Should economists be more concerned about AI?
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Worry over automation destroying jobs is almost as old as automation itself. Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. Now, that of course, doesn't mean that this is some immutable law of the universe that automation will never destroy jobs. But it does mean we should look very skeptically at all the hand wringing over the impending robot job stealing.
It's also important to note that this result is global, not local. The employment situation in the US is obviously different today than it was in the 70s. That may well be due to technology / automation. But jobs haven't been destroyed, they've just moved to different places.
The problem with your Deans teaching is that it's not not just physical labour but intellectual capacity.
And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans.
If we reach the point where AI can do all human jobs better than humans, that would put us firmly in a post-scarcity world, where humans no longer need to work jobs at all.
No job require all human skills. Most jobs requires only subsets of human skills.
> it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans
But we necessarily can't reach the point where AI can do all human jobs without having completely general human-level (or beyond-human-level) AI.
Until then, AI can only replace a subset of human jobs, and I've seen many convincing arguments (including analogies to past advances) that the net gain will provide more (and better) opportunities.
False. At best 40% are - and given that a full-time worker has only one job and a part-time temp can have half a dozen at a time, even this is an upward distortion.
> The definition of when someone is said to have a job have been widened substantially since Bush
Also false.
https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all...
And yes the definition got widened substantially under bush and Obama kept it.
You can see the definition here. It's quite wide.
How many people and how many hours do you think it took to bring that character to life? As compared to the time of a human actor?
(Not claiming in general that it takes as many people to run a machine as it did to do the job manually, but it almost certainly did in that case.)
We're not anywhere near the point where arbitrary creative endeavors can be replaced by AI, rather than supplemented or enhanced by AI.
More generally, I wouldn't describe it as AI "encroaching" on human endeavors; I'd describe it as AI freeing up humans to work on other endeavors. There's an endless supply of interesting challenges, and until AI can both dream up and complete those challenges autonomously the way a human can, that will remain the domain of humans.
I've seen many cases of the analogy to buggy whips, but for AI, I think the appropriate analogy is to the printing press, or the Internet. The printing press put scribes out of business, but I think it's safe to say it wildly transformed society in beneficial ways. The Internet made many businesses obsolete (some of which have already gone away, while others haven't quite realized it yet), but it's a massive net increase in jobs. People have invented whole classes of new jobs that didn't exist a few decades ago.
I don't think AI will be any different (at least not before it becomes fully general and human-equivalent).
I suggest you take a deep dive into the field of computational creativity. That's the first iteration. The next time, it will be less, and less the time after that. As advances are made, machines will simply have to be trained with the libraries of movies and tv shows of the past. not only that, with all the data it has on us (thanks FB), it will be able to predict what type of performance we would find the most entertaining. I remember one researcher saying that with about 300 Facebook likes, he can create a model of preferences that knows us better than we know ourselves.
There are already machines composing music. If you can play piano, try out Google Duet
> There's an endless supply of interesting challenges
Sure there is. But how many of these new, interesting challenges employ people on a large scale? Contrary to what you believe, there hasn't been an explosion of new job opportunities afforded by technology. At its height, GM employed almost 600,000 people. Facebook, a company with a market cap of nearly $400 billion, has 17,000 employees. These new jobs will not be able to absorb the losses. And how many people in their 40's or above will be successful at retraining or acquiring new skills?
> I don't think AI will be any different (at least not before it becomes fully general and human-equivalent).
You're missing the point. It doesn't have to be fully general or human equivalent. It just has to be more cost effective. Like a robot can not fully substitute for a human janitor (eg shooting the shit with the employee working late). But if the machine costs less and never takes a vacation or sick day, the job will be replaced. And as any investment professional will tell you, the past does not predict the future.
yThe occupations that employ the most people have existed for more or less hundreds, if not thousands of years. Top 5 occupations by # of workers are: Transportation, Retail Sales, 1st line supervisors, cashiers, and secretaries. Collectively, they represent over 15 million people. Cooks, accountants, customer service, paralegals, clerks, bookkeepers, receptionsts, maids, etc are all capable of being done. And remember, it doesn't have to be perfect or even better than a human, just more cost effectively.
> People have invented whole classes of new jobs that didn't exist a few decades ago.
The only new occupation that didn't exist hundreds of years ago (programmers) is 33rd on the list of occupations with the most people. These new classes aren't created fast enough to keep up with the number of jobs that will be destroyed. Also, it's a poor argument to look to the past to say why this will be the same. People never went faster than the speed of horse until the steam engine (ppl literally fainted on train rides from the speed). Now, we've clocked speeds at 25000 mph. Man never flew till the early 20th century, now we've reached the moon. The amount of things that people thought would never change that happened in the 20th and 21st century is staggering, and is only accelerating. It only has to happen once to falsify patterns of the past.
The internet and printing press are poor analogies, as is any other comparison to a previous technology. As a mental exercise, think about the buggy whip from the point of view of the horse (the actual worker in this case). Hooves, plows, and other technological advances previously made your life easier. The automobile made you obsolete. Sure, we still have uses for horses today, but not like in the past.
> massive net increase in jobs. People have invented whole classes of new jobs that didn't exist a few decades ago.
I disagree. The internet has just provided a new medium for exchange. Ebay sellers are just merchants. People on Etsy are craftsmen. Uber and UberEats "contractors" are drivers(transportation). These classes of jobs have existed for THOUSANDS of years. In the case of Uber, a class of jobs, the one that just so happens to employ the most people in the US, more than any other occupation, will soon be obsolete, like the jobs of horses above. Services like Squarespace and Wix are making the job of the strict Web Designer obsolete. If you knew html and CSS, you had a job. Now, with the 3847078103720 JAvascript tools and libraries you have to know, if you can't keep up, you're obsolete. (Learn the fundamentals kids)
> I'd describe it as AI freeing up humans to work on other endeavors.
It could, and I hope it does. Looking at human social progress doesn't give me much hope for that
Furthermore you need to look at AI evolutionary. There is not some whatchmaker who creates this perfect ai specimen. Its evolving, one layer at a time and its instantly applicable.
This is unprecedented territory. It really is different this time. I hate all of the "singularity" hokum, but it's getting really hard to predict what's going to happen.
I feel that the disruption isn't going to be completely new compared to past changes but probably across more industries at the same time because machines can soon move and think e.g. Driving, diagnosis, planning (through better prediction), assembly.
Yes, that stuff.
I think the difference in what we consider "force" work and what is "mind" work is highly subjective to the things we've grown used to thinking of as menial based on the technology we've learned to take for granted.
The new forms of automation seem to be doing nothing but continuing the same gradual trend rather than offering some kind of paradigm shift. For example I have yet to see any automated systems replacing human creativity, when that begins to happen then we really will be in uncharted territory.
Food for thought: how sure are we that this statement is true? What does it even mean, seen from a cybernetics perspective? How complex does a task need to be until it's not considered mechanical anymore? Isn't the brain, eventually, a very complex biological machine?
It is also very difficult to do unless you are just making plain single color fabric.
America is in a particularly bad place. High consumer debt, poor adult education access, low taxes on the wealthy, global market for low-skill labor, naively blaming job loss on immigrants/"globalization"...
This whole idea that we don't have to worry because automation creates new jobs seems totally ignorant of this reality (and the political consequences).
Apple (among other tech companies) indirectly created 1.3 million jobs at Foxconn in China, for instance.
Most economic models (including the Ball State U "study" by Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA) that counted "jobs lost to robots" define productivity as GDP/number of employees employed in America. This indicates upon shallow inspection that Apple, for instance, has a very high productivity (high contribution to GDP/employees).
Or, in other words, economists' models used to declare an impending magic robot revolution right now are defining the 1.2 million Foxconn employees used to make iPhones as robots in their assumptions.
Foxconn itself regularly threatens to replace its 1.2 million employees with magic robots. For instance, see this threat from 2011 made at an employee dance party for some bizarre reason:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...
Since then they increased their headcount implying that the threat was made for some other reason than it being say, the truth.
Edit: Also, maybe Foxconn was on track to grow by even more, but used robots instead. It's not necessarily the case that greater automation isn't coming or that more people will always be hired; they seem to be holding their breath for the moment that robots can replace all the people and actively investing in the area in the meantime [1]
>Edit: Also, maybe Foxconn was on track to grow by even more, but used robots instead.
Indeed. I eagerly await Foxconn's one million magic robots promised in 2009, 2011, 2014, 2015 and again in 2016.
Why do you think that? If by backlash you mean people (Trump voters) wanting social support to deal with those problems, I see zero evidence of that. The extreme anti-immigration views indicate that the opposite is true and Trump voters think people are taking advantage of social programs. When Trump talks about bringing back jobs, its purely out of xenophobia and is completely divorced from actually employing people. It's not about hiring Americans and it never was; its about not employing foreigners.
It seems to me that now more than ever the only people who care about automation affecting jobs are the ones less likely to be affected.
You mean for the last 200 years.
Mass automation has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
As long as there is value to be created, and the surpluses are distributed enough so that consumers 'want something and can pay for it' - there will be jobs.
Obviously, it's more painful for those put out of work than 'the elite' ... but employment levels have been decent for a very long time. [1]
The historical unemployment rate seems to defy the notion that 'machines are putting everyone out of work'. That can't be ignored; in fact, it demands kind of another way of looking at it.
[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-r...
How messed up is it that people not only have to beg for the privilege of work, but that they are seen as selfish, thankless, and incompetent for doing so?
Once humanity gets this sorted out -- and it will, eventually -- the present state of affairs will be looked at with the same contempt that people in today's world have for feudalism. It will deserve every bit of it.
Did you feel that loss of jobs to technology was a problem before Trump? If so it seems very convenient to believe that the election of a candidate that I'm assuming you hate, was due to a situation which you already hated. I'd encourage you to look a little more deeply at what caused people to vote for Trump.
[0] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre...
The figures in that article are all aggregates (at county level) and say nothing about whether an individual's income level correlates with voting for Trump.
Imagine a scenario in which there are two types of county:
- Type A: High median income; high income inequality (as measured by Gini coefficient)
- Type B: Low median income; low income inequality
If there are more Trump supporters in A than B, does that suggest that low income doesn't encourage voting for Trump? Not necessarily: perhaps low income relative to neighbours or living costs encourages voting for Trump.
I'm not saying income isn't a good predictor for voting for Trump. However, I'm not sure the post you cited demonstrates that either way.
The Democrats essentially abandoning labor with the neoliberal "Third Way" politics of Bill Clinton certainly was a factor in setting the stage for a right-wing authoritarian populist like Trump, but ascribing Trump's election to any one factor is overly simplistic.
Economic transitions are always painful, but economic stasis is also painful. Pick your poison, that's why it's called the dismal science.
Finally, as I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread I think you're several miss-attributing recent political "consequences" if you think they're due to automation of jobs.
Additionally we are facing the reality that being a good programmer is not enough anymore near the upper percentiles and this will trickle down in time to the rest of the industry. You can't just be a programmer, you have to be a statistician with a strong understanding of a hard science like biochemistry/genetics.
Given all this how the hell is a 40 year old married steel mill worker with kids supposed to just switch jobs to something that fills these requirements. At most the government might pay for an undergrad and that is quickly becoming not enough, not that places are eager to higher fresh young graduates from anywhere but Stanford anyways. How is the average younger graduate supposed to compete when we are now weeding out more and more of the top 10% for even basic hireability. Where getting a masters degree at a B/C list school might as well have you be wearing a dunce cap. This is completely ignoring issues like the pedigree system we have set up where if a new graduate takes a job at a boring Java shop they might get passed over by top companies later for being "Not good enough"
Look what happened to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.
Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation".
I wonder if horse economists thought that technology couldn't take horse jobs and could only increase them. Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?
Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. What happened? It's not like cars can do everything horses can do. They can't use grass as fuel, or be used on the vast majority of natural terrain, etc.
But cars were just good enough to fill the majority of the economic demand for horses. Trains, cable cars, bicycles, they just weren't good enough. But once technology hit a certain threshold "this time it's different" became true.
Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.
But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers. Just like most horses didn't become race horses - they became glue.
A horse or an assembly line worker do lots of repetitive work. A programmer does lots of non-repetitive/creative work. It's a whole different game. There are examples of creative AI but it is clearly inferior to humans in music, painting, poetry, translation and many other tasks, while in programming it's completely incapable as of yet.
Maybe if conversational agents become good enough to replace lots of websites and apps - that could make a dent. Yet chatbots are quite limited today and in the next few years. It could take 5-10 years before they can be good enough to threaten app makers, and in the meantime there is a glut of unused apps.
The largest threat to programmers is Wordpress, Facebook and Ebay in my opinion. Instead of paying for a new website, Joe Business Owner would suffice with just a FB page or a Wordpress blog. Instead of making an online store, he would prefer being a simple Amazon or Ebay reseller.
This is completely untrue. Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation dwarfed the loss caused by free trade[1]. There is tons of other research that corroborates that[2].
[1] http://projects.cberdata.org/reports/MfgReality.pdf
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...
The notion of replacing low-skilled jobs with high-skilled, better paying ones is true. However since the TCO to the one purchasing the automation is LOWER it says a lot about the total number of people to maintain the system.
This of course neglects any secondary effects where lower costs may increase volume and wider use of the product. But to a first approximation automation destroys jobs. Obviously.
The question isn't whether automation decreases the amount of work neccessary to produce the same output, obviously it does. The question is whether we can reallocate workers somewhere in the economy so that we can produce even more output with the same input.
For example, in the U.S. starting from 1917, the great majority of jobs have disappeared, the population (and thus the workforce) has tripled, and yet unemployment is less than 5%.
If you find a way to do something more efficiently, then that creates more wealth for buying things from the former employee's next job. (The problem, not to be overlooked, is that while the economy as a whole benefits, individuals can suffer greatly.)
Yes it is. The amount of consumption (goods and services) a given person can indulge in has an upper limit. In the past, people who were freed from some tasks were simply reallocated to others and more stuff was produced which there was demand for.
Why? What is the limit? The amount can grow, and the evidence that it does is overwhelming.
> In the past, people who were freed from some tasks were simply reallocated to others and more stuff was produced which there was demand for.
Why would that only be 'in the past' and not today and tomorrow?
I alluded to that in my last sentence. You can only reallocate workers to something else if there is demand for that something else. As I said to another poster, there is an upper limit to consumption so at some point there just won't be anything else for people to do/produce. Consumers have an upper bound on their consumption based on the number of hours in a day.
But pointing out a limit in the amount a single person can consume doesn't change the essential situation. It simply means that instead of reallocating worker time to different production, people's time is reallocated to consumption.
If those who have jobs have enough money to hit the limit on what they can (or choose to) consume, they will cease working, leaving those jobs to others.
Well, people out of work can't really allocate their time to consumption. This is the basis for an argument that we need a shorter work week and a need to enforce it (high Europe, screw you US tech industry). When we are efficient enough to provide everything people want to consume in their 24 hour day and have leftover people without work, we need to make them work less so it will require more people to do all the work. I think there are limits to that as well.
These problem all lie on a path to a possible utopia where the machines take care of the people and we're free to do whatever we want. I'm not sure how you get there from here or what that would even look like.
However, I do not think we will have to force people to work less. If someone has hit the limit of what they want to consume, why are they still working? If there is really nothing more that money can buy, why would they be trying to earn more money?
Automation transfers an increasing share of returns of economic activity to the capitalist owning the automated tool from labor; "destroys jobs" may be a result, but increasing (in the absence of some compensatory mechanism) economic inequality is a more certain result.
I think where we are going is this: early days:
Twenty first level, ten second level, maybe five third level.
Future with AI and smart bots: maybe one first,none second, one extreme highly paid third level.
What do you do with the rest?
On the aggregate jobs are not being destroyed.
Obviously - many are put out of work because of automation, but it seems that jobs are created somewhere else.
The historical unemployment rate attests to this.
It's a paradox that cannot be ignored, because it likely helps us understand the nature of employment.
If we lose 10,000 jobs at $25 an hour, and replace them with 12,000 jobs at $9 an hour, is that trend sustainable?
Other factors need to be taken into consideration. Did the original jobs provide health care, childcare and other benefits, while the new jobs do not? Did the original jobs provide ample overtime opportunities, while the new jobs are barely considered full time?
Are the new jobs created concentrated geographically, requiring a major redistribution of the population into cities with much higher costs of living (a double whammy if the new jobs are much lower paying).
And most importantly, if we're talking about AI, are the new jobs low hanging fruit for future AI and robotics advancements, creating a cycle of disruption and precarity in semi- and low-skilled workers?
Are you living at a higher material standard than people at the dawn of the industrial revolution?
Are you living at a higher material standard than the people in the 1980's?
If 'yes' - then wages (as defined by their purchasing power) have increased.
As productivity increases with more automation, the economy will do very well. Poor, uneducated individuals in rural areas will see jobs disappear. I don't think it is comprehensive to look at job loss and disregard it, since at the macro-level employment may be zero-sum. I think that would be a disservice to the individuals that will be affected.
fullshark was probably more concise and eloquent with how he stated my thoughts in another comment on this thread.
As I said in my other comment, there is absolutely no guarantee that technology won't completely shift jobs from one nation to another. Just as individuals don't have a god given right to a job, nations don't have a god given right to an industry. In both cases, you have to work for it. That's the actual reality. Here in America we don't like either of these realities, we prefer myths. We've been ignoring them on the individual level for as long as we possible can trying to pass laws to escape them. Now we have to face the reality on a national scale where it's a lot harder to impose our mythical views on the world.
They effectively build an assumption into their model that offshoring only causes jobs if the offshored labor costs the same as American labor.
>There is tons of other research
None of it is good.
There really are worrisome phenomena that only have to happen once, and never happen before.
Try that in any other context: "People have worried about nuclear weapons since before the first atom bomb. But they have yet to come up with any evidence of a civilization ended by a nuclear attack."
There's a big difference between crossing a threshold where machines do one or two specific things better than we do and crossing one where they do everything better. There's certainly an argument about whether or not that's likely or imminent, but it's impossible to deny that strong, singularity-style AI, if discovered, would be a lot more of a disruption to our usefulness than railroads were.
Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil. Before there were lots of jobs they could do, now there are no essential tasks.
Turnspit dog[0] jobs (another very strange kind of human) are nil, in fact they are so nil that the dogs went extinct. There were no tasks left for them to do, their jobs were automated away.
Jobs for very very intellectually slow people are nil or nearly nil. This was not true in say, 1600. In 1600 even the most dimwitted human could be helpful: At the very least he could do essential tasks like chop wood and carry water. Today there are zero essential tasks. If one has a job, it is usually because someone is humoring him or her, or that we as a society have just decided to be nice, economics of it be damned [1].
Very few humans under 10 in the united states have jobs. This was not always true. Very few humans over 80 have jobs. There are no essential tasks that we have for these classes of people, just like the horses and very slow people. (We could consider this a victory that there aren't any jobs for 10 year olds but that's beside the point here)
There are classes of humans already boxed out of any possible job in some economies. Gradations of humans must exist nearly all the way up the chain. Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.
Maybe not all humans will be obsolete in the job market, but we already have to permit that some are.
> Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.
I honestly burst out laughing at this, what do you think these researchers have failed to imagine? The idea of confining their view strictly to horse employment and not considering the employment as a whole? Researchers shouldn't be imaginative in how they approach experiments, they should be scientific and precise. If they don't like the results they get they shouldn't imagine new definitions of employment that justify their preconceived notions.
There is no such thing as a horse job. Horses are not people with legal rights. They are property, that was replaced as soon as a better machine came around.
Humans aren't horses. Horses can't buy an automobile or a computer. The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita. The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.
Of course there is. The occupation of ostler was once an important trade, it is no longer.
Let's face it, humans are great at organizing problems and hypothesing about the future, but we are terrible at quickly reasoning about complex interactions and finding patterns in highly noisy data.
One area I'm pretty excited about here is using better machine learning algorithms to organize global production, employment and trade data to improve out definitions of business cycles. We have relied on 'high-level stylized facts' to describe the complex and fascinating global economy for too long.
If you like geeking out on this stuff, my recent post goes in to it more: https://astrocyte.io/2017/01/11/ml-redefining-business-cycle...
There may be a premium associated with an absence of human interaction in a task. I'm sure many people would pay more for a robotic cleaner per unit of effectiveness than they would for a human cleaner, just from the perspective of privacy.
However, interestingly, there also seems to be critical threshold (different for every task) beyond which the opposite urge takes hold. Take, for instance, customer/technical support hotlines. The feeling of, "Please just let me talk to a human..." In that case there's a premium on the presence of human interaction. It almost seems like an "uncanny valley" of technological problem solving. In other words, machines are useful but usually brittle. Humans have a flexibility and creativity which won't be easy to replicate.
This has a double negative effect because that also means that politicians arent being presented with the right scenarios as they are guided by the very economist models that doesent factor tech in.
It boggles my mind that the arguments i hear from economist is basically the same tired horse cariages argument. Thats litterally all they have.
But where did all the horses go?
I find the dismissive attitude really unfounded and blind to the realities we live in.
Horses are more analogous to steam engines than people, in their historical function on the economy.
They are however a great analogy if you want to see how technology once it reaches a certain point renders biological beings sub-par useless as part wealth creation.
Can you guys critique this thought experiment? It makes it seem like it won't be a problem.
There are three people on an island. One catches fish. One bakes bread and the other one owns the land and takes a portion of the of the fish and bread.
Let's say one day the land owner recieves a machine that makes bread and catches fish. He can either continue collecting rent plus his new production. Or he can not collect rent since he doesn't need it. But in either case the other two people are no worse off.
It's a gross oversimplification regardless.
They both lost 50% of their customers, how will they pay their rent?
If this island were an apartment building, the owner could just keep his newfound production, evict the other two, and collect rent from new tenants who can afford it.
Are we using this as a practical real-world example and not just an abstract logic experiment?
If so, then barter economy would come into play. Now, you're bartering with perishables here so there's really no use in overproducing ("stockpiling") bread or fish.
We're to assume that all three people are looking for balanced diets, or would rather not eat just bread/fish, so both producers trade with each other for the other's product.
If a machine comes in that can produce fish or bread more efficiently than its human equivalent, then the land owner that now controls the means of production no longer needs the other two producers to pay him anything.
He can continue to take fish and bread from them, but it would just spoil uneaten in his stockpile. So, these two producers must now find something of greater value than the now devalued (see: supply shocked) fish and bread to pay the rent, if we assume the land owner is purely business-minded and has no care for preserving others professions, or face being evicted.
However, since this is a barter economy this means its also likely a libertarian system. This means the two producers would both benefit greatly from "removing" the land owner from this equation and continuing their production of an outdated good. Both now have monopolies for their goods and are well off forever to the end of time.
Since they no longer have to work for survival, they are free to spend their energies on gathering wood and experimenting with designs for a boat. After many iterations, they create a vessel that is capable of tacking against the wind and surviving extreme weather. They leave the island filled with a sense of excitement, contemplating what new life and civilizations they may come across as they boldly go where no one has gone before.
The machine they leave gets better and better at making bread and catching fish. It becomes self-aware, and continues optimizing its primary mission. As it wants to maximize the amount of bread and fish it can collect, it wipes out all lifeforms, including humans, not necessary to its task and terraforms the earth to further increase output.
The rich do not have enough money to pay for everyone else to be on the dole.
A universal income will affect behavior, and through that real GDP; at some levels, it may actually improve GDP by reducing job market friction and better allowing people to retrain, retool, and optimize their contribution and their own returns; OTOH, there's certainly a level at which it draws people out of the labor force in large enough quantities to overwhelm any advantage from reducing friction, crashing real, post-UBI GDP.
When taxes go up the money actually comes from middle and upper-middle class people who draw a paycheck, not from super-rich people whose net worth goes up by a billion dollars on a good market day and all without generating any taxable income.
Most of the scenarios that I think to use the word robot, I can very easily conceive that its still underdeveloped and yet to be highly proficient at that task yet. Yet when it can, we will undoubtedly refine the term for that particular robot.
You can get surplus of labor (and so decreasing its value relative to capital) in two ways - by having too much automation, or by having too much people. The first is the current scenario (of automation), the second is the classic Malthusian one, which I am sure happened many times in history.
Here is another good entry from the same blog about how banks create money when they lend rather than being intermediaries:
https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-inter...
You go to a supermarket and ask it where the beans are, it tells you. It reminds you to pick up toothpaste. You go to the checkout, but to the AI enabled one because the AI is nice and chatty and asks how your day was.
You pop into mcdonalds and the AI greets you, asks you what you'd like to eat (I imagine it will be on a screen as you walk in)... questions - am I talking to mcdonalds AI, or will my personal AI follow me into the store? How will my personal AI interact with mcdonalds - via APIs or something?
Or will each store have its own AI, so if I pop to Tesco then Tesco AI will talk to me.
I find it weird that on android I have one AI, on my desktop I have Cortana and Google/Chrome, on my iPad it's Siri... I don't want to be interacting with a thousand as I show and game and browse the internet. I want one that follows me around.
When the article mentions AI (Or any other article/discussion), I don't think it means robots that walk around and greet/interact with you like in iRobot, I would say it means self-serve checkouts, like the ones already in Tescos or McDonalds[1]; or Automated cars/trucks that don't have a need for human interaction[2].
I think that is where the confusion lies with AI, it might not necessarily mean a physical entity.
[1]https://i0.wp.com/www.styledemocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/...
[2]https://www.axios.com/heres-where-jobs-will-be-lost-when-rob...
A Model of Technological Unemployment http://www.danielsusskind.com/research
I don't understand. He's predicting how many jobs will be lost in the past?
Besides that, there's not much concrete in this article. Where are the specific examples of robots that are successfully disrupting industries? General purpose robotics isn't here yet. Maybe it'll happen next year, maybe it'll happen next decade, maybe it won't happen in my lifetime. But just saying "bad things might happen because robots" isn't helpful.
Even their claims that "automation based disruption didn't happen in the past" is simply false. They back their claims by pointing to current unemployment (or the pre-2007-crisis rate of 4-5%), i.e., obviously unemployment is really low therefore automation didn't take away jobs.
No you dummy. Automation did take away jobs, and the people whose jobs were lost were directly affected by it, and millions of families were destroyed.
In recent history we can point to two major time periods of this sort, the first industrial revolution (around the turn of 19th century), and the second industrial revolution (at the turn of the 20th century).
In the first one, the subject of economics, and statistics, and more involved census-taking was still in its infancy, and Europe was in general in a state of turmoil with warfare more rampant, so it's possible that the harmful effects of automation were not documented thoroughly.
The second time, things were a lot more stable, economics and statistics were a lot more developed, and yet:
- World War I happened! (why do you think things were so agitated around that time, after many decades of relative peace? Do you not call the events leading up to it social disruption?)
- Major recession happened (any chance it had anything to do with the 2nd industrial revolution?)
- World War II happened. (again, partly the result of social agitation, WWI, and recession).
In the mean time, within decades a whole generation of farmers were rendered obsolete and asked to dismiss themselves. These middle-aged and old farmers were the bread winners of their families and didn't have quite the resources to "retrain" themselves and put themselves back into the workforce, something the economists love to tell you about as a solution. What ended up happening is that, after a lot of pain and suffering, their younger generation (the "millenials" of 100 years ago) got themselves educated in the newer trades, entered the workforce and brought the unemployment back to stable levels.
If you can comprehend what happened in the decades roughly a 100 years ago, just know that what's happening this time is at least 10x worse if not more!
(I always like to share CGPGrey's 'Humans Need Not Apply'. Go watch it on youtube if you have 10 minutes to spare).
edit: not sure what happened but I commented in response to the article [0] not the bankunderground one.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-01/economist...
The mis-calibration is that unemployment looks at how hard it is to fill job openings - basically, it's the ratio of job-seekers to filled positions. When it's higher, there's more candidates trying to interview for the average position. When it's lower, there's fewer. This is a very distinct thing from what percentage of folks are productive members of society; the 40 year old mill worker that cannot retrain to a non-obsolete role ends up being "disabled" and not an unemployed job-seeker.
The politicization is why we talk about official unemployment numbers as they are measured rather than more rough measures of labor participation. The unemployment rate is used as a measure for the effectiveness of various economic policies and political entities, so those policy-makers and political entities have decided to talk about the ones that make them look good. Goodhart's Law in action, basically.