Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates (2014)

Nah this is cool, man. We just keep convincing big companies and government to hire Accenture, SAP, Oracle consulting, IBM Global Services, Computer Associates, McKinsey, BCG, etc. etc.

They will happily destroy any gains in labor efficiency by hiring hundreds of people to sit in a room hacking enterprise strength (ie non-functioning) stuff to justify billion dollar fees.

It's scary how good your tech has to be to succeed in startup land and yet just how awful the tech is that people deal with at work on a day to day basis.

Anonymous has hacked big co, how to bring them to their knnees?!? "Install sharepoint and let the consultants bleed them dry."

Part of the problem is politics. You can't fix that with technology or with basic income. (I mean, maybe you can fix the political problem in, say, the US, with basic income. You can't fix the political problem in Sudan with basic income, because it's a tribal and religious war.)

But, sure, there's enough food today. Then all the farmers quit. You need robotic tractors and combines. Plus you need seed, fertilizer, and pesticides, all produced (and distributed) by robots. Once the food is grown and harvested, you need every step of the distribution done by robots. You also need robots producing the gasoline, vehicles, tires, and roads that are needed for that distribution. Otherwise, if the people stop working, the food stops, and people starve.

Are we there yet? No. We're getting close enough that we can see that it might be possible to get there, though.

Let's illustrate this with a graph. Let's call it the Laugher Curve, and borrow the inverted U from the much loved Laffer curve. But here, the Y axis is The Value of Human Life, and and the X axis is The Value of Technology.

To the left of the curve's peak, as the value of technology rises along X, the value of humans also rises along Y. Clearly technology is augmenting human labor and increasing the value of human workers.

Further to the right the Laugher Peak is approached, and the rise in human value slows because for some jobs, augmentation has turned to automation. Machines begin to automate more tasks more than they augment. Ergo, when the number of automated tasks rises sufficiently, machine replaces man.

Then as displaced humans seek new jobs, they find themselves taking positions of lesser value because they lack the skills or ability needed to qualify for those remaining jobs of equal value due to those jobs' increasing complexity, which was caused by their rising tech augmentation. What many humans do best, now a machine can do cheaper, and the retraining of those humans for equally valuable jobs has become unprofitable.

Further to the right, human augmentation by tech fades and automation is in full swing -- replacing those humans with marginally greater and lesser skills. Finally when we reach the right edge of the curve, all humans have been made redundant by tech; they're unemployed. At last, the net present value of mankind falls to zero.

[It's called the Laugher Curve because it's believed the original Laffer Curve was never about taxes. It was just a pretext to encourage those folks who valued tech more than people. It also cleverly refers to the oxymoronic outcome of a temporal mobius loop, in which the final laugh was on those who could laugh, by those who couldn't.]

Horse population in the US is half of what it was in 1920, while US population is three times what it was.

So per capita, there's 1/6th the horses of 100 years ago.

I'm wondering if/when will signs of something like the Butlerian Jihad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad show.

In Frank Herbert's Dune books, the objection of humanity against "thinking machines" was not that the machines took jobs, but that intelligent machines shaped humanity too much. And signs of that can certainly be seen today. Business models and customer experiences are built around solutions that are easy to implement with computers. As AI gets used more, and AI will do the jobs of humans, human experiences will be shaped by AI. There will be a point where lawmakers will declare on certain things "no you can't do that with computers, you have to do it yourself".

My guess is that new laws will be made against specific uses of computers and AI. And that the issue of jobs will be regulated in those laws.

For example this recent law looks like something fitting in that category: http://ew.com/article/2016/12/16/obama-law-ticket-bots/