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Should economists be more concerned about AI?

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Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#71

Post by vorotato »

scottmf wrote: post #30
mrfusion wrote: post #24

I was thinking about automation and job loss recently. I tried to make a simple model to understand what happens. Can you guys critique this thought experiment? It makes it seem like it won't be a problem. There are three people on an island. One catches fish. One bakes bread and the other one owns the land and takes a portion of the of the fish and bread. Let's say one day the land owner recieves a machine that make…

Why will he continue to let them live on his land? It's a gross oversimplification regardless.

I'd say it was an appropriate level of simplification given that you arrived at the correct answer and he wasn't able to :P.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#72

Post by simonsarris »

jdoliner wrote: post #10

Something 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…

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

Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil. Before there were lots of jobs they could do, now there are no essential tasks.

Turnspit dog[0] jobs (another very strange kind of human) are nil, in fact they are so nil that the dogs went extinct. There were no tasks left for them to do, their jobs were automated away.

Jobs for very very intellectually slow people are nil or nearly nil. This was not true in say, 1600. In 1600 even the most dimwitted human could be helpful: At the very least he could do essential tasks like chop wood and carry water. Today there are zero essential tasks. If one has a job, it is usually because someone is humoring him or her, or that we as a society have just decided to be nice, economics of it be damned [1].

Very few humans under 10 in the united states have jobs. This was not always true. Very few humans over 80 have jobs. There are no essential tasks that we have for these classes of people, just like the horses and very slow people. (We could consider this a victory that there aren't any jobs for 10 year olds but that's beside the point here)

There are classes of humans already boxed out of any possible job in some economies. Gradations of humans must exist nearly all the way up the chain. Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.

Maybe not all humans will be obsolete in the job market, but we already have to permit that some are.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_Industries

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#73

Post by Namrog84 »

gozur88 wrote: post #13
hacker_9 wrote: post #4

There 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.

Somebody on this very site quipped you can define a robot as "A machine that doesn't work yet," because if it worked you'd name it after what it does (like a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner).

That is actually quite clever.

Most of the scenarios that I think to use the word robot, I can very easily conceive that its still underdeveloped and yet to be highly proficient at that task yet. Yet when it can, we will undoubtedly refine the term for that particular robot.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#74

Post by glangdale »

I wonder sometimes whether there's another accelerating factor at work; specifically, as this kind of technological advance accelerates, that the prospect of interfacing with another human to get a task done becomes less and less pleasant for people. I've already noticed that quite a number of people of my acquaintance, including occasionally myself, would rather spend 5 minutes poking at radio buttons on my phone to order food vs 45 seconds talking to a human.

There may be a premium associated with an absence of human interaction in a task. I'm sure many people would pay more for a robotic cleaner per unit of effectiveness than they would for a human cleaner, just from the perspective of privacy.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#75

Post by edblarney »

sigmar wrote: post #40
jdoliner wrote: post #10

Something 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…

>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...

"Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation"

On the aggregate jobs are not being destroyed.

Obviously - many are put out of work because of automation, but it seems that jobs are created somewhere else.

The historical unemployment rate attests to this.

It's a paradox that cannot be ignored, because it likely helps us understand the nature of employment.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#77

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

mrfusion wrote: post #24

I was thinking about automation and job loss recently. I tried to make a simple model to understand what happens. Can you guys critique this thought experiment? It makes it seem like it won't be a problem. There are three people on an island. One catches fish. One bakes bread and the other one owns the land and takes a portion of the of the fish and bread. Let's say one day the land owner recieves a machine that make…

Since no one has to catch fish, bake bread, or collect taxes, the inhabitants are finally freed from their labor. The land owner then starts to invite his former tenants over for rousing philosophical discussions. They wonder if there is a world beyond the waters surrounding the island, their final fronter

Since they no longer have to work for survival, they are free to spend their energies on gathering wood and experimenting with designs for a boat. After many iterations, they create a vessel that is capable of tacking against the wind and surviving extreme weather. They leave the island filled with a sense of excitement, contemplating what new life and civilizations they may come across as they boldly go where no one has gone before.

The machine they leave gets better and better at making bread and catching fish. It becomes self-aware, and continues optimizing its primary mission. As it wants to maximize the amount of bread and fish it can collect, it wipes out all lifeforms, including humans, not necessary to its task and terraforms the earth to further increase output.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#78

Post by winstonewert »

phkahler wrote: post #44
sigmar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

It's easy to see and I've said this here before. As a business owner doing manufacturing (for example) replacing manual labor with automation costs less. That's less in terms of TCO, so that includes setup, operation, energy, and maintenance. The idea that the low-skilled assembly jobs are just replaced by high-skilled jobs is untrue. Those high-skilled jobs pay more - perhaps 2-5x more, and if the TCO is actually le…

I think you are engaging a straw man here. Obviously, given a fixed amount of output, automation will reduce the man-hours required. That's the whole point. And yes, that will, by itself, reduce the amount of work available. Who do you think is saying otherwise?.

The question isn't whether automation decreases the amount of work neccessary to produce the same output, obviously it does. The question is whether we can reallocate workers somewhere in the economy so that we can produce even more output with the same input.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#79

Post by michaelchisari »

edblarney wrote: post #75
sigmar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

"Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation" On the aggregate jobs are not being destroyed. Obviously - many are put out of work because of automation, but it seems that jobs are created somewhere else. The historical unemployment rate attests to this. It's a paradox that cannot be ignored, because it likely helps us understand the nature of employment.

Are the jobs that are created, in aggregate, as good as the jobs that are replaced?

If we lose 10,000 jobs at $25 an hour, and replace them with 12,000 jobs at $9 an hour, is that trend sustainable?

Other factors need to be taken into consideration. Did the original jobs provide health care, childcare and other benefits, while the new jobs do not? Did the original jobs provide ample overtime opportunities, while the new jobs are barely considered full time?

Are the new jobs created concentrated geographically, requiring a major redistribution of the population into cities with much higher costs of living (a double whammy if the new jobs are much lower paying).

And most importantly, if we're talking about AI, are the new jobs low hanging fruit for future AI and robotics advancements, creating a cycle of disruption and precarity in semi- and low-skilled workers?

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#80

Post by Almaviva »

Swizec wrote: post #49
ThomPete wrote: post #2

Yes 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.

The question isn't "What happened to horse carriages", they're now cars. Obviously. But where did all the horses go?

Horses haven't shown the same level of adaptation to different skill sets that humans have.
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