novalis 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: novalis 24 July 2013 10:17:27PM *  8 points [-]

I'd pay $5/hour for someone to drive me almost anywhere if availability was coordinated by Uber, but not taxi prices... 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!"

Federal minimum wage has been falling relative to productivity for decades. Also, Australia has a much higher minimum wage than the US but a lower unemployment rate. They also don't have at-will employment, implying that the risks of hiring are larger. So I'm not sure the regulations are actually the problem here (that said, I oppose many of them anyway on various grounds).

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2013 10:22:53PM 4 points [-]

Sure, there can be more than one solution to a problem; Australia and Germany took different paths, one regularizing NGDP, one deregulating labor markets, but neither is suffering from unemployment despite robotics. Basic Income might also solve it. Getting rid of huge marginal tax rates on the poor might solve it. Or making it easier for someone to sign up with an online service that lets them offer me a ride somewhere for $5 might solve it. Since I don't think unemployment problems are due to literal lack of labor that anyone can be paid to do, there are potentially all sorts of things that might solve it.

Comment author: alexgmcm 19 August 2013 09:10:56AM *  0 points [-]

This would also require some amount of decreased taxes on the next quintile in order to avoid high marginal tax rates, i.e., if you suddenly start paying $2000/year in taxes as soon as your income goes from $19,000/year to $20,000/year then that was a 200% tax rate on that particular extra $1000 earned

Am I misreading this part? As in the UK the tax-rates are done on % of your income in a certain bracket, so you pay nothing on the first £15k, then 20% on £15-30k (I forget the exact brackets) then 30% on £30-45k and 40% on everything above that.

So if you were earning £19k a year for example you would pay nothing on the first £15k, then 20% of the £4k you earned that sits in the higher bracket. So you don't suddenly pay loads of tax as it only affects the income that sits in the taxed brackets so if you earned £35k you would pay (0*15)+(0.2*15)+(0.3*5)=4.5k in tax and so you avoid having any massive discrete leaps.

I thought that's how all progressive taxation systems worked as otherwise people could be better off refusing to take raises etc. and I'm almost certain that isn't the case anywhere in the world.

Comment author: khafra 19 August 2013 11:09:30AM 4 points [-]

He's talking about effective marginal tax rates--the USA has a lot of welfare programs with hard cutoffs, which effectively mean more gross income can lower your net income until around $20k or so.