paper-machine comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 July 2013 06:46PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2013 09:36:47PM 14 points [-]

As my initial comment implies, I think the last century is qualitatively different automation than before: before, the machines began handling brute force things, replacing things which offered only brute force & not intelligence like horses or watermills. But now they are slowly absorbing intelligence, and this seems to be the final province of humans. In Hanson's terms, I think machines switched from being complements to being substitutes in some sectors a while ago.

The key Hansonian concept is that replacing humans at tasks is still complementation because different tasks are complementary to each other, a la hot dogs and buns; I should perhaps edit OP to make this clearer. It is not obvious to me that craftspeople disemployed by looms would have considered their work to be unskilled, but as that particular industry was automated, people moved to other jobs in other industries and complementarity continued to dominate. Again the question is, what's different now? Is it that no human on the planet does any labor any more which could be called unskilled, that nobody cooks or launders or drives? Obviously not. But there are many plausible changes in regulation, taxes, phasing-out benefits, college credentialism, etc.

I'd pay $5/hour for someone to drive me almost anywhere if availability was coordinated by Uber, but not taxi prices. House cleaning and yard work is not possible for me to find at a price I'd currently pay ($150 can't pay someone to trim your trees, at least not well). I strongly suspect that things would have appeared otherwise to me in 1870, when maids etc. were far more common. This looks to me like a barrier-to-entry, regulatory-and-tax scenario, not "Darn it we're too rich and running out of things for labor to do!"

Unless you want to pin unemployment on changes in people's trustingness, there is nothing obvious about your stated fears of the IQ 70 kid which would have prohibited equal fear in 1920. More to the point, a change in this characteristic is not a change in automation. A few weeks of training may indeed be necessary - I'm sure I live in a high-IQ bubble but I try to be aware of this - but people managed to get jobs requiring a few weeks of training in 1920.

I would favor Basic Income, though I would favor zero taxes on the bottom 20% even more. But this has to do with my beliefs/model/worries about distribution of gains and negotiating power, more than a belief that unemployability due to machines outcompeting many humans at literally everything is the source of the Great Recession and possible Long Depression (though I'm not sure we can get properly stuck in a Long Depression while China, India et. al. are still growing).

Comment author: [deleted] 24 July 2013 09:53:42PM 2 points [-]

though I would favor zero taxes on the bottom 20% even more.

Do you mean zero income tax, or zero all taxes, or something inbetween?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2013 10:26:57PM 22 points [-]

I mean that when somebody in the bottom quintile gives me a car ride to Berkeley for $5, nothing else happens to them. They don't pay Social Security on the $5. They don't have their health benefits phased out. They don't have to fill out a form. They just have an additional $5.

I know this is a completely radical concept.

Comment author: Grant 24 July 2013 10:49:19PM 3 points [-]

Roughly half of Americans don't owe anything to the IRS each year. Pre-recession I believe this figure was about 40%. They of course pay other taxes, such as payroll (social security, medicare, which most people consider taxes), state sales tax, property taxes, etc. It'd be nice if they at least didn't have to file tax returns.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3505

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2013 11:02:18PM 12 points [-]

The problem isn't just all those other taxes but phasing-out of benefits - this is what leads to the calculations and observations by which somebody making $25,000/year isn't much better off than someone getting $8,000/year.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 July 2013 06:40:04PM 24 points [-]

ADDED: Also, any paperwork can easily be an extreme barrier to that IQ 70 kid that Gwern was talking about.

Comment author: Kawoomba 25 July 2013 07:05:42PM 26 points [-]

It's an extreme barrier (in the sense of an ugh-field) even for smart would-be employers.

Comment author: Randy_M 30 July 2013 02:42:06PM 3 points [-]

I'm kind of worried that 20 people upvoted that any paperwork is an extreme barrier to smart employers--presumably people like themselves?

What kind of opportunities have you all been passing up for want of avoiding a form?

And what kind of opportunities are present to eliminate or stream-line such (ie, turbo-tax)?

Comment author: Grant 24 July 2013 11:19:10PM 0 points [-]

I'm not very well informed on this topic, but isn't something like that always going to be the case in a society with a safety net? e.g., if we make sure everyone has at least $25k to live on, anyone making $8k a year isn't going to be any worse off than someone making $25k.

Of course I'm not sure how well America's arcane maze of benefits, tax deductions and whatnot fit into this simple abstraction.

Comment author: jaibot 25 July 2013 12:18:56AM 18 points [-]

Safety net should be a slope, not a cliff. Earning your first dollar shouldn't mean you get $1 less in benefits - there's actually a good argument for subsidizing the first $X of income - which is what the EITC is. Basically negative income tax.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 August 2013 03:25:52PM 1 point [-]

You mean about half (actually 46%) of all American households did not pay any income tax (which is different from "not owing anything to the IRS") in 2011.

20% of all Americans don't pay income tax by virtue of being too young to work.

Comment author: Kenny 17 August 2013 02:05:27PM 0 points [-]

I thought they wouldn't need to file taxes, but I just completed a "tax assistant" wizard at the IRS website, for a single, non-retirement-benefit-receiving, single individual with $20k in gross income ... and I was told they'd have to file a return.