There are two separate effects here. In the short term, a new technology may put people out of work faster than they can retrain. That's bad for them; it's likely to be bad for the world as a whole in the short term; but it may very well be a good thing for everyone in the long term, e.g. if it creates more jobs than it destroyed. But it may also happen that a new technology destroys jobs without creating any new ones. In that case, even if it produces an increase in total wealth, it may be bad overall (at least for people whose values assign substantial importance to the welfare of the worst-off) -- in the long term as well as the short.
So the following two claims need to be treated quite separately. (1) "Recent technological progress is obsoleting more jobs than it's creating, and lots of people are getting shafted as a result." (2) "Future technological progress may obsolete more jobs than it ever creates, directly or indirectly, and lots of people will get shafted as a result if so." And both are different from (1.5) "Recent technological progress is obsoleting more jobs than it's creating, and that loss of jobs will persist way into the future". It's (1.5) that's made less credible by observing that past progress doesn't seem to have left us with a population that's almost entirely jobless; that observation seems to me to have little to say about (1) and (2).
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:
And ME magazine quotes McAfee in an interview:
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.