Is AI a scientific revolution or a new digital divide?

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is progressing at a pace that often exceeds how quickly educational, healthcare, public health, and policy systems can keep up with it, let alone govern, evaluate, and deploy it responsibly. In healthcare, public health, and education, it is broadly discussed as a tool that could benefit doctors, researchers, students, and decision-makers. But those benefits will not happen by themselves. If AI is shaped mostly by groups that already have the resources such as data, computing power, funding, technical skills, and policy influence, it will widen the same gaps it is supposed to close. For MIT Science Policy Review Volume VII, themed "The Geopolitics of Science Policy: How Science is Outpacing Policy in a Rapidly Changing World," MIT SPR spoke with three experts whose work spans global policy, academia, public health, and technology implementation around one direct question: "Is AI a scientific revolution or a new digital divide?"