"Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income" dear lord
The battle cry of raving lunatic libertarians like Koch and Ron Paul.
AI Won't Cause Unemployment
151–160 of 362 posts
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the television first arrived any TV optimist would’ve said: “clearly TV is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down” … and that is exactly what happened. Since 1960 every kid in the world “clearly” gets the absolute best education imaginable thanks to the economy of scale afforded by TV broadcasting. It’s basic economics. Oh wait.
And yet the proliferation of screens capable of displaying information and graphics has been an absolute boon to education.
I’m not denying it, but the cost of educating 1 child - has that fallen or risen?
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#153What an incredibly, idiotically reductionist interpretation of cherry-picked data this is. First of all, he selected a fairly random, non-representative set of goods and services. I can immediately think of a glaringly obvious counter-example that his dataset excludes: energy. It's one of the most highly regulated industries in the US and yet energy inflation has been barely positive over the last 20 years ( https://…
His interpretation of “industries that are allowed to innovate vs those where it’s illegal” is laughable. Has Marc considered that there might be some other fundamental difference between the inflation-positive sectors of health, education, food and housing, vs the inflation-negative ones of TVs, cars and software subscriptions? I’ll give you a hint Marc: some of these are essential to life and society and some are n…
Because housing is essential to life does not mean it should double in price every ten years.
Because education is valuable it doesn't mean the amount of student debt in the country needs to double like it has in the last two decades.
At least in these two examples, these "industries" are flying off the charts in the last two decades not because of how essential they are, or how technologically progressive they are, or how the value they bring to people's lives has correspondingly doubled just now (nope, same essential value as before), but because there are large groups of people who have figured out how to milk the shit out of these parts of society, and technology (which didn't start with ChatGPT yesterday) doesn't seem to be helping with that.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#154This claim that AI won't cause unemployment baffles me. I understand the argument being made that new types of jobs will be created, but what the people making that argument miss is the massive level of up-skilling/re-skilling that is required of the population whose jobs are replaced. This has not worked out well. Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam…
It’s very surprising when people talk about AI but not talk about the Industrial Revolution. The power loom hugely changed the world. You don’t have to write a substack about your opinions — just read a history book. Second, Marc quotes outsourcing but that’s not at all a relevant example. Outsourcing was not a technology. His other example is of robots but robots have not been revolutionary like the power loom or ev…
[deleted]
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#155This claim that AI won't cause unemployment baffles me. I understand the argument being made that new types of jobs will be created, but what the people making that argument miss is the massive level of up-skilling/re-skilling that is required of the population whose jobs are replaced. This has not worked out well. Just look at the communities in some poorer parts of the UK, who were relying on coal, mining and steam…
Not up-skilling but down-skilling. AI is going to come for the mathematicians and radiologists first and work its way down to the pizza delivery boys. This is because robotics is a couple of decades behind. Anyone with a desk job as a knowledge worker is most at risk.
Yeah I could easily see it happening this way. Which breakthrough will happen first is frankly anyone's guess at this point.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this different from previous leaps in industrialization or technological innovation? If you make widgets worse than a machine in a factory then your labor is worthless.
One word: scale.
Correct, most here think that this time isn't different because "unemployment goes down as technology improves since demand increases more than supply". The issue is that AI makes the supply effectively infinite. I claim humans do not have "effectively infinite" demand, and even if they did, the cardinality of the supply infinity is higher than the demand infinity.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#157> The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask the Luddites. The obvious yet unaddressed point here is that automation was bad for the Luddites. They lost their jobs to machines. The implied retort is that people can and should be reskilled, but as people like Andrew Yang have said many times, reskilling has mixed results. It seems very weird that I, as a moderately knowledgeable layperson, should…
And reskilling makes much more sense when you’re replacing manual labour. Less sense when you’re replacing brains.
Most the reskilling will ironically be in knowledge workers who will be forced into skilled physical labor. AI plumbers are a lot further out than most other forms of AI workers.
Morevec's paradox rearing it's ugly head again
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this different from previous leaps in industrialization or technological innovation? If you make widgets worse than a machine in a factory then your labor is worthless.
We moved from farming and digging ditch to offices where we think for a living. But tell me, what is left after physical labor and thinking? Sex work? I don't think most of us are cut out for that. And with AI taking on creative work it won't be long before someone makes a Cherry 2000.
Well you might be farming again when you have nothing left to do?
I'm sure a shit not going to be laid off due a robot and do nothing about it, I'll be doing whatever I need to do to survive, this might be farming and living a simpler life, even if it's considered a step backwards, I have really no idea how far it will go.
My theory is however, I'll be either building AIs, or developing new ones, helping optimize them etc.
I'm not really sold that we're going to every create an AGI that can reason and will just want to sit in a box all day and work for humans, I think there are some serious ethical considerations there too.
So as long as we're not talking about sentience, these thing are systems, and there will be demand for new and improved systems.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not up-skilling but down-skilling. AI is going to come for the mathematicians and radiologists first and work its way down to the pizza delivery boys. This is because robotics is a couple of decades behind. Anyone with a desk job as a knowledge worker is most at risk.
Mathematicians are more than just number crunchers. Perhaps the most important part of a mathematicians job is formally defining problems. Even if the next generation of ChatGPT can solve any math problem you give it satisfactory, you still need a mathematician to ask the question. Presumably this AI won’t be omnipotent either, and there will be some limit to its mathematical prowess. I suspect most human effort will…
Why does society have mathematicians right now? It's some mix of "the people find mathematics intellectually worthwhile" (public universities) and "we sometimes need to ask them to solve hard problems". If AI makes it less intellectually interesting, the first reason goes away. If engineers can just ask the AI to solve a hard problem instead of the mathematician, they don't need the mathematician as a middle man. So AI also breaks this reason.
> I suspect most human effort will be spent inventing new ways to push the AI further.
Assuming the AI can't just do that itself too.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japan is ahead of us in time. What they are we will be. Zero interest rates can’t fix massive debt, a graying population with low population growth, low immigration, and out of control property prices. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencelight/2021/02/24/will-t...
It can. Zero interest rates are the natural rate for money - since it is costless to produce. Therefore that is the optimal rate for the currency issuer. There is no need to pay people not to spend when you can tax them if they do. That's just basic income for rich people. Banks then discount assets into liquidity at a markup over zero and they can be allowed to compete fully and go bust which controls the net intere…
"costless to produce"
No, making coins or dollars, particularly the type which is resistant to counter-fitting, takes an awful lot of money to produce. Hell, pennies are worth significantly more than their face value, hence why we have people calling to ban the penny all the time!