Robots ate my job [links]

torekp

Mechanical Engineering magazine (paywalled until next month) and Financial Times, among others, recently reviewed the book Race Against the Machine by economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The FT reviewer writes:

Pattern recognition, the authors think, will quickly allow machines to branch out further. Computers will soon drive more safely than humans, a fact Google has demonstrated by allowing one to take out a Toyota Prius for a 1,000-mile spin. Truck and taxi drivers should be worried – but then so should medical professionals, lawyers and accountants; all of their jobs are at risk too. The outcome is a nightmarish but worryingly convincing vision of a future in which an ever-decreasing circle of professions is immune from robotic encirclement.

And ME magazine quotes McAfee in an interview:

Once computers get better than people, you don't have to hire people to do that job any more. That doesn't mean that people can't find work. There will always be an amount of work to do, but they won't like the wages they are offered.

Both reviewers also hint that McAfee and Brynjolfsson offer a partial explanation of the "jobless recovery", but either the book's argument is weak or the reviewers do a poor job summarizing it. Such a purported explanation might be the main attraction for most readers, but I'm more interested in the longer-term picture. Be it the "nightmarish vision" of the future mentioned in FT, or the simpler point about wages offered by McAfee, this might be a good hook to get the general public thinking about the long-term consequences of AI.

Is that a good idea? Should sleeping general publics be left to lie? There seems to be significant reluctance among many LessWrongers to stir the public, but have we ever hashed out the reasons for and against? Please describe any non-obvious reasons on either side.

Pattern recognition, the authors think, will quickly allow machines to branch out further. Computers will soon drive more safely than humans, a fact Google has demonstrated by allowing one to take out a Toyota Prius for a 1,000-mile spin. Truck and taxi drivers should be worried – but then so should medical professionals, lawyers and accountants; all of their jobs are at risk too. The outcome is a nightmarish but worryingly convincing vision of a future in which an ever-decreasing circle of professions is immune from robotic encirclement.

And ME magazine quotes McAfee in an interview:

Once computers get better than people, you don't have to hire people to do that job any more. That doesn't mean that people can't find work. There will always be an amount of work to do, but they won't like the wages they are offered.

(Edit: I see there is a "flickering" of votes (at least 3 up and 4 down so far). Is my post merely controversial, or does specific parts of it warrant up/down votes?)

To answer your question, the subject of specialized AI and its consequences is already out there. From what I see, the point of evil machines taking out our job is already going mainstream. The only remedy to this technophobia I can think of is to outpace it with more (justified) technophilia.

About the article you cite, I find this kind of talk increasingly crazy (emphasis mine):

Truck and taxi drivers should be worried – but then so should medical professionals, lawyers and accountants; all of their jobs are at risk too. The outcome is a nightmarish but worryingly convincing vision of a future in which an ever-decreasing circle of professions is immune from robotic encirclement.

So, machines are increasingly working for us, and it is supposed to be bad news?! To me, that's humanity being crazy, again.

Sure, if we insist on 40 hours work weeks, and use the productivity increase to produce more stuff instead of concentrating on, say, technological development and education, then yeah, that's very bad news: unemployment rises to unsustainable levels, resources depletes faster and faster, until the economic system collapses, and things get nasty from there. Or we get to a Bladerunner-like future. Or something Bad™.

We can do better. Machines are taking out our jobs? Cool! More free time! We could then:

work less, like 30, or even 20 hours per week.
work on other things, like (self) education, science, and even automating further work.
reduce, maybe stop the exploitation of the South by Western countries.
reduce, maybe stop pollution, instead of increasing it.

Unfortunately, I think this optimistic way of looking at the matter depends on confusion about who "we" are.

Oversimplified picture: Alex owns a business, Bill works in it, Chris is a customer. Alex buys a machine that does Bill's job better and cheaper. She benefits (higher profits). Chris benefits (lower prices). Bill loses (no job). In the (common?) case where the machine is only a little better at Bill's job than Bill was and Alex chooses to keep most of the profits, Alex benefits a lot, Bill loses a lot, Chris benefits a little, and the whole... (read more)

14[anonymous]14y

Most people don't have the cognitive horsepower or personality type to do any of this. In any case doing science seems like a great candidate for automation. [...] "Western exploitation" seems to simply amount to investing money into third world countries and providing them with opportunities that are a vast improvement over what they would otherwise have. Arguably it has done them far more good than any international aid program attempted to date. Cheap labour plus industrialization and capitalism mean societies grind their way to wealth as Taiwan, Korea, Japan and 19th century Europe did. And as China and Vietnam are doing now. Make regular humans obsolete and we (as in our technological civilization) have literally nothing to do with the vast masses of third world peoples except perhaps give them welfare because we feel sorry for them.