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The AI Index, currently in its ninth year, tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data relating to artificial intelligence.
The AI Index, currently in its ninth year, tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data relating to artificial intelligence.
The possibility that AI will automate most cognitive labor is worth taking seriously. How should we adapt to this transformation? I start from the perspective, articulated in the essay “AI as normal technology”, that the true bottlenecks lie downstream of capabilities and that AI’s impacts will unfold gradually over decades. If this is true, there are major gaps in our current evidence infrastructure, because it over-emphasizes the capability layer.
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The possibility that AI will automate most cognitive labor is worth taking seriously. How should we adapt to this transformation? I start from the perspective, articulated in the essay “AI as normal technology”, that the true bottlenecks lie downstream of capabilities and that AI’s impacts will unfold gradually over decades. If this is true, there are major gaps in our current evidence infrastructure, because it over-emphasizes the capability layer.
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: Diversity breeds innovation, yet underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this by utilizing a near-complete population of ∼1.2 million US doctoral recipients from 1977 to 2015 and following their careers into publishing and faculty positions. We use text analysis and machine learning to answer a series of questions: How do we detect scientific innovations? Are underrepresented groups more likely to generate scientific innovations? And are the innovations of underrepresented groups adopted and rewarded? Our analyses show that underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty. However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted: For example, novel contributions by gender and racial minorities are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities, and equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups. These results suggest there may be unwarranted reproduction of stratification in academic careers that discounts diversity’s role in innovation and partly explains the underrepresentation of some groups in academia.
