Should economists be more concerned about AI?
bankunderground.co.uk
Should economists be more concerned about AI?
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Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#2Yes they are because they treat tech as an externality.
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.
Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#3[deleted]
Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#4There have been trials of basic income though, so people are thinking about it. Additionally the term 'robot' is very handwavey and could mean anything intelligence wise, so difficult to say what jobs will get replaced and when.
Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#5No idea why the link is to the utterly shallow BB article rather than the BoE blog.
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...
Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#6There have been trials of basic income though, so people are thinking about it. Additionally the term 'robot' is very handwavey and could mean anything intelligence wise, so difficult to say what jobs will get replaced and when.
This is one of the very
the problems of this discussion. What is important is not robots but ai.
Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#7A small thought. When AI gets good-ish then would it work sort of like this:
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.
Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#8There have been trials of basic income though, so people are thinking about it. Additionally the term 'robot' is very handwavey and could mean anything intelligence wise, so difficult to say what jobs will get replaced and when.
Bill Gates said that no nation on earth is rich enough to afford basic income. It's a long way off.
Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#9> BOE Chief Economist Andrew Haldane estimating in 2015 that 15 million British jobs and 80 million in the U.S. could be lost to automation
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.
Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?
#10Something interesting that I learned recently from a former Dean of the Industrial Labor Relations School at Cornell:
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.