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.

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 thing is sllightly positive-sum.

Now, suppose this happens on a large scale. There are lots of Bills and Chrises; there are way fewer Alexes. So a few Alexes get a lot richer; a lot of Bills-and-Chrises get a lot poorer (from losing their jobs) and a bit richer (from cheaper or better products). The whole thing is indeed positive-sum, but all the gains go to the Alexes, and along with those gains they also take a whole lot more from the Bills.

It's an oversimplification to say that all the businesses are owned by a small number of Alexes. Many of them will be publicly traded, which means that their ownership is widely distributed. However, substantial share ownership is the preserve of the wealthy, and the picture remains one of a large-scale wealth transfer from poorer people to richer ones.

For sure, the gains could instead be used to enable everyone to work shorter hours for the same pay, or to stop pollution, or whatever. But only if someone makes that happen. What the market will do, left largely to itself, is to allocate all the gains, and more, to those who are already wealthy. Distributing those other benefits to ordinary workers (who generally aren't already wealthy) and less-developed countries will depend on the generosity of those people. Or on large-scale government regulation of the sort that, in the US at least, is currently absolutely unthinkable politically because it looks too much like SOCIALISM!!!111eleven!!! to survive in the face of public opinion.

Do you see an actually-achievable way in which these technological changes end up bringing the benefits you hope for?

wouldn't mass protests be inevitable in such a situation, and boycotting the businesses that keep the profits to themselves?

5ewbrownv14y

Like most people who believe in widespread market failures you've stopped your analysis too early. So Alex automates Bill's job away and pockets most of the savings, leaving Bill unemployed and some large number of Chrises slightly better off. What happens next? Well, obviously Bill looks for work, and Alex's competitor Dave decides he needs to automate too. A year later Bill is working some other (possibly less desireable) job, and Alex and Dave are locked in a price war that gradually transfers most of the savings from automation to their customers. So as long as the automation process is gradual there's no particular need for intervention.

1loup-vaillant14y

Yeah, we're basically screwed. I'll try to think of something anyway. The goal is to redistribute wealth, from the rich to the poor. Doing it directly seems impossible. But we could do it indirectly, by redistributing power. I think one of the most powerful lever currently available is unemployment. Currently, employees fear it, so they accept lower wages. If unemployment where somehow less terrible, or less common, employees would have more power, and higher salaries. Of the top of my head, I see two ways: * Universal income. It makes unemployment less unpleasant. If it gives you enough money, one could chose to just retire early and live frugally. I agree it sounds too communist however. I don't see it happening, especially in the US. * Reduce work hours. Go down to 4 days a week, while maintaining current salaries. There will be need for more people, which will mean less unemployment. When automation goes up again, go down to 3 days. And down. And down. This one sounds more plausible, but again, not in the US. The second someone talks about a 4 week day is the second you see some Republican stir up emotions about righten up the country through virtuous hard work. Maybe it could work in Europe (one country at a time), then spread. But we need to get past the idea that hard work is sacred first. We could also spread basic rationality and basic political awareness. But frankly, this is difficult: most people don't have the energy to think when they get back home. They just watch TV, and collapse until tomorrow morning. This would change if they worked less, but you see the chicken-and-egg problem here… Another possibility is the internet. Compared to mainstream media, ideas flow unfiltered here. As more people learn to use it, we will have more and more meaningful many-to-many communications, of which 4chan is only a baby step.

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Robots ate my job [links]

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Robots ate my job [links]

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