On: Rapid spread of AI may worsen global inequality, UN warns

The news from the United Nations arrived today, a dry report warning that this new intelligence - this “artificial” mind - may deepen the gulfs between nations. They speak of a “shared framework,” of “responsible development.” I read the words and thought of my own ledger, of the tenants on the farm.

When John was in Philadelphia and I managed our affairs, I saw how a new tool - a better plough, a finer seed - could alter a man’s fortunes. But only if he could afford it. The neighbor with capital bought it and his yield doubled; the man without fell further behind, his old methods unable to compete. The tool itself was not good or evil; it was the distribution of it that wrote the future.

This is what the report names, though in grander terms: the adoption grows “unevenly.” I translate: the nations with the capital, the universities, the infrastructure, will harness this engine. The others will be left to purchase its products, or be governed by its judgments, without ever having a hand on its tiller. They will be tenants in their own lands, paying rent to a mind they did not help shape.

They discuss a framework, as men in rooms far from any kitchen table are wont to do. But who is in that room? Whose fields, whose markets, whose daily arithmetic of survival informs their “responsibility”? I see the blind spot as clearly as I once saw the one in the phrase “all men.” They build a system meant for all, but its foundations are laid upon ground only some of them have walked.

The consequence is already written, if one reads the household accounts of the world. The inequality will not merely be worsened; it will be codified, made efficient and inescapable. A new kind of scarcity will be created: not of bread, but of the very capacity to understand and direct the forces that now bake it. It is a sobering thought, that we might forge chains of such exquisite and clever design, and call it progress.