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.

Or, a year later Bill is still unemployed -- I hear that's been happening a bit lately -- and Alex and Dave have found other ways of competing that don't require commoditizing their products and not taking any profits.

Does it look to you as if (e.g.) Microsoft, Apple and Google are taking minimal profits while their customers pocket all the benefits of their cleverness?

IIRC, the last three recessions have had largely-jobless recoveries, and the pattern of unemployment they've left behind them looks a whole lot like what you'd expect if people's jobs are being taken away by technical progress without new opportunities arising to give a lot of those people new jobs. And I don't see any sign that (e.g.) typical working hours are getting shorter to absorb all that surplus leisure.

Microsoft does not meaningfully compete, Google doesn't seem to be taking excess profits, and Apple's mostly based on ripping off people who have too much money anyways. But look at the giants of a few decades ago - are GM and American Airlines known for excess profits today? Competing margins down takes time, but it does happen.

2ewbrownv14y

At least in the US, the current long-run employment is caused by a severe ongoing recession that's being exacerbated by massive deficit spending, increased regulation and tax hikes. None of this has anything to do with technology one way or the other. While it's true that at some point you could have so much automation that you run out of jobs for people, we're not remotely close to approaching that point yet. Instead we see a few % of current jobs become obsolete each decade, most of which are replaced by new jobs that didn't exist before. As for profit margins, my point was simply that degree of automation is irrelevant. Profit magins in a given industry are determined by a complex interplay between number of competitors, barriers to entry, regulation and dozens of other factors, none of which are much afected by the details of production. For instance, manufacturing has already seen 1-2 orders of magnitude increase in automation in the last 200 years but their profit margins generally don't show it. Finally, you won't see people trading work hours for extra leisure unless their pay is already high enough that they'd prefer more free time to more money, which isn't going to happen unless average incomes are at least an order of magnitude higher than they are now. Most people don't start running out of things to spend money on until they have a mansion, several luxury cars and a few $100K of assorted toys, after all.

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Robots ate my job [links]

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Robots ate my job [links]

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