Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo recently made the news for defeating the world’s top Go contender, Ke Jie, at a game of Go. As the creators of the AIphaGo retired their AI as the undefeated champ of Go, they expressed their excitement at the next great thing their AI could accomplish. They named curing diseases and inventing new materials as some of the possibilities.

While many in the tech world celebrate the existence of such a breakthrough program, I shuddered when I read on The Guardian that Ke Jie had described his AI contender as ‘godlike’.

At the start of my Masters program, I interviewed an AI professor for an article I was writing on autonomous weapons. The professor made it clear that it wasn’t a question of whether machines would take over the world, it was a question of when. “Definitely in the next 50 years”, he said. I fear the success of a deep learning AI program like AlphaGo has just shortened the timeline.

Elon Musk warned in February that humans will become irrelevant unless we find a way to merge ourselves with computers.  Musk has since started a company, Neuralink, to develop technology that can connect the human brain to a computer.

As tech companies scramble towards the much prophesized eventuality, we move closer and closer towards a world where power and wealth is concentrated within the owners of technology. I said to my husband the other day, “it’s not the robots I’m afraid of. It’s the humans who’d own the robots, I’m afraid of”.

Karl Marx wrote in his manifesto about the proletariat (working class) and the bourgeoisie (landowners). The new bourgeoisie, Mr Marx, may just be technology-owners. And the new proletariat, unfortunately, may not even have a chance to work for a wage. For tech-owners are displacing their jobs with robots!

Steven Mnuchin was roasted by Larry Summers in an FT blog post when the former dismissed a question by reporters earlier this year on the possibility of machines displacing jobs. Mnuchin had said it was something that was, I quote, “very far away”, and not even on his radar.

Summers pointed out that driverless cars are expected to replace millions of driving jobs within the next 15 years. Indeed, the technology for autonomous vehicles already exists.

In response to the massive job displacement effects, ideas have been floating around in places like the World Economic Forum on how governments can address the potential social problems.

One suggestion making its rounds is to re-train displaced workers to do new kinds of work. Work that machines can’t do. It really isn’t so simple. If it were, those workers would have voluntarily sought re-training to be in those better paying jobs pre-displacement.

Bill Gates recommended that a robot tax be imposed to redistribute wealth. I think this is a great idea. But I am sceptical that governments will move fast enough or have the political will to impose such a tax. Countries today compete for MNCs by lowering their corporate tax rates. Would countries suddenly decide to co-operate on a robot tax?

Assuming governments successfully extract more tax dollars from corporates, some have proposed that countries pay a living wage to citizens regardless of their employment status. This would afford food, shelter and other basic amenities like education and healthcare. (This sounds like a handout to me.) In this scenario, would majority of the population end up living at the poverty line?

In an Oxfam report released in January this year, data revealed that the top 1% of Australians own as much wealth as 70% of Australians. This problem is not unique to Australia. The report highlights that just 8 men in the world today own as much wealth as 3.6 billion people. Despite the glaring inequality, has there been any drastic measures to change the way the world functions? Not really.

You see, the rich are always happy to live amongst the poor. Why then would it be any different once AIphaGo can cure diseases and invent things?

What will likely happen is the unaffected people would come up with a term, as we did with ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘the homeless’ to label the people who have been displaced. For now, they can borrow my term, ‘the displaced’. The displaced would appear on the news, their plight will be discussed in parliament and on Q&A. People will argue that bigger hand-outs should be given. Some will be against the hand-outs and ask for the displaced to be re-trained. All this time, the displaced would be living in poverty.

All we have to fall back on in the end, is democracy. Hopefully when enough people join the displaced, governments will begin to act in the voter majority’s interest.