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Silicon Valley entrepreneurs love to describe their products as "democratizing access", "connecting people", and, of course, "making the world a better place". That vision of technology as a cure-all for global inequality has always been something of a wistful mirage, but in the age of AI it could turn into something far more dangerous. If left unchecked, AI will dramatically exacerbate inequality on both international and domestic levels. It will drive a wedge between the AI superpowers and the rest of the world, and may divide society along class lines that mimic the dystopian science fiction of Hao Jingfang. As a technology and an industry, AI naturally gravitates toward monopolies. Its reliance on data for improvement creates a self-perpetuating cycle: better products lead to more users, those users lead to more data, and that data leads to even better products, and thus more users and data. Once a company has jumped out to an early lead, this kind of ongoing repeating cycle can turn that lead into an insurmountable barrier to entry for other firms.
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