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AI Won't Cause Unemployment

pmarca.substack.com

261–270 of 362 posts

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#261
Two thoughts:

1. I think it's worth considering how much the Baumol effect is responsible for the price changes described. Specifically: we'd expect those industries that don't benefit from improved productivity (for instance, because AI doesn't actually meaningfully help with most parts of the work) to experience price rises, since they're competing in the labour market with other sectors that have have benefited from improved productivity, and can therefore pay workers more.

Or, to put it another way, you'd expect this effect to some degree in a market operating entirely without restriction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

2. If I remember correctly, in the past, when technological innovation eliminated jobs, the new ones that sprang up generally meant a rise in wages across the board. In other words, the overall effect was low-paid jobs being replaced with higher-paid jobs.

No more. In recent years, the graph of wages of replacement jobs looks more like a U-shape: they tend to either be low-paid or high-paid. For instance, take translating a textbook. A company might decide to fire their moderately well-paid translators with a steady job, and replace them with AI (built by another company, using a smaller number (per book) of high-paid tech workers), plus some low-paid, proof readers to fix up the mistakes. And the latter group is probably precariously employed: the better the AI gets, the less they're needed. And they're probably seen as lower skilled and therefore easier to replace by the company, so perhaps their jobs look more like precarious gig economy jobs.

That's a simplification, but I think the evidence suggests that that U-shape is a pattern that, very broadly, holds true. So, we might not be unemployed, but we might have a lot of people with falling incomes and much lower job security.

(Apologies, writing this in a hurry, so can't find a source right now!)

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#262

I don’t get the argument of tech not being able to affect prices. Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no? Also how does virtual and reimagined medical care not disrupt this? Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly. Didn’t Charlie Munger say something about how high prices create the…

> Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no? Not clear: the textbook prices have been detached from reality for many years now not because there weren't alternative ways to get the knowledge all along. But because they are a part of a bloated system that works to extract more and more money by gatekeeping (formal degrees), upsellin…

I don’t think you’d see the change immediately as many of these companies just shifted strategies to be digital in the last few years and continued to increase prices.

I’d expect that to slowly reverse over the next decade or two. If not, then there was plenty of successful lobbying.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#263

> Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income Which communist country has or had UBI? Because I am not aware of any, nor do I regard it as communist. So what do I mean by communism? All economies are run by a mixture of markets and commands. Communism is any economy that is largely command-based (all real economies are a mixture of the two, of course). UBI is where someone is given a regular amount of money and can spe…

What's funny is that it isn't communist. UBI is a free market belief utilising the money illusion to make capitalist extraction seem 'fair' to those who can't see past a dollar sign. Hence why Friedman made the case for it via 'negative income tax' In reality it is people who don't want to work for a living being fed and clothed by forcible extraction of time and output from those that do work for a living - with the…

It's not necessarily extraction from those that do work for a living if the tax to pay for the UBI is largely a wealth-tax taking the majority from wealthy investors (who, by the conventional wisdom of capitalism, do exactly what you accuse and extract time and output from those that do work for a living for the "hard labor" of managing an index fund). If that tax is balanced to offset the two, well - you've got a fair society (and one likely to eliminate billionaires over time).

I estimate that wealth tax price to be around the average cost of living - as any less and those are people who have no choice but to accept whatever poor labor deals are put in front of them, which enables the capitalist to extract more value than the labor is worth. If people have their costs of living covered and freedom to pick and choose to labor or not, then it doesn't matter if your net worth is 10k or 10M, you're going to accept a similar wage for similar work. (well, not entirely - but at least at that point it's about desire for luxuries not hard desperation)

A truly Communist economy takes this much further and splits things evenly from the start. Though I'd argue you get there with a very-high wealth tax and UBI. That doesn't necessarily mean the society is producing a lot of goods though - especially if you just uplifted most of your citizenry that were only doing those shitty jobs because they would literally starve otherwise. But to communism's not-credit, there haven't been many great implementations solving the motivation problem yet either.

I suspect a gradual UBI/wealth tax combo is going to do a lot better at easing in motivation and crucially - preventing violent backlash from those in power - than any sudden shift to a fully-communist system. Personally, that is.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ok to give an example to show a contradiction, but it's a mistake to use an example to point a generalization. Hoover dam is a bad example which can not be generalized into the "government is net positive problem solver" argument.

For one thing, everyone in the West who's fallen on hard times has been pretty grateful their government didn't let them starve to death. This general, wide-impact instance of problem-solving is why the public will never allow libertarians anywhere near power.

The US is the single largest food and energy producing country in the world. The US economy barely depends on exports to work and it's most important trading partners are the two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. Mexico for labor and Canada for fertilizer.

There is no other country in the world with the relative and absolute advantages of the US. And that has nothing to do thanks to government, but instead despite government.

In particular, the USA energy supply kept running of fossil fuels, which is the government just doing nothing.

The USA is in a position to take a lot of bad choices and still have a great economy. The rest of the world only chance to have a good economy is to make good choices.

The next possible country that had a proven track record of very bad choices and still working out is Argentina. Net positive Food and energy producer. And yes, they tried hard to f*k it.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#265
post #101

This 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.

Knowledge workers are at most risk because free access to quality knowledge is disappearing.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#266
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

LLMs stand to be much better at research mathematics than humans. Breakthroughs in mathematics often come from taking a concept from one area of mathematics and applying it to another area. Humans find this difficult because it's hard to be a research-level mathematician in more than a few areas, a human life isn't long enough to learn that much. Humans learn depth-first. LLMs learn breadth-first. You can go ask Chat…

I hope that intelligent mathematicians don't contribute too much to feed the AI. First develop a method by which all of us get better financial outcome in the long run, and then teach the AI some basic thinks just to please investors.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs stand to be much better at research mathematics than humans. Breakthroughs in mathematics often come from taking a concept from one area of mathematics and applying it to another area. Humans find this difficult because it's hard to be a research-level mathematician in more than a few areas, a human life isn't long enough to learn that much. Humans learn depth-first. LLMs learn breadth-first. You can go ask Chat…

LLMs aren't new and there has been no sign of them being able to automate maths research so far. If they do, I will acknowledge them as AGI as it has been my goalpost for over 30 years. I've never moved it once, and I won't. Computers were invented in large part for this purpose. The hope was to have a machine that could spit out interesting theorems. It turned out that generating theorems was trivial (you can just e…

It would be interesting to try these things out. I've been experimenting with making art with ChatGPT - instead of telling it how to do it or even what to do specifically I'm asking it for ideas, to then pick its favourite and expand on why etc. It's worked surprisingly well. I've moved on to asking it how you'd make an art show of multiple images, then just asking it to "follow step one in your instructions", "now follow step two".

Results were good enough feeding that into a SD model that we're commissioning the first one it made to get it in real life.

I'm not arguing chatgpt can research maths, but I do think the tools available are now fundamentally different than they were perhaps even last year. I don't think we're even at a point of knowing how best to use what we have, and the models should continue to get better.

I'd encourage you to experiment and see how far away you think things are. I'd do it, I probably will, but I lack the mathematical background to understand whether it's responding with garbage or not.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing, everyone in the West who's fallen on hard times has been pretty grateful their government didn't let them starve to death. This general, wide-impact instance of problem-solving is why the public will never allow libertarians anywhere near power.

The US is the single largest food and energy producing country in the world. The US economy barely depends on exports to work and it's most important trading partners are the two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. Mexico for labor and Canada for fertilizer. There is no other country in the world with the relative and absolute advantages of the US. And that has nothing to do thanks to government, but instead despite govern…

This still sounds like Reaganism "Government is the problem" rhetoric. Sum GDP is not a good measure of a country, particularly when it is concentrated in a very small group of people.

If citizens (as carried out by their democratic representative government) give corporations an inch, they will take a hundred miles.

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re applying what I would call the fallacy of scale. Your take is correct as long as these singularity happen at relative scales. We don’t know at all what happens when massive scale becomes a factor. Computers and the internet allowed virtualization and we now base our economies largely on virtualization and abstraction. That also means almost infinite replicability. In turn, infinite replicability allows levels…

I love this topic, maybe too much... Don't you think that a lot of what you're talking about depends on how people react to this technology and it's use? To ask another way, if everyone around you is in complete suffering and misery from "AI", we're all broke, hungry and miserable, maybe people will just not want to use AI and prefer to buy and trade services with other humans so that we maintain a nice quality of li…

This is a good point but I’m not sure we can really compare the size and reach of what corporations can do with this tool with smaller circular and local economies driven by ethics. It’s again a problem of scale :)

Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment

#270

This article is pure conservative BS. The stagnation of certain industries is because of tax policy and the insane greed injected into our healthcare systems when the HMO laws passed in the 1980's. I'm not even sure what pmarca is talking about here. It's like he's waving his arms, "look over here at my BS and don't look over there where AI is about to slam information workers." AI will absolutely change the way soft…

> This article is pure conservative BS

Just based on how the entire article is structured, and the way it links in supporting evidence that normal people don't do, its like a delusional rant almost, but there's something off, honestly, the inconsistency in certain areas makes it looks like a number of articles that were generated by chat-GPT. Anyone else getting that vibe?

Aside from that, it completely ignores the division of labor, and AI isn't being developed to augment production, its being developed to replace human's as the source of productive effort.

For the communist bashing it does about universal basic income, its positively influencing socialist topics, cherry picking, and quite ironic.

The benefits we get from being the primary form of production are growth from challenges, professional experience, money, food, the means to support children, etc.

There's a lot of good reasons why thinking machines are generally outlawed/banned on pain of death in realistic scifi literature.

Overpopulation isn't a problem anyone wants to touch. What use is humanity if the environment becomes disadvantaged to human intellect, and there are too many mouths to feed for the resources available. There are always limits to growth.

Most benefits we enjoy today have only been possible through the division of labor.

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