No Recent Automation Revolution

I usually stay away from this kind of topics, but this rubs me the wrong way and I have five minutes to burn. Probably because I expected better from him.

The mistake here is the nature of capitalism. In reality, when you see a bunch of companies beginning to turn everything into "a field of strawberries", something is going extremely right. Why? Because capitalism is working based on needs, and it means it found a way to satisfy a very deep (or very wide) need. At the end of the long chain there are people that are more satisfied with their lives than before.

As for being afraid of this? Hogwash. In nature every exponential curve is the beginning of a logistics curve. And the more complex the system, earlier the curve flattens. If you burn a forest it'l taper only when it has nothing left to burn. If you try something similar in a human society, it will find blockers long before that.

And that's why we should be more afraid of AI - there is the chance (small, true) that to an AI our society is as uncomplicated as a dry forest, and the feedback mechanisms that hold us in place just don't apply to it.

Investors will provide the capital, robots/software can be hired.

With all due respect, I thought Robin Hanson was better than this.

I followed him briefly during the 2013-2015 automation hype (which hasm't died yet; far from it), and I found him to be carrying out reasonable analysis of tech economics. I found him to be one of the few economists who are in touch with tech reality, and so things weren't that bad in the econosphere in terms of keeping up with tech trends.

This blog post doesn't help maintain that perspective at all. I'm sorry.

As a tech person myself, I'm extremely busy with making this happen instead of being a negative nancy towards other tech folks, but I'll finish my though with this:

I have a close friend who is a typical naysayer of tech progress, "business as usual", "old jobs replaced with new jobs", "capital is what makes thing work", "economics good technology meh"

He will not stop for a minute, and will not entertain a single of my counter-arguments.

What is super-surprising to me though is that in the last 5-7 years, he has pivoted from a non-tech job to complete-alignment with one of the big-tech companies, has been investing heavily in all kinds of big tech stocks, and watching his stocks with a keen eye day-in and day-out.

And everytime we talk, the first thing he discusses is my opinion and forecast of where technology is headed. Once having absorbed all that information, he goes back to his same old rotten cassette tape.

Funny how it works.

Well as I unerstand it, the average American salaried worker spends 10-12 hours a day, at least 5 days a week, at the office. With maybe 10 days holiday a year.

How does anyone have time to have an actual life outside work?

As a robotics engineer I too once bought in to the notion that automation would lead to a massive jobs crash. But the more experience I get the more I see how big the problem space is. There's a million simple tasks we cannot do with robotics, and even when we can do them the machine costs $100k. Instead I am beginning to understand that humans and machines will work together for a long time.

I still think we can use automation to do radical things. I want to see us automate food production and meal preparation, to lower the cost of healthy food. By intentionally lowering the cost of human survival with automation, and with changes to intellectual property restrictions which keep costs high, we could create a world where food is so cheap we give it away to those in need. With changes to our cultural norms and broad application of this theory, it is literally possible to eliminate material poverty.

Think about it - in a world where there are only private book collections, some people are book-rich and some people are book-poor. But that kind of poverty is effectively eliminated if you introduce the concept of libraries to that world. If we share the automation we create the same way we share books at a library, we can create societies where everyone is provided for at no direct material expense to others.

Years ago I wrote an essay [1] where I used the concept of impending job loss from automation to emphasize the importance of this better way of living I proposed above. But I've realized that we don't need to see automation as an impending crisis - millions of people are already in crisis because they cannot afford the food, medicine, or housing they need. So the need for change is still there, but the cause is not some future problem, but the problems of the status quo.

[1] http://tlalexander.com/wealth/