Should economists be more concerned about AI? • Hacker News Board

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#111

Post by elsewhen » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 5:34 AM UTC

vorotato wrote: post #67

massysett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates is worth $76 billion. US population is over 300 million. So if we liberated Gates of every penny he has, there would be a one-time payment of less than $253 to every American. The rich do not have enough money to pay for everyone else to be on the dole.

Sure but there were over 10 million millionaires in the US last year. If we took just a million a year just from those guys we'd have 30,000 a year per american. I'm not saying we should, but your math sucks.

a millionaire is a person with $1MM or more in net worth. the lion's share of these people have the low single-digits millions, as you would expect. after you take $1MM from them in the first year, they won't have much more to give in the subsequent years. net-worth ≠ income.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#112

Post by ethbro » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 5:37 AM UTC

glangdale wrote: post #74

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…

I would counter that it's not privacy / lack of human interaction we're increasingly desiring, but regularity. Or, being able to expect a thing happening in a given situation.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#113

Post by ethbro » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 5:39 AM UTC

Almaviva wrote: post #80

Swizec wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(In 50 years) Humans haven't shown the same level of adaptation to different skill sets that GP AIs have.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#114

Post by js8 » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:36 AM UTC

I believe AI (and automation) are just special cases of growing income inequality (between labor and capital), so it's a little unfair, perhaps, as many economists are worried about that.

You can get surplus of labor (and so decreasing its value relative to capital) in two ways - by having too much automation, or by having too much people. The first is the current scenario (of automation), the second is the classic Malthusian one, which I am sure happened many times in history.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#115

Post by Bombthecat » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 6:45 AM UTC

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…

To add to it.

I think where we are going is this: early days:

Twenty first level, ten second level, maybe five third level.

Future with AI and smart bots: maybe one first,none second, one extreme highly paid third level.

What do you do with the rest?

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#116

Post by the_cyber_pass » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:04 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #102

Houshalter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if AI can program computers, it's still difficult to replace programmers because programming comes hand in hand with analysis - process analysis, system analysis, design, security, interfacing with old projects and interacting with human teams. AI won't replace a programmer's external knowledge before it reaches the level of AGI. A horse or an assembly line worker do lots of repetitive work. A programmer does lo…

I think the point they were trying to make is that although we might not see the complete collapse of these industries now, there is a good chance it is still coming. They might already be dead by something already created but the knowledge just isn't widespread yet and is sitting in someones thesis just waiting for another person to try a practical version of a now theoretical concept. As to their other point getting rid of the programmer is very much on peoples todo list right now. It's a massive cost center. To think this one line of work is somehow immune from this trend seems short cited. I am sure the horse caretakers had a hundred reasons why they would survive automobiles until they didn't.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#117

Post by the_cyber_pass » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:29 AM UTC

pcmaffey wrote: post #34

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…

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.

I would go further than that. Even if you try to keep up, it's becoming difficult to follow where everything is going now. I highly doubt that many people even here have a deep understanding of many subjects in the CS wider field outside of their niche. I don't think it's a stretch to say ycombinator represents a very skilled subset in the field. What about all the rest of those programmers who don't come here or worse they have a family which sucks away a few hours of study time every day. Much of the industry still produces stuff like CRUD apps and toils away in layers of abstraction in "Enterprise Software"

Additionally we are facing the reality that being a good programmer is not enough anymore near the upper percentiles and this will trickle down in time to the rest of the industry. You can't just be a programmer, you have to be a statistician with a strong understanding of a hard science like biochemistry/genetics.

Given all this how the hell is a 40 year old married steel mill worker with kids supposed to just switch jobs to something that fills these requirements. At most the government might pay for an undergrad and that is quickly becoming not enough, not that places are eager to higher fresh young graduates from anywhere but Stanford anyways. How is the average younger graduate supposed to compete when we are now weeding out more and more of the top 10% for even basic hireability. Where getting a masters degree at a B/C list school might as well have you be wearing a dunce cap. This is completely ignoring issues like the pedigree system we have set up where if a new graduate takes a job at a boring Java shop they might get passed over by top companies later for being "Not good enough"

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#118

Post by ianai » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 7:36 AM UTC

ewjordan wrote: post #82

wwarner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happen to agree with this. Have a listen to the last twimlai.com podcast about "deep genomics". From an ML point of view, they're still finding their way, but from an economic point of view two things seem clear. 1) ML + genetics are going to have a massive economic impact. 2) Not a single job will be lost as a result of advancement, as the sector doesn't yet exist. Whenever I hear someone say there won't be any jo…

And every person that tells you that there won't be any jobs after AI passes a threshold has already considered your railroad question, and decided that for various reasons the AI shift is different. There's a big difference between crossing a threshold where machines do one or two specific things better than we do and crossing one where they do everything better. There's certainly an argument about whether or not th…

They probably won't do tasks that people want a human to do better. i.e. I think there will always be human card dealers because, despite being able to gamble against a machine just as well, some people prefer to gamble against a human. There are many customer-centric jobs such as that. I've got no idea how that will work out.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#119

Post by xbmcuser » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:06 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #102

Houshalter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if AI can program computers, it's still difficult to replace programmers because programming comes hand in hand with analysis - process analysis, system analysis, design, security, interfacing with old projects and interacting with human teams. AI won't replace a programmer's external knowledge before it reaches the level of AGI. A horse or an assembly line worker do lots of repetitive work. A programmer does lo…

Ai is already being used to find security bugs in software. An Ai is able to do in a few minutes which would take multiple programmers 1000s of man hours to do. As these Ai keep getting better the need for thousands of such code analyst programming jobs will be lost. 1 programmer with the help of Ai will be doing jobs of hundreds of programmers. With the current economic systems the income of many will be funneled at a n exponential rate to the top. Rich people getting more wealth doesn't help the economy. A billion going to billionaire will hurt the economy compared to 100k going to 10k people. As those 10k people will use it and it would be used in the economy multiple times where as the billiionare will probably keep in his bank account.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#120

Post by rahimnathwani » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 8:09 AM UTC

jdoliner wrote: post #87

sskates wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agreed. I think the GP's viewpoint was widely shared by "The Elite" for the past 10 years and is what created the backlash that got Trump elected. We (and I use that loosely) have to care because the people who get displaced all care about their jobs. In fact, because this displacement is accelerating, we have to care even more than we would in the past.

I think you might be projecting your own beliefs onto Trump's election here. If what you're saying is true then we would expect income to be a good predictor of voting for Trump right? It wasn't [0]. Trump's election was backlash, but not to loss of jobs. It was a backlash against much more than that? Did you feel that loss of jobs to technology was a problem before Trump? If so it seems very convenient to believe th…

"we would expect income to be a good predictor of voting for Trump right? It wasn't [0]"

The figures in that article are all aggregates (at county level) and say nothing about whether an individual's income level correlates with voting for Trump.

Imagine a scenario in which there are two types of county:

- Type A: High median income; high income inequality (as measured by Gini coefficient)

- Type B: Low median income; low income inequality

If there are more Trump supporters in A than B, does that suggest that low income doesn't encourage voting for Trump? Not necessarily: perhaps low income relative to neighbours or living costs encourages voting for Trump.

I'm not saying income isn't a good predictor for voting for Trump. However, I'm not sure the post you cited demonstrates that either way.