The AI Divides Are Here
Nobody can fully predict what two decades from now will look like, but generative AI has already led to three important divides that are starting to shape society | Edition #284
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The AI Divides Are Here
It has been almost three and a half years since the generative AI wave led to the large-scale deployment of general-purpose AI models, and the divides that will shape the next few decades have started to become clearer.
For comparison, if you consider the advent of smartphones and social media in the 2000s, it took almost two decades for the social implications of their widespread deployment to become obvious.
Their negative impact on areas such as education, cognitive development, focus, reading scores, mental health, individual and social well-being, and political polarization was not fully visible in the early years.
Only recently, after the harm became full-blown, widely acknowledged, and often irreversible, have we seen a much stronger social, cultural, and legal pushback against smartphone use by children, unregulated social media platforms, toxic algorithms, manipulative design, and more.
And in 2026, we are still unable to address many of the negative implications of technological disruptions from 20 years ago.
Social media and smartphone addiction, poorer focus and cognitive performance, less reading, mental health decline, the loneliness epidemic, and lower individual and social well-being are among the issues that we might actually never overcome.
These consequences have become somewhat entrenched in our society. That is the post-smartphone, post-social-media society we have become, and there is no way back.
Technological waves are powerful, and the disruption-and-divide cycle occurs in every one of them.
Technological waves often lead to broad disruption because, as humans, we seem to strive for and be collectively drawn to what appears to be technological progress, like a blinding light. They end up engulfing everything around them, like a black hole.
Maybe it is part of Homo sapiens sapiens’ DNA and part of what, perhaps luckily, led us here, technologically speaking.
Every mass-scale technological wave also creates new divides. Through social, economic, cultural, legal, ethical, and philosophical ripples, it reorganizes society.
Some people will adapt, upskill, shield, regroup, find new resources, build support networks, and thrive; others will lose support, access, and resources, and end up left behind.
But it is not so simple.
At the beginning of a technological wave, it is difficult to clearly see the main divides shaping society, culture, the economy, or even the law, and how we can be on the side benefiting from it (if there is really one).
In the late 2000s, for example, many of us were simply excited by the convenience of smartphones and the connectivity enabled by social media platforms.
A new world was being born, and as humans, we are ingrained in our own material existence in the present. It is difficult to see 20 years ahead and plan accordingly, individually and collectively.
The same “disruption-and-divide” cycle is already happening with generative AI, and it will also happen with any form of “superintelligence” or cognitive automation that comes after it and reaches mass scale.
Nobody can fully predict what two decades from now will look like, but generative AI has already led to three important divides that are starting to shape society:
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