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

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#131

Post by phkahler » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 2:09 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #97

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…

> But to a first approximation automation destroys jobs. Automation transfers an increasing share of returns of economic activity to the capitalist owning the automated tool from labor; "destroys jobs" may be a result, but increasing (in the absence of some compensatory mechanism) economic inequality is a more certain result.

If there is a lot of competition, the capitalist will have to lower prices to compete. Without competition he may just enjoy the increased profits. Either way I think job destruction is the more certain result, but you are right in that it is done with the intent of increasing inequality whether that happens or not.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#132

Post by ThomPete » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 2:33 PM UTC

MagnumOpus wrote: post #127

ThomPete wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

95% of jobs created since 2008.

https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all...

And yes the definition got widened substantially under bush and Obama kept it.

You can see the definition here. It's quite wide.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#133

Post by valuearb » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 2:58 PM UTC

We should have done something about automation in 1800, we had a country where 95% was gainfully employed in agriculture and those jobs are now gone.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#134

Post by kwhitefoot » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 3:01 PM UTC

jdoliner wrote: post #99

simonsarris wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The statements about jobs not being destroyed is about _aggregate_ jobs. If you pick any specific group of people (or animals) you can find many examples of groups losing jobs. Hopefully this doesn't come as a surprise to you and hopefully you can see how these are different things. Markets shift, that's the whole point of markets, and when they do it's very painful for those they shift away from. The most poignant e…

Perhaps people simply need to express themselves with a little more care and clarity and say that "the number of jobs has not been reduced" instead of saying that "jobs have not been destroyed" when it is plain as day that certain jobs no longer exist, that is they have been destroyed.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#135

Post by kwhitefoot » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 3:03 PM UTC

Fantastic_T wrote: post #122

simonsarris wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

> There is no such thing as a horse job.

Of course there is. The occupation of ostler was once an important trade, it is no longer.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#136

Post by mattnewton » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 3:12 PM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #126

mattnewton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produc…

So the magic robot scenario is more expensive to implement than the Foxconn workforce, but if we were to implement more protectionist policies though that made manufacture in china untenable, would the magic robots still be more expensive than American labour?

Edit: Also, maybe Foxconn was on track to grow by even more, but used robots instead. It's not necessarily the case that greater automation isn't coming or that more people will always be hired; they seem to be holding their breath for the moment that robots can replace all the people and actively investing in the area in the meantime [1]

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#137

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 3:16 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #130

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…

>> 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. Con…

[deleted]

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#138

Post by crdoconnor » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 3:26 PM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #136

crdoconnor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produc…

So the magic robot scenario is more expensive to implement than the Foxconn workforce, but if we were to implement more protectionist policies though that made manufacture in china untenable, would the magic robots still be more expensive than American labour? Edit: Also, maybe Foxconn was on track to grow by even more, but used robots instead. It's not necessarily the case that greater automation isn't coming or tha…

So... "magic robots aren't real but just you wait they soon WILL be if you take away my dirt cheap labor" theory?

>Edit: Also, maybe Foxconn was on track to grow by even more, but used robots instead.

Indeed. I eagerly await Foxconn's one million magic robots promised in 2009, 2011, 2014, 2015 and again in 2016.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#139

Post by crdoconnor » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

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...

This study is unmitigated bullshit. They intentionally conflate the effect of robots with the trade deficit in their model. A $5 million California house bought every year by a Chinese oligarch is considered equivalent to 20 $50k/year jobs and Foxconn's 1.2 million employees are considered mathematical robots.

They effectively build an assumption into their model that offshoring only causes jobs if the offshored labor costs the same as American labor.

>There is tons of other research

None of it is good.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#140

Post by winstonewert » Thu, Mar 02, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #130

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…

>> 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. Con…

Yes, your last sentence alluded to that. But your whole post was still engaging a strawman.

But pointing out a limit in the amount a single person can consume doesn't change the essential situation. It simply means that instead of reallocating worker time to different production, people's time is reallocated to consumption.

If those who have jobs have enough money to hit the limit on what they can (or choose to) consume, they will cease working, leaving those jobs to others.