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Should economists be more concerned about AI?

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Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#121

Post by Fantastic_T »

jjoonathan wrote: post #84
edblarney wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"was widely shared by "The Elite" for the past 10" You mean for the last 200 years. Mass automation has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution. As long as there is value to be created, and the surpluses are distributed enough so that consumers 'want something and can pay for it' - there will be jobs. Obviously, it's more painful for those put out of work than 'the elite' ... but employment levels h…

The long history of scarcity amid plenty does deserve examination. Critical examination. How messed up is it that people not only have to beg for the privilege of work, but that they are seen as selfish, thankless, and incompetent for doing so? Once humanity gets this sorted out -- and it will, eventually -- the present state of affairs will be looked at with the same contempt that people in today's world have for fe…

Could you explain a little more explicitly what you are referring to, and what you think the solution will be?

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#122

Post by Fantastic_T »

simonsarris wrote: post #72
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 automate…

>Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil.

There is no such thing as a horse job. Horses are not people with legal rights. They are property, that was replaced as soon as a better machine came around.

Humans aren't horses. Horses can't buy an automobile or a computer. The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita. The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#123

Post by ThomPete »

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.

And neither have humans. How many +40 will be able to change career?

I find the dismissive attitude really unfounded and blind to the realities we live in.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#124

Post by ThomPete »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #81
FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you can come to this conclusion. Machines are even encroaching upon artistic and creative endeavors, territory once taught to be the province of humans. From drawing to composing music to acting (Grand Moff Tarkin, please stand up), they are advancing. Machines unequivocally surpass my abilities in said fields.

> From drawing to composing music to acting (Grand Moff Tarkin, please stand up), How many people and how many hours do you think it took to bring that character to life? As compared to the time of a human actor? (Not claiming in general that it takes as many people to run a machine as it did to do the job manually, but it almost certainly did in that case.) We're not anywhere near the point where arbitrary creative…

That massive net increase you talk about is not massive at all. The number of new jobs created in the us have gone down, decade after decade since ww2.

Furthermore you need to look at AI evolutionary. There is not some whatchmaker who creates this perfect ai specimen. Its evolving, one layer at a time and its instantly applicable.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#125

Post by wwarner »

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…

I'm simply pointing out that there are lots of applications of AI that will create work. And to those that say that machines will just solve all those problems by themselves, I would ask them to produce some evidence besides an estimated trajectory.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#126

Post by crdoconnor »

mattnewton wrote: post #20
fullshark wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most individuals care less about jobs in aggregate and just care about their own particular job. They especially don't care about the number of jobs at the global level. There are many people whose job will be replaced by robots and whatever expertise they've learned over the years will become useless. They will need to transition to an entirely new career and start over. If they are over the age of 40 they have to a…

Agreed, the jobs are moving to new places and skillsets, but many US voting demographics aren't.

In many cases abroad.

Apple (among other tech companies) indirectly created 1.3 million jobs at Foxconn in China, for instance.

Most economic models (including the Ball State U "study" by Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA) that counted "jobs lost to robots" define productivity as GDP/number of employees employed in America. This indicates upon shallow inspection that Apple, for instance, has a very high productivity (high contribution to GDP/employees).

Or, in other words, economists' models used to declare an impending magic robot revolution right now are defining the 1.2 million Foxconn employees used to make iPhones as robots in their assumptions.

Foxconn itself regularly threatens to replace its 1.2 million employees with magic robots. For instance, see this threat from 2011 made at an employee dance party for some bizarre reason:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...

Since then they increased their headcount implying that the threat was made for some other reason than it being say, the truth.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#127

Post by MagnumOpus »

ThomPete wrote: post #54
JoshTriplett wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't suggest otherwise; however, the comment I replied to said: > it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans But we necessarily can't reach the point where AI can do all human jobs without having completely general human-level (or beyond-human-level) AI. Until then, AI can only replace a subset of human jobs, and I've seen many convincing argu…

There is no net gain, the number of jobs have only been growing because the market have been growing, but in the west the number of actual jobs are declining. In the US, 95% of jobs are temp jobs and the definition of when someone is said to have a job have been widened substantially since Bush. The number of new jobs created have gone down decade after decade since ww2

> 95% of jobs are temp jobs

False. At best 40% are - and given that a full-time worker has only one job and a part-time temp can have half a dozen at a time, even this is an upward distortion.

> The definition of when someone is said to have a job have been widened substantially since Bush

Also false.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#128

Post by ThomPete »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #109
ThomPete wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure we will see a move to nationalize basic production. If you think about it it actually make sense as there is no more competitive advantage to be had if the entire ecosystem is automated.

Automation doesn't mean no competitive advantage.

Full automation do.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#129

Post by phkahler »

hackuser wrote: post #95
winstonewert wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly; the economy is not zero-sum; it's not a pie we have to split. The pie grows by the addition of more labor, more capital, or greater efficiency. For example, in the U.S. starting from 1917, the great majority of jobs have disappeared, the population (and thus the workforce) has tripled, and yet unemployment is less than 5%. If you find a way to do something more efficiently, then that creates more wealth for…

Exactly; the economy is not zero-sum; it's not a pie we have to split.

Yes it is. The amount of consumption (goods and services) a given person can indulge in has an upper limit. In the past, people who were freed from some tasks were simply reallocated to others and more stuff was produced which there was demand for.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#130

Post by phkahler »

winstonewert wrote: post #78
phkahler wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> The question is whether we can reallocate workers somewhere in the economy so that we can produce even more output with the same input.

I alluded to that in my last sentence. You can only reallocate workers to something else if there is demand for that something else. As I said to another poster, there is an upper limit to consumption so at some point there just won't be anything else for people to do/produce. Consumers have an upper bound on their consumption based on the number of hours in a day.

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