend will worsen in coming years with the continued emergence of AI.
We can see all of the internet companies, says Lee, the co-author of a new book on AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. Without AI, they would probably be worth only half of what they're worth because AI helped them monetize. When it's simultaneously making many people unemployed and making the most amount of people ultra-rich, he says. That is the wealth inequality problem that AI will exacerbate. Five of six largest companies worldwide are in the tech sector, including three companies with market cap over $1 trillion : Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
While some of the founders of tech giants are among the world's richest people, their technological advancements have not delivered comparable income gains to workers. Since the 1970s, technology has enabled productivity growth of 61.8% while hourly pay has risen just 17.5%, according to a report updated last month by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The World Economic Forum, host of the annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, found that technology had already worsened inequality in upper and middle-income countries and would eventually spread to the entire world. The trend of wealth concentration not only transcends borders but also sectors, since AI will replace White-collar jobs across blue and rote work, Lee said.
That will extend to all the other industries, he adds. So the tycoons there will be more numerous, and they will become even richer at the same time, because AI is developing human intelligence equivalence. Kai-Fu Lee has been at the center of AI development for decades, ever since he helped to develop speech recognition and automated speech technology as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.
Since 2009 he has served as CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a startup with over $2.5 billion in assets under management.
Lee says that in a recent interview to Yahoo Finance, Automation will create more jobs than it will kill.
Just in software, you don't even need robotics, says him. Then blue-collar work, visual inspection, assembly line work, waiters and waitresses and many of the jobs in factories and warehouses, the pickers on Amazon, cashiers at the grocery store, he adds. All this is a substantial number of jobs when you add all that up.
Why is the move in the next 20 years more likely to make more jobs than create. Nevertheless, over time it will create many jobs, he says.
According to members of Facebook board, the decision by Elizabeth Warren to allow Facebook to stop being too powerful shows that Big Tech is 'way too powerful'.