It's no secret that the overwhelming majority of wealth in the United States is concentrated at the very top, creating staggering levels of poverty and inequality that vastly outpace other supposedly "wealthy" nations. But while the current political system ensures that this upward extraction of wealth continues, AI researchers have begun playing with a fascinating question: is machine learning better equipped than humans to create a society that divides resources more equitably?

The answer, according to a recent paper published in Nature Human Behaviour from researchers at Google's DeepMind, seems to be yes—at least, as far as the study's participants are concerned.