AI Will Make Our Society Even More Unequal, Economists Warn
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
We can choose to make it more equal. We can choose to even things, and to work less.
It’s us using the AI to do things.
Let’s stop pretending like our hands are tied. We can build a better world if we want to. Don’t give me excuses about how everyone else will do something so then you have to do the same.
Take responsibility for your own actions.
Don’t fire people that you can replace with AI. Instead, re-train them to use AI to make your business better and for everyone to work less.
Be creative, be visionary, be disruptive and be compassionate. Care about people over money.
Mother Theresa said: “if you want to change the world, go home and love your family”
Maybe this time, if you want to change the world, don’t replace people with AI. Do replace their work, but keep the people and find them something more human to work on.
But you do not have to keep them hired. You are running a business, you hire based on your needs, not theirs.
> But you do not have to keep them hired. You are running a business, you hire based on your needs, not theirs.
Caring for someone isn't kicking them out the door with a kind word. That's just assuaging your own guilt and little else.
If you actually "cared" for those people, you'd keep them on the payroll until they actually found "better job opportunities elsewhere."
Unfortunately, there are strong systemic forces working against this approach. This is why when executives say that the team/company are "like a family" they might mean it, but they can't actually exhibit the behaviours of a family when times get tough. Being too nice can risk the well-being of the overall company which could put everyone out of a job suddenly.
The answer society has come up with so far is funding and maintaining institutions that can run at a loss without going out of business. But this seems increasingly unpopular in some circles.
Stop making excuses. You as a person can make a difference if you want to. If you won’t, then that’s your own decision, don’t blame anyone else for it.
Don’t point the finger at “society”, what happens when you point the finger at yourself? Don’t deflect.
Quit lying to yourself. It's certainly not "unhealthy for everyone," for instance it's probably healthier for laid off employees in many circumstances.
"It's better for everyone" often translates to "it's better for me and I don't really care about you."
What's more human than writing, or making art? The sad reality is if AI is as disruptive as some claim and a company follows your advice:
a) The employees will end up doing the menial tasks that AI still can't.
b) Their competitors will either buy them up or drive them out of business by being more ruthless about how they apply automation.
There's no "bottom-up" market solution that will work in the long term here. In my opinion the only thing that can lead to a more equal distribution of resources has to come in the form of more redistributive taxation and more stringent labor laws - i.e. "top down" from the government. Unfortunately, legislators seem to be moving in the opposite direction on some of these fronts. I think more social unrest is inevitable until things are forced to change.
Luxury things are expensive, yet people buy them anyway. In fact they buy them because they are expensive.
Let’s not pretend that price automatically triggers actions on people.
We choose.
Let’s choose to use AI to make the world a better place.
Let’s not use AI to create more inequality.
It’s a choice that people will make.
Let’s choose better this time.
>re-train them to use AI
Why can't they take responsibility for their own actions, and train themselves to use AI?
Everyone knows about the disruptive potential of AI now, it's not a secret anymore. Some people will take the initiative to master the new tech, and they will replace the people who don't. It's their choice.
Instead of training luddites to use technology they don't understand, it's better to hire people who already see the potential of AI and are making efforts to capitalize on it. Fill your company with people who share your vision for a better, more automated world, and fire those who don't. Unregulated market forces are the best way to force AI adoption, and people will quickly learn AI once it becomes a requirement for survival.
Maybe they can. But what are you going to do from your own position?
Can you help those people? Will you?
You might not feel responsible or accountable. But if everyone feels that way, then no one will do anything.
If you just read the above, thought that there is something you can do, but still won’t do it, then you made that decision.
Don’t blame anyone else for it. Don’t blame “unregulated market forces” for it.
You are free to do as you please. But don’t make up excuses about other people’s behavior of why you choose to act the way you do.
This applies to everything in our lives, not just our reactions to AI.
Love to you on your path.
What we need is universal healthcare and universal basic income. For everybody to recognize that every human being deserves the resources to live and share in the wealth that AI has created.
We all need to believe we can make an impact. That we will not allow the powers that be use AI to make our lives more unequal.
We are at a huge potential inflection point for humanity.
We can choose to reduce our collective work load for the benefit of everyone.
Let’s not squander the opportunity by making excuses of why we can’t do it.
We can make the world more equal and have people work less. We have the technology and resources to make that happen.
Who am I kidding, Idiocracy is already a reality. Just look at the comments here on HN.
The concern is always that there is a finite amount of work[0] to go around in any given iteration of our current style of society. New kinds of work do get invented from time to time. Automation eliminates kinds of work. The two are rarely in sync with eachother and the difference is usually measured in human privation and suffering.
[0]work being defined as, "something you can trade for food and healthcare"
Though I can imagine a counter argument from a technologist/futurist positing that the incentive to automate in part comes from that merciless system of survival.
The modern Luddite, I think, doesn't necessarily "hate" looms, or their inventors. They just don't have any faith that those necessary compensations you describe will ever happen, or at least not quickly enough to save them. Perhaps the government is convinced by exactly that argument above. Or at very least too apathetic (or financially tangled) to fight it.
We all act along the axes where we can affect something, effect something. Smashing looms is a fool's errand, but sometimes that's all the power you feel you have.
Agree
> We all act along the axes where we can affect something, effect something. Smashing looms is a fool's errand, but sometimes that's all the power you feel you have.
However I think what's fascinating about this is it requires believing you can't change your skill set to something else. Sometimes I don't think its as simple as feeling empowered, but also fear and anxiety about change.
Oh my god, yes. The way it makes everything possible means you never get to feel like you actually know WTF you're doing, because the edge is always expanding. Bring back the days of having a small shelf of 5-10 books that contained 99% of what you needed to know to do your programming/sysadmin/whatever job.
Yes, it's absolutely exhausting. If you've never experienced or even seen what came before, it may not seem so just because you don't have a point of comparison.
My point is that we couldn't possibly do our jobs now without Google, but that we used to be able to do it just by knowing the stuff in a few books really well and knowing where—in the books or in e.g. manpages—to find what we didn't know. A small shelf of books is way better than Google, if you can be reasonably certain that the answers you need are in there.
Yes, this situation is far more exhausting.
This is made worse by their size and scope. Spring Boot is a giant ecosystem, as is .NET, as is Azure, etc.
Also, search results tend to be a sea of data which might, or might not, contain some crucial bit of information that will help.
So, all too often, "using Google to answer a question" becomes a 2-hour or day-long research project to figure out how to solve some small, arcane problem like why the POST to some service doesn't have the Authorization header.
And when there's internal and external pressure to be productive, meet deadlines, and not feel incompetent, sometimes it gets frustrating and stressful and tiring.
I was less productive than I am now, but making something was more satisfying.
Today.. .. first one has to get up speed on whatever the F changed this week
Before the internet could pose a challenge to my bookshelf, I had over fifty that I referred to fairly regularly (my office library had about 100, my total library several hundred), ~5 of those covered 80% of what I needed for a given project, but which 5 those were changed from project to project.
Your second point is like saying: 'I imagine a gig economy where taxi drivers will need to leverage a car to be effective.' If someone offers you a hammer to build a cabin, why would you say no?
To your point about it being good for small and medium sized businesses — let’s assume it gets rid of a significant amount of workers. Who would be the consumers of these products, other small/medium sized businesses who also mostly have AI producing work? Obviously it’s a simplified question, but I’m curious how we’ll handle the removal of “useless workforce” when AI does an objectively better job.
The previous generations could never imagine the kinds of jobs we have today.
Now I am not saying that this is a guarantee to happen again, and that new jobs will be created and such. But I think anyone claiming to know that "this time it will be different" and that "we wont create new jobs that we can't imagine today" could be just as wrong about that idea too.
Gutting a ton of jobs across many sectors in the economy won't change demand for food or rent, but will likely hurt every service sector and slow the economy down overall as people without jobs push out purchases they would have made otherwise.
As maybe a last resort, regulation could play a factor in how many AI resources a company can use, which will mimic scarcity.
You act as if humans haven’t been solving existential problems for their whole existence. It’s not like 50% of the workforce will get laid off and there will be no response to that.
Who's going to buy from these businesses if people don't have jobs?
Other businesses.
If the "people don't have jobs" due to AI, consumer goods companies will go out of business, and society's resources will get redirected to non-consumer businesses and the passion projects of the ownership class.
Outside Soviet Russia, there has to be an end consumer in there somewhere. There isn't such a thing as a truly "non-consumer business."
And I answered that. The ultimate consumers will be a group of wealthy people who control the productive resources using AI and use them to pursue their personal goals. There will be some B2B exchanges between those people, and perhaps a smallish cadre of employees who's labor is still useful to the wealthy, but most commerce as we know it will grind to a halt because the vast majority workers' labor won't be valuable to those who could pay them.
I think this is a dead angle for a lot of AI experts. That sudden bump in efficiency might ruin large parts of the markets businesseses are built upon.
Viable AR/VR?
Fully autonomous vehicles?
Fusion power?
Edit: I'm confused why this question is garnering all these downvotes. Could anyone please help me understand why this is controversial or disliked?
But most leaps would not result in ‘x will make things unequal’ if the people making would give everyone access to them in an affordable manner. That’s why an unlimited source of energy has to be easy to make and copy and not be hampered by patents on hurdles that prevent that. Otherwise these articles are absolutely right.
I think the "accessible to everyone" rubric is more complicated than the GP described. It's more like provides similar economic benefits to everyone. ChatGPT may be "readily accessible to everyone," but if it and similar technologies allow significant automation of knowledge work it will not provide similar benefits to everyone, since it will allow the elimination of entire categories of jobs.
At least in the short-term "elimination of entire categories of jobs" benefits the ownership class and no one else. If these "AI" technologies also inhibit the ability of those masses of laid off workers to retrain an switch jobs to something with equivalently high wages, then they will make our society even more unequal in the long term.
You can basically always find an angle for the story you want to tell.
What's the name of that story?
There's a different story by another author where a similar machine brings on an economic depression, but I forget the title.
Bankrupt many companies, causing the loss of jobs generally around the world and a potential expanding economic shock matched to the rate of production of the new devices
Cause the complete devastation of smaller sized communities (villages and towns, very small cities) where the majority of employment is directly in an energy related resource extraction capacity or in supporting jobs maintaining equipment for or supplying services to these primary resource industries
The lack of externally needed power supply like diesel fuel or surface supplies for solar farms would enable more people to take up mobile or alternative living situations (van life, mobile homes, camping with appliances) as the need for a house to plug in appliances is one of the anchoring factors in real estate economics which could be the best thing for people in general but also another potentially large scale economic shock.
Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. Productivity and wages largely remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate as the use of AI proliferates.
This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity.
Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling.
This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down. While the rest of us are oblivious to the approaching calamity. The tech crowd with a boner for the supposed techno-utopia imagined in sci-fi needs to ask what costs we should be willing to pay for a chance at that future.
I argue we have already been using these technologies, they merely got better and more available.
Wow, we suck at being human.
coders should be worried though
More seriously, if a huge chunk of white-collar professionals are made redundant, why would they have the cash to pay a tree trimmer?