I came across a survey/experiment article the other day entitled The Hidden Penalty of Using AI at Work. The “penalty” in this case being engineers more harshly judging a peer’s code if they were told the peer used AI to help write it. The overall effect is one’s competence being judged 9% worse than when the reviewer is told no AI was used. At least the penalty was applied equally…

The competence penalty was more than twice as severe for female engineers, who faced a 13% reduction compared to 6% for male engineers. When reviewers thought a woman had used AI to write code, they questioned her fundamental abilities far more than when reviewing the same AI-assisted code from a man.

Most revealing was who imposed these penalties. Engineers who hadn’t adopted AI themselves were the harshest critics. Male non-adopters were particularly severe when evaluating female engineers who used AI, penalizing them 26% more harshly than they penalized male engineers for identical AI usage.

Welp, that’s pretty bad. Indeed one of the conclusions is:

The competence penalty also exacerbates existing workplace inequalities. It’s reasonable and perhaps tempting to assume that AI tools should level the playing field by augmenting everyone’s capabilities. Our results suggest that this is not guaranteed and in fact the opposite could be true. In our context, which is dominated by young males, making AI equally available increased bias against female engineers.

This is the sort of thing I will never understand about AI Optimists: why would you presuppose anything other than an entrenchment of the existing capitalist dystopian hellscape and cultural morass?

I don’t know if you have taken a moment to look around lately, but we are clearly in the Bad Place. If I had once held a hope that AI tools would accelerate breakthroughs in fusion technology and thus perhaps help us out of the climate apocalypse we are sleepwalking into, articles like the above serve to ground me in the muck where we are. Assuming AI doesn’t outright end humanity, it certainly isn’t going to save us from ourselves. Do you imagine the same administration that is trying to cancel solar/wind energy and destroy NASA satellites monitoring CO2 is going to shepherd in a new age of equitable prosperity?

Or is it infinitely more likely the gains will be privatized and consolidated into the techno-feudal city-states these tech bros are already dreaming up? Sorta like Ready Player One, minus the escapism VR.

I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. We are absolutely in a transition period with AI, and as the survey pointed out, the non-adopters were more harsh than those familiar with AI. But… the undercurrent remains. I do not see what AI is going to do to solve income inequality, racism, sexism, or the literal death cult currently wielding all levers of government. I’m finding it a bit more likely that AI will be used to, you know, oppress people in horrible new ways. Or just the old ways, much more efficiently.

Wherever technology goes, there we are.