AI使用效率差异不仅在人与组织间,更在交互层面由能否自动获取上下文决定。
The Context Access Divide: Interaction-Level Architecture as a Complementary Dimension of Agentic Inequality

- 提出'上下文访问鸿沟',区分AI自主检索与用户手动上传文档的交互模式
- 证明手动上传导致任务成功率随文件数和复杂度指数级下降
- 适合关注AI公平性、知识工作者效率与平台设计的研究者阅读
Sharp等(2025)将代理不平等定义为可用性、质量和数量三个层面的差距,但未涵盖更细微的个体交互层级差异。两名用户虽有同等代理访问权限,但若系统无法自主从其知识库中动态检索上下文,而需人工逐次附加文件,则体验到的AI效用存在质的差异。我们称此为上下文访问鸿沟(CAD)。对拥有数万份文件的知识型工作者而言,该鸿沟构成AI有用性的关键门槛:低于此阈值时,上下文整理的认知负担仍由人类承担,重演了本应被消除的低效。我们提出‘情境性’——即AI系统自主访问用户积累知识资本的程度——作为补充不平等维度。基于认知心理学中的扇形效应理论,构建概率模型证明,手动附件会导致任务成功概率随语料规模和任务复合性增长而出现组合式崩溃,而动态检索架构则在结构上免于此类崩溃。进一步分析了模型上下文协议(MCP)与检索增强生成(RAG)架构的技术基础及其对知识工作分层与平台治理的影响。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Sharp et al. (2025) introduce "agentic inequality" as a framework for analyzing disparities in access to AI agents across three dimensions: availability, quality, and quantity. These person- and organization-level dimensions characterize who can access agents and at what capability, but do not address a structurally important divide operating at a finer level: the individual interaction. Two users with nominally equivalent agent access may experience qualitatively different AI utility depending on whether the system can autonomously retrieve context from the user's knowledge corpus (Dynamic Context Retrieval) or requires the user to manually identify and attach relevant documents at each query (Manual Attachment). We term this the Context Access Divide (CAD). For knowledge-intensive workers whose intellectual capital spans tens of thousands of files, the CAD constitutes a qualitative threshold in AI usefulness: below it, the cognitive burden of context curation falls on the human, reproducing the inefficiencies AI is meant to eliminate. We propose contextuality -- the degree to which an AI system autonomously accesses a user's accumulated knowledge capital -- as a dimension of AI-mediated inequality that complements, but is not reducible to, the Sharp et al. framework. We formalize the CAD with a probabilistic model grounded in the fan effect literature in cognitive psychology, demonstrating that manual context attachment leads to a combinatorial collapse in task-success probability as corpus size and task conjunctivity grow, while dynamic retrieval architectures are structurally insulated from this collapse. We analyze the technical basis of this divide in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, and examine its implications for knowledge-work stratification and AI platform governance.
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