The End Of Upward Mobility – AI is coming for the meritocracy

The End Of Upward Mobility – AI is coming for the meritocracy noemamag.com

Artificial intelligence is coming for the meritocracy.

65 points•meep_meep_meep•10 days ago•44 comments•

#meritocracy #upward #mobility #ai #upward mobility #artificial #intelligence #artificial intelligence

44 comments

But this is a good thing for egalitarians. It offsets one of the most unfair aspects of the knowledge economy: that some people get to have much more fulfilling and remunerative careers than average people because they were lucky enough to be born smart.

PorciiVorbesc9 days ago

It's actually the opposite. People who are "born smart", will leverage AI to get more knowledgeable even faster, use it to learn new things faster, use it to churn through data to find patterns and opportunities, and use it to do labor for them, so they can make even more money than those not born smart, who will just use AI to ask it what's 3x3 and if the earth is flat.

toasty2289 days ago

Inequalities have been growing for a while now, either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it works, probably because your take is super naive and barely scratches the surface of first order effects while ignoring everything else

CM309 days ago

There is one thing worth pointing out here though. Being smart doesn't necessarily mean you've got the ability to make money from said intelligence.

Like on average it probably helps, but if your interests don't lie in what makes money in the current economy, then even being the next Einstein won't really change much. If you're a genius that wants to help teach people in a school or university, you're going to make a lot less money than if your interests lay in setting up a business or getting into finance.

AI can help you do things faster, but it won't make you financially successful if the things you're interested in don't have a lot of economic demand.

kelseyfrog9 days ago

It's actually the opposite and more complicated than that. AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.

TheCoelacanth9 days ago

Not at all. It destroys the only aspects of the economy that don't simply hand everything to the people who were lucky enough to be born wealthy.

rayiner9 days ago

Very little of the economy belongs to people who were "born wealthy." Most rich people these days come from upper middle class, cognitive elite families or small business owners, not generational wealth.

The most important number is that 50% of consumer spending is attributable to the top 10%. That's Google engineers driving up the price of everything from housing, to cars, to Disney World tickets. The income levels of this group has grown several times faster since 1970 than the median income. That directly hurts the middle class, which is out-competed for the same scarce resources.

eli_gottlieb9 days ago

You mean, it proletarianizes yet another stratum of skilled laborer.

rayiner9 days ago

Yes. People’s unhappiness about the economic trajectory since the 1970s is due principally to the growing divergence between skilled knowledge workers and everyone else. Normal people can’t afford a house in the middle class neighborhood where I grew up because it’s been overtaken by Google engineers, not “billionaires.”

prplfsh9 days ago

This is a weird article.

If anything - it seems that AI is _attacking_ the things the elite have. Elite people have private tutors/expert networks, now people do too for $20/month. What if the cost of education collapses to zero? It already sort of was - I learned to program on a ~$1,000 computer while Google engineers had access to $100s of millions of hardware, and it was enough.

Also, open-weight models are powerful and relatively cheap to run. So it's not like OpenAI can just close the doors (short of extremely strict regulation which seems to be a lost cause).

the_real_cher9 days ago

It seems to me that historically there was a high water mark for what people were able to accomplish on their own and all people, dumb to smart, fell somewhere at or below that high water mark.

My opinion is that our current generation of A.I. will just raise the high water mark for what's possible.

Until we have AGI, ASI, or Recursively improving AI....A.I. in it's current form is a tool that adds a constant to some peoples intelligence and an exponent to other peoples intelligence...and many people of all intelligences refuse to use it.

watwut9 days ago

It was not meritocracy. And the thing that cane for whatever merit based advantages were was not AI, but capture of politics by moneyed interests.

K shaped economy is not result of AI.

vannevar9 days ago

AI may be coming for meritocracy, but capital got there first.

kooi9 days ago

The effect if LLMs is not linear. It's metaphorically x^2.

Smart people will be more effective. Average people will remain average. Dumb people will become dependent on it.

atoav9 days ago

How dependent you are and how much value you get out of it are not linked as a metric. You can be smart and get a ton of value out of it, yet still be entirely dependent on it. Just like a sporty person can be dependent on a car since running a marathon to work each day is illusionary.

I believe all people will become dependent on it. And then the rent will be jacked up. Everything else wouldn't fit with the dominant capitalist incentive to always maximize extraction and suffering.

wannabe449 days ago

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