What net destroys jobs is things that unproductively increase costs. Resources that are wasted can't be used for productive labor that improves quality of life.
This is true so long as two other things are also true;
- There needs to be something else for people to do instead. In the case of the industrial revolution power looms in factories replaced home weavers, but the factories were huge and could employ all the weavers and more. The factories created more jobs than they destroyed. In the case of AI that isn't immediately true, nor is it obvious that it's going to be true in the short term. So far we can only envisage the destruction of jobs.
- Secondly, the lowering of costs only puts money in people's pockets if the very wealthy don't hoard it for themselves. There are trillions sitting around doing nothing for the economy according to leaks like the Panama Papers. AI could potentially just make those numbers a bit bigger while everyone else starves.
In the long term I'm reasonably optimistic. I think society will organize around AI to let computers do things and we'll settle on an alternative model to 'time worked = money', whether that's something like UBI or artistic patronage or whatever really. I think that's 50 years away. We'll only get to that because in the short term it's going to be painful though.
This is trivially the case. We still need people to build housing and fell trees for lumber and grow food. But let's suppose AI could do all that.
Then those things would be available at trivial cost because they require no labor. You could work for one day at minimum wage and cover your food and housing costs for a year.
> Secondly, the lowering of costs only puts money in people's pockets if the very wealthy don't hoard it for themselves.
Hoarding money isn't the root of the problem because money isn't resources, it's just paper or bits. If you print a trillion dollars and give it to Bill Gates to stuff in his nefarious mattress, not that much changes.
The true evil is artificial scarcity. But that's an entirely separate problem which is already happening independent of automation.
Suppose there is plenty of labor available to build new housing but you have a law against building new housing. Then people have neither jobs nor housing and get screwed. The thing screwing them is the law, not the AI.
Yes it does, because those are the people whose labor will be available. They'll take whatever jobs they're qualified for, which may lower wages in those occupations until the lower price increases demand or reduces supply by driving anyone currently in those occupations who is qualified for another job into the other job.
The change isn't necessarily Pareto optimal. There can be people who are worse off because the amount their cost of living went down was less than the amount their wages went down. But for most people it will be the opposite, because the change is an increase in productivity. You get more production with less labor, so you on average need to do less labor to meet your cost of living.
- People have aptitudes, especially for creative work
- Changing trades requires training/education which in itself requires capital
- for most people their brains are less adaptable at older ages. Which worsens the other two effects.
It wasn't claimed to be. That's why people whose skills are now in lower demand may make less money than other people. But that doesn't mean they can't find jobs.
Citation Needed.
This isn’t how it works out in practice though. If the predictions of the 1950s were to come true, we’d all be working 10 hours a week and bringing in the same wages.
They weren’t wrong though. Efficiency did go up. It’s just that these efficiencies were never passed on to workers. Instead you’re now 3x productive, but for less money. That’s a pay cut.
The same thing happens if/when AI automates us all. We won’t become unemployed, because people like pmarca are scared to death of people with the time and energy to be mad about the raw deal they’ve been given. So instead, we’ll all get paid less, while working longer in more bullshit jobs.
You're ascribing the evils of market concentration to automation. Automation isn't why housing and higher education are so much more expensive now than they were.
You’re right, automation isn’t why housing and education are more expensive now. The increase of those is direct result of government policy choices encouraged by the voters. For housing, were taking zoning laws, and public objection laws. Higher education tuition increases for public universities is directly tied to cuts in government support for said government institutions.
But let’s get back to the topic at hand, whether or not benefits of productivity increases are felt by workers, or if it’s primarily concentrated with the already wealthy.
The answer is clear. The benefits are concentrated with the few. Sure prices drop, but so do wages and overall wealth by the majority. This isn’t even a controversial take. Government statistics have been tracking this for 40 years.
You’re asking questions like they’re some great unknowable, but not only is this common knowledge, but just an google image search away.
Government spending on higher education has gone up dramatically.
Most of the increase there is probably attributable to student loan subsidies and the inability of borrowers to default. Make it possible for anyone to borrow an obscene amount of money to bid on status goods like elite degrees and the consequence isn't that hard to predict.
> But let’s get back to the topic at hand, whether or not benefits of productivity increases are felt by workers, or if it’s primarily concentrated with the already wealthy.
> The answer is clear. The benefits are concentrated with the few. Sure prices drop, but so do wages and overall wealth by the majority. This isn’t even a controversial take. Government statistics have been tracking this for 40 years.
What you've failed to establish is any link between the productivity improvements and the concentration of wealth. Why has capital captured the higher share? TFA provided the answer. Market concentration as a consequence of regulatory capture.
Consider the result if we had this degree of market concentration without the efficiency improvements from automation.
I am somewhat serious, but also being a little factitious here. There's a breaking point of widespread democratized (runnable by like 1-5 people, or a small community) technology where these companies don't have the same ability to absorb all these gains. If/when the basics for living are largely automated and able to be bootstrapped for very cheap / very little labor by AI-assisted tools, then the only way people are going to settle for jobs that give less than what these provide is by top-down dictatorial artificial scarcity and rent-seeking, blatantly destroying this production ability. I think there's definitely a cynical reality where that happens - and definitely regions of the world where it will - but everywhere..? Eh...
My money for the cynical take is much more along the lines of "massive social upheaval kicks off a world war with terrifying consequences" or "AI eradicates humanity". Less than that and honestly - we're gonna be golden in the long run, and it's gonna be an awkward but neat short/medium run.
That is actually a technological solution for a societal problem that I see as a way out:
A device that produces food, water, energy and does sanitation for a family of 4-5 people. This device would make it possible to give families higher leverage in any negotiation because they can not be forced to work for survival. We have the tech, only limiting factor is the size, but we will find a way.
- Solar Foods [1] (Protein production with CO2 and solar energy with a fermentation process)
- Omni Processor which recycles human waste [2]
- Tiger Toilet [3]
- Low cost waste water treatment [4]
- And potato production in a small vertical setup
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tdlqjGlN3A
We don't need to settle for lower quality, or convenience. We just need to ensure capitalism does what it's supposed to, and pass on the efficiency gains down to the consumer.
Though also, for my money - water, energy, sanitation? Those are already very cheap, and will get cheaper naturally. And food is cheap if you keep to basics. Automated housing construction and automated high-quality-meal kitchens (not just basics) seem like the areas to tackle for real cost savings. Ultimately the last bastion will be rent seeking on land though - which could be alleviated by creating housing alternatives off the conventional grid, or uplifting the quality of services in much of the developing world so there are much more options of safe areas to live (which again, is happening fast already and will happen much faster with a rapid improvement from AI tooling).
My argument is this is the natural way capitalism works - or is supposed to work - and we should treat that with hearty skepticism. But the only way this doesn't happen seems to be if there are monopolistic forces actively holding it back. Otherwise there really should be an abundance of cheap options for living coming to consumers in the near future, which would effectively be close to a UBI, and a "living off the land" alternative to wage labor.
(P.S. for housing, my bets are more on modular housing production in a factory setting becoming highly automated - the quality level of those builds is already quite high. But also just automation on the materials production all the way down the stack. There's hope for in-place construction savings (robots!) but I think that'll come much later. Logistics transportation was already due for some major improvements before AI reared its head - cheap electric engines just enable some very different structures that effectively have a net-0 cost of operation when combined with solar. Any innovation on that front would dramatically reduce the cost of everything else.
Dark kitchens are already a thing, and expect them to keep growing - especially as the tools improve. You could probably supply a whole city with the same wide variety of well-cooked dishes from a single facility with efficient transport. There's an element of dystopia there as cook jobs disappear and thus the personal touch, but the consumer reality (should be) basically-free meals at the same quality we expect from restaurants, on demand.)
Probably what's going to happen is everyone will get more productive as open source AI models become more accessible and cheaper to run yourself, tooling, robots etc, then it will kind of end up leveling off again. Amazon will become less relevant because many other companies will have factories that are automated too.
It would be nice if we end up in a society where it's so cheap to produce everything that we're all wealthy.
I actually think there are so so so many variables at place that no one can predict where this is going... I get a feeling it's going to be a surprise.
The answer depends on whether Amazon is a monopoly. If everybody else who sells goods on the internet also automates their warehouses and customers choose the retailer with the lowest prices, they have to pass the savings on to the customer or the customer will buy from Walmart or some other competitor.
But "monopolies raise the cost of living" is a separate problem the solution to which is to get rid of monopolies, not to get rid of automation.
Regardless of how this all plays out... there's gonna a whole lot of Abundance of Things, and Services. As producers/workers - it's gonna be an awkward time. As Consumers? Ho boy baby - shit's gonna get crazy cheap