DeepMind cofounder warns govts must find solutions for jobs lost to A.I

From my point of view, the impact of AI in the past couple of decades has primarily been better translation, computer vision, speech recognition/synthesis, scientific computing, recommender systems, and the latest wave of generative AI. These are excellent tools, but they aren't capable by themselves of doing a job that a human does. Autonomous vehicles are an exception to this, and they do have the potential to disrupt the transportation industry. But it seems like there are still significant problems to be solved before we can deploy them on a large scale. We don't seem to be making much progress on creating truly generally intelligent agents, either. I think any claim that these technologies are going to have a large impact on the overall number of jobs in the next 5-10 years is highly speculative at this point.

The underlying issue is that the current hype and fears around AI are being used to push a specific political agenda. Even if I grant for the sake of argument that millions of jobs will be automated away in the next decade, that doesn't automatically imply that UBI is the solution. Why is UBI a better solution than expanding existing social programs? What impact will UBI have on inflation and other economic indicators? Will UBI have a positive or negative impact on societal problems like structural inequality?

Of course, it could turn out that the predictions about AI are true. And maybe UBI is in fact the best solution. All I want to see is a nuanced conversation on this issue, grounded in empirical data, that weighs the pros and cons of the alternatives. That's not what I'm seeing in the media narratives around AI right now.

UBI (mentioned in the article) may well work fine on a national-economic level, but it's existence threatens several business models which are predicated on the availability of masses of unemployed and unskilled people, which would be a self-reinforcing phenomenon.

Long story short is that AI is coming for capitalism. I believe any solution would have to entail the ideation of a new economic system, and what passes for the aristocracy these days is almost certainly not going to be on-board, inevitably leading to historically interesting times.

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(To be fair, let's not say "no clue". But overall their ability to help folks actually find jobs seems quite marginal).

> Governments will have to find a solution for knowledge sector workers whose jobs are automated away thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence, a leading expert in the field warned.

This is a horrible way to solve this possible future problem.

Unfortunately, that's not how the real world works. If farmers produce more food than people want to eat, the food will go uneaten and the farmers' time will have been wasted. If carpenters produce more housing than people want to live in, the housing will stand vacant and the carpenters' time will have been wasted.

Does this mean the farmers and carpenters get to work less? No, because if they only work 30 hours a week, they won't make enough money to function in the society that assumes people have to work 40 hours.

So instead some of the farmers and carpenters have to find other work that needs to be done. Which is great, but only so long as there really is other work that needs to be done. If there isn't, then the surplus farmers and carpenters have to find performative work--something to soak up 40 hours and appear valuable so they can get a paycheck.

Which is bad. Not just because it wastes the lives of the people who do that unneeded work, but because it even wastes the lives of the people who do the farming and carpenting. They have to work a full 40 too, even though everyone could be working fewer hours on jobs that matter.

I know, I know, "But if we adopt a 40-N hour work week, we'll lose lots of things that make our lives better. There will be fewer snacks to choose from at the grocery store; fewer video games, all of inferior quality; fewer computers and TVs and fewer everything that goes into making them."

And maybe so, although personally I don't think we'll lose anything we'll miss much. But we'll all have more of a life to improve for ourselves, instead of the way TV or Instagram dictates we should. My happiness will not suffer for lack of cheese puffs, and I'll actually enjoy learning how to cook a lot of things I used to buy because I will have the time and energy needed to enjoy it. So my washing machine won't have a phone app anymore. Big deal, I never used it anyway. And it least it's a lot more repairable now, since companies have been forced to figure out how to add competitive value to it without investing a lot more time in it.

I'm looking around at my world and damn near every part of it is designed to imprison me in some way. I got a bottle of shampoo saying it gave me 20% extra for free, because statistically speaking I'm more likely to think I'm getting more value than if it didn't, even though the price per ounce is the same no matter if it says it gave me 99% for free. Somebody was paid to come up with that trick. And I paid them to try that trick on me, even if I was just buying the lowest price per ounce.

This kind of shit does not make me feel free.

Jokes aside, I think we are seeing this question come up every other day. Has anyone proposed a solution? Ideally, based on data?