The PBS Frontline documentary In the Age of AI describes the moment when deep learning AI became truly and irrevocably noteworthy: Google built AlphaGo, a deep learning AI trained on millions of Go games, and pitted it against the world’s best Go player, Lee Sedol, beating him with a critical, unthinkable move. It was when Sedol conceded the game to the bot that everything seemed to start moving faster for AI. With this new win under their collective belt, AI engineers were spurred on to work towards bigger, better things for AI to achieve, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, however, it seems that AI may prove to be more of a curse than a blessing, and large-scale AI incorporation into our lives is likely a questionable move.

“Money, money, money,” as the great ABBA said. One positive aspect of capitalism is the search for efficiency, which I see as a valuable pursuit with a goal of making life easier for everyone. The immediately present negative aspect of the capitalist obsession with efficiency is the side effect of job loss. Kai-Fu Lee, in the documentary, defined efficiency essentially as “How can I do this with less people?” and explained how AI integration into workspaces is only making the rich richer and the poor poorer by increasing efficiency. A common response to the ‘people will lose their jobs’ protest is the ‘they can retrain’ argument, but the reality is much more complicated than that. People who lose their jobs do not usually have the resources nor time to pay for and complete educational programs and, as for company training programs, hiring managers will almost always prefer either a candidate with 1) experience and age to cut down training cost and reduce the time before an employee adds value or 2) no experience and fresh out of college so that they can save on salary, making it extremely difficult to obtain enrollment in a company training program as someone who lost their job after years in the workforce.

An even sadder implication of this constant pursuit of efficiency in the name of capitalism, a distinctly American thing, is that the fabled American Dream, another distinctly American thing, no longer exists. Exact wording differs slightly across sources, but all would probably agree on Britannica’s definition of the American Dream being the “ideal that the United States is a land of opportunity that allows the possibility of upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.” This country, on its current trajectory, does not, in fact, offer equal opportunity to people of all classes and backgrounds, regardless of work ethic and will to succeed.

Especially now with AI, efficiency threatens the lives of real people. Lee states in his interview that we see increasing “inequality of opportunity,” making it less and less likely that we’ll do better than our parents. This brings to mind the insanity of people who complain loudly about immigrants stealing our jobs, whether it be the Irish in the early 1800s, the Chinese who build the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, or the Mexicans now, who are the same people touting the virtues of the same American capitalism that seeks to replace them with code, which is certainly more insulting than displacement by a person. AI, in a large-scale integration into business practices in the US, will only catalyze the country’s already growing wealth gap issue.

In the documentary Pedro Domingo asserts that the growth of AI and its implementation into any and every aspect of our daily lives is a positive thing on the basis that AI adapts the world to you. I, being a somewhat lazy person, am always looking for ways to cut down on time-wasting tasks and make my life easier. AI was originally marketed to us under this time-saving/lifestyle-improvement kind of umbrella of products like Alexa, the Roomba, and Tesla’s self-driving cars, and I bought into it immediately out of, as the documentary points out, an inherent trust in the forward progression of technology improving our lives based on a long positive track record. It’s gotten to the point now, I think, that AI has become too invasive and is actively altering our minds. There’s something to be said for going through a little bit of hardship, and if AI becomes too good at adapting the world to us, we run the risk of leeching all opportunity for people to become mature, well-rounded, empathetic adults from our environment.