AI and Intellectual Equality (5): Technology Creates Stratification, Equality Requires Rules
TL;DR AI flattens old gaps while creating new layers of inequality. That is not a bug but the default path of technological change. Printing needed public education; the internet needed open-source institutions. AI’s equalizing effects will not complete themselves. The decisive arena is not the laboratory, but institutional design. This series has traced four journeys. First, AI lowers the threshold for basic skills while widening gaps in higher-order capability. Second, credentials lose signaling power while judgment earned through experience gains value. Third, outsourcing thought can quietly erode judgment. Fourth, applications become more universal while control over AI concentrates. ...