Should economists be more concerned about AI?

As a technologist, and a follower of automation related news for the past 4+ years, I have basically given up on the economists, save for a handful like Robin Hanson. They will probably realize their folly when it's too late.

Even their claims that "automation based disruption didn't happen in the past" is simply false. They back their claims by pointing to current unemployment (or the pre-2007-crisis rate of 4-5%), i.e., obviously unemployment is really low therefore automation didn't take away jobs.

No you dummy. Automation did take away jobs, and the people whose jobs were lost were directly affected by it, and millions of families were destroyed.

In recent history we can point to two major time periods of this sort, the first industrial revolution (around the turn of 19th century), and the second industrial revolution (at the turn of the 20th century).

In the first one, the subject of economics, and statistics, and more involved census-taking was still in its infancy, and Europe was in general in a state of turmoil with warfare more rampant, so it's possible that the harmful effects of automation were not documented thoroughly.

The second time, things were a lot more stable, economics and statistics were a lot more developed, and yet:

- World War I happened! (why do you think things were so agitated around that time, after many decades of relative peace? Do you not call the events leading up to it social disruption?)

- Major recession happened (any chance it had anything to do with the 2nd industrial revolution?)

- World War II happened. (again, partly the result of social agitation, WWI, and recession).

In the mean time, within decades a whole generation of farmers were rendered obsolete and asked to dismiss themselves. These middle-aged and old farmers were the bread winners of their families and didn't have quite the resources to "retrain" themselves and put themselves back into the workforce, something the economists love to tell you about as a solution. What ended up happening is that, after a lot of pain and suffering, their younger generation (the "millenials" of 100 years ago) got themselves educated in the newer trades, entered the workforce and brought the unemployment back to stable levels.

If you can comprehend what happened in the decades roughly a 100 years ago, just know that what's happening this time is at least 10x worse if not more!

(I always like to share CGPGrey's 'Humans Need Not Apply'. Go watch it on youtube if you have 10 minutes to spare).

edit: not sure what happened but I commented in response to the article [0] not the bankunderground one.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-01/economist...

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 less that means significantly fewer man-hours due to the higher hourly rate.

The notion of replacing low-skilled jobs with high-skilled, better paying ones is true. However since the TCO to the one purchasing the automation is LOWER it says a lot about the total number of people to maintain the system.

This of course neglects any secondary effects where lower costs may increase volume and wider use of the product. But to a first approximation automation destroys jobs. Obviously.

And the same was true of horses, until it wasn't.

There really are worrisome phenomena that only have to happen once, and never happen before.

Try that in any other context: "People have worried about nuclear weapons since before the first atom bomb. But they have yet to come up with any evidence of a civilization ended by a nuclear attack."

I think the difficulty in seeing how this time really is different is that increasing technology is exponential at replacing human labor. But exponential growth is extremely unintuitive. It initially looks linear, and this approximately linear phase can last an arbitrary amount of time. But eventually, a wall is hit and seemingly overnight the explosion is unstoppable. I feel we've been in the approximately linear phase all this time which is why we have so many naysayers saying this time isn't any different. We'll never have the political will to make changes until a third of the country is unemployable.