Economic Harms
These harms pertain to an individual’s or group’s economic standing. At the individual level, such harms include adverse impacts on an individual’s income, job quality or employment status. At the group level, such harms include deepening inequalities between groups or frustrating a group’s access to resources. Advanced AI assistants could cause economic harm by controlling, limiting or eliminating an individual’s or society’s ability to access financial resources, money or financial decision-making, thereby influencing an individual’s ability to accumulate wealth.
ENTITY
2 - AI
INTENT
3 - Other
TIMING
2 - Post-deployment
Risk ID
mit394
Domain lineage
6. Socioeconomic and Environmental
6.2 > Increased inequality and decline in employment quality
Mitigation strategy
1. Prioritize large-scale public and private investment in workforce development and retooling programs to transition workers into roles that emphasize human-AI collaboration, thereby shifting the AI adoption paradigm from labor displacement to augmentation. 2. Institute proactive fiscal policies, such as adjusting corporate tax codes to eliminate incentives that disproportionately favor the automation of human labor, and simultaneously explore mechanisms for distributing the economic surplus generated by AI advancements, such as progressive taxation or wealth redistribution, to counteract widening socioeconomic inequality. 3. Establish robust governance frameworks that strengthen worker power and agency, promote fair labor practices, and mandate transparency in AI-driven financial and employment decisions, ensuring equitable access to economic opportunities and mitigating algorithmic bias that could disproportionately affect marginalized groups.