Should economists be more concerned about AI?

I suggest you take a deep dive into the field of computational creativity. That's the first iteration. The next time, it will be less, and less the time after that. As advances are made, machines will simply have to be trained with the libraries of movies and tv shows of the past. not only that, with all the data it has on us (thanks FB), it will be able to predict what type of performance we would find the most entertaining. I remember one researcher saying that with about 300 Facebook likes, he can create a model of preferences that knows us better than we know ourselves.

There are already machines composing music. If you can play piano, try out Google Duet

> There's an endless supply of interesting challenges

Sure there is. But how many of these new, interesting challenges employ people on a large scale? Contrary to what you believe, there hasn't been an explosion of new job opportunities afforded by technology. At its height, GM employed almost 600,000 people. Facebook, a company with a market cap of nearly $400 billion, has 17,000 employees. These new jobs will not be able to absorb the losses. And how many people in their 40's or above will be successful at retraining or acquiring new skills?

> I don't think AI will be any different (at least not before it becomes fully general and human-equivalent).

You're missing the point. It doesn't have to be fully general or human equivalent. It just has to be more cost effective. Like a robot can not fully substitute for a human janitor (eg shooting the shit with the employee working late). But if the machine costs less and never takes a vacation or sick day, the job will be replaced. And as any investment professional will tell you, the past does not predict the future.

yThe occupations that employ the most people have existed for more or less hundreds, if not thousands of years. Top 5 occupations by # of workers are: Transportation, Retail Sales, 1st line supervisors, cashiers, and secretaries. Collectively, they represent over 15 million people. Cooks, accountants, customer service, paralegals, clerks, bookkeepers, receptionsts, maids, etc are all capable of being done. And remember, it doesn't have to be perfect or even better than a human, just more cost effectively.

> People have invented whole classes of new jobs that didn't exist a few decades ago.

The only new occupation that didn't exist hundreds of years ago (programmers) is 33rd on the list of occupations with the most people. These new classes aren't created fast enough to keep up with the number of jobs that will be destroyed. Also, it's a poor argument to look to the past to say why this will be the same. People never went faster than the speed of horse until the steam engine (ppl literally fainted on train rides from the speed). Now, we've clocked speeds at 25000 mph. Man never flew till the early 20th century, now we've reached the moon. The amount of things that people thought would never change that happened in the 20th and 21st century is staggering, and is only accelerating. It only has to happen once to falsify patterns of the past.

The internet and printing press are poor analogies, as is any other comparison to a previous technology. As a mental exercise, think about the buggy whip from the point of view of the horse (the actual worker in this case). Hooves, plows, and other technological advances previously made your life easier. The automobile made you obsolete. Sure, we still have uses for horses today, but not like in the past.

> massive net increase in jobs. People have invented whole classes of new jobs that didn't exist a few decades ago.

I disagree. The internet has just provided a new medium for exchange. Ebay sellers are just merchants. People on Etsy are craftsmen. Uber and UberEats "contractors" are drivers(transportation). These classes of jobs have existed for THOUSANDS of years. In the case of Uber, a class of jobs, the one that just so happens to employ the most people in the US, more than any other occupation, will soon be obsolete, like the jobs of horses above. Services like Squarespace and Wix are making the job of the strict Web Designer obsolete. If you knew html and CSS, you had a job. Now, with the 3847078103720 JAvascript tools and libraries you have to know, if you can't keep up, you're obsolete. (Learn the fundamentals kids)

> I'd describe it as AI freeing up humans to work on other endeavors.

It could, and I hope it does. Looking at human social progress doesn't give me much hope for that

Food for thought: how sure are we that this statement is true? What does it even mean, seen from a cybernetics perspective? How complex does a task need to be until it's not considered mechanical anymore? Isn't the brain, eventually, a very complex biological machine?

It is also very difficult to do unless you are just making plain single color fabric.