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Should economists be more concerned about AI?

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Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#141

Post by Almaviva »

ThomPete wrote: post #123
Almaviva wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is fundamental and serious, what to do when a growing number of people have literally nothing valuable to contribute to an economy. But horses aren't a good analogy to shed light on it.

Horses are more analogous to steam engines than people, in their historical function on the economy.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#142

Post by ThomPete »

Almaviva wrote: post #141
ThomPete wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is fundamental and serious, what to do when a growing number of people have literally nothing valuable to contribute to an economy. But horses aren't a good analogy to shed light on it. Horses are more analogous to steam engines than people, in their historical function on the economy.

Horses are a bad analogy if you want to prove that AI wont take over most jobs.

They are however a great analogy if you want to see how technology once it reaches a certain point renders biological beings sub-par useless as part wealth creation.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#143

Post by rpcorb »

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…

Can confirm. I've noticed this social trend as well.

However, interestingly, there also seems to be critical threshold (different for every task) beyond which the opposite urge takes hold. Take, for instance, customer/technical support hotlines. The feeling of, "Please just let me talk to a human..." In that case there's a premium on the presence of human interaction. It almost seems like an "uncanny valley" of technological problem solving. In other words, machines are useful but usually brittle. Humans have a flexibility and creativity which won't be easy to replicate.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#144

Post by Fantastic_T »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #135
Fantastic_T wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Ostler was a human job. The parent comment implied that horses had jobs.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#145

Post by phkahler »

winstonewert wrote: post #140
phkahler wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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) cons…

>> It simply means that instead of reallocating worker time to different production, people's time is reallocated to consumption.

Well, people out of work can't really allocate their time to consumption. This is the basis for an argument that we need a shorter work week and a need to enforce it (high Europe, screw you US tech industry). When we are efficient enough to provide everything people want to consume in their 24 hour day and have leftover people without work, we need to make them work less so it will require more people to do all the work. I think there are limits to that as well.

These problem all lie on a path to a possible utopia where the machines take care of the people and we're free to do whatever we want. I'm not sure how you get there from here or what that would even look like.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#146

Post by winstonewert »

phkahler wrote: post #145
winstonewert wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) cons…

>> It simply means that instead of reallocating worker time to different production, people's time is reallocated to consumption. Well, people out of work can't really allocate their time to consumption. This is the basis for an argument that we need a shorter work week and a need to enforce it (high Europe, screw you US tech industry). When we are efficient enough to provide everything people want to consume in thei…

You have pretty much agreed to my point. Its not a matter of running out of work, its a matter of reallocating the work.

However, I do not think we will have to force people to work less. If someone has hit the limit of what they want to consume, why are they still working? If there is really nothing more that money can buy, why would they be trying to earn more money?

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#147

Post by hackuser »

phkahler wrote: post #129
hackuser wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The amount of consumption (goods and services) a given person can indulge in has an upper limit

Why? What is the limit? The amount can grow, and the evidence that it does is overwhelming.

> 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.

Why would that only be 'in the past' and not today and tomorrow?

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#148

Post by glangdale »

rpcorb wrote: post #143
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…

Can confirm. I've noticed this social trend as well. However, interestingly, there also seems to be critical threshold (different for every task) beyond which the opposite urge takes hold. Take, for instance, customer/technical support hotlines. The feeling of, "Please just let me talk to a human..." In that case there's a premium on the presence of human interaction. It almost seems like an "uncanny valley" of techn…

Yes indeed. Unfortunately one often finds that you are talking to a human who is sitting on the same side of the "uncanny valley of technological problem solving as you". That is, some pleasant and would-be-helpful call center worker who is now just banging their head on the same problem you were. I've had more than a few calls where you can actually hear them getting stuck on the same web page, experiencing the same bug/timeout/whatever that you were getting on the 'public' site. Flexibility and creativity aren't much use when we're all just wrestling with the same brittle machine on the same terms...

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#149

Post by gozur88 »

speedboat wrote: post #31
monk_e_boy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates said that no nation on earth is rich enough to afford basic income. It's a long way off.

Bill Gates just want doesn't want to pay more in taxes. That's what UBI requires: more taxes. Considerable tax increases, but there it is. Tax the economic beneficiaries of the economy and divest to everyone to bring the top and bottom closer to GDP per capita.

Would he have to pay more taxes, though? All his wealth is tied up in stock. His income is probably relatively small.

When taxes go up the money actually comes from middle and upper-middle class people who draw a paycheck, not from super-rich people whose net worth goes up by a billion dollars on a good market day and all without generating any taxable income.

Re: Should economists be more concerned about AI?

#150

Post by hetman »

novos wrote: post #43
hetman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that difference is overstated. Weaving was once a highly skilled profession requiring intricate control by an intelligent operator yet it was increasingly automated even before the advent of computing. I think the difference in what we consider "force" work and what is "mind" work is highly subjective to the things we've grown used to thinking of as menial based on the technology we've learned to take for…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_creativity has some links to examples but I'm on mobile.

These tend to be imitations of an existing style at best with a sprinkling of randomness thrown in, and nonsensical at worst. Certainly nothing fascinating enough to have people queuing to experience it paid ticket in hand. Still, artistic creativity seems like a pretty lofty goal at this point so it wouldn't be the first place I would expect to see genuine creativity emerge.
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