Should economists be more concerned about AI?

> But in either case the other two people are no worse off.

They both lost 50% of their customers, how will they pay their rent?

If this island were an apartment building, the owner could just keep his newfound production, evict the other two, and collect rent from new tenants who can afford it.

While I don't prescribe to the hand-wringing, I would say that a major difference now is that the speed of technological innovation is now far outpacing education from generation to generation.

They don't need to destroy jobs. Just lower wages by competing with human workers. Arguably this may have already happened, if you look at how wages have fallen or remained stagnate over the past few decades. Once the value of human labor falls below minimum wage, then there is unemployment. There is no law of economics that says technology can't compete with human workers or that wages can't fall.

Look what happened to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.

Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation".

I wonder if horse economists thought that technology couldn't take horse jobs and could only increase them. Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?

Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. What happened? It's not like cars can do everything horses can do. They can't use grass as fuel, or be used on the vast majority of natural terrain, etc.

But cars were just good enough to fill the majority of the economic demand for horses. Trains, cable cars, bicycles, they just weren't good enough. But once technology hit a certain threshold "this time it's different" became true.

Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.

But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers. Just like most horses didn't become race horses - they became glue.

I'll bite.

Are we using this as a practical real-world example and not just an abstract logic experiment?

If so, then barter economy would come into play. Now, you're bartering with perishables here so there's really no use in overproducing ("stockpiling") bread or fish.

We're to assume that all three people are looking for balanced diets, or would rather not eat just bread/fish, so both producers trade with each other for the other's product.

If a machine comes in that can produce fish or bread more efficiently than its human equivalent, then the land owner that now controls the means of production no longer needs the other two producers to pay him anything.

He can continue to take fish and bread from them, but it would just spoil uneaten in his stockpile. So, these two producers must now find something of greater value than the now devalued (see: supply shocked) fish and bread to pay the rent, if we assume the land owner is purely business-minded and has no care for preserving others professions, or face being evicted.

However, since this is a barter economy this means its also likely a libertarian system. This means the two producers would both benefit greatly from "removing" the land owner from this equation and continuing their production of an outdated good. Both now have monopolies for their goods and are well off forever to the end of time.

>Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs.

This is completely untrue. Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation dwarfed the loss caused by free trade[1]. There is tons of other research that corroborates that[2].

[1] http://projects.cberdata.org/reports/MfgReality.pdf

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...