EHeller 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: EHeller 24 July 2013 11:15:23PM *  7 points [-]

Somewhat irrelevant, but:

$150 can't pay someone to trim your trees, at least not well

I think you need to find an enterprising teenager? I currently pay a local kid $100 a month to do the overwhelming majority of my (very elderly) parent's yardwork. He mows the lawn, does the edging, weeds the flower bed and trims back the bushes. He butchered things a few times the start, but he has gotten quite competent and I fear the day he realizes he is worth more than ~$10 an hour + a christmas bonus + free lunch served by my mother when he is working.

Of course if you have trees > 20-30 feet tall you'll probably need a more expensive professional service.

Comment author: Davidmanheim 01 August 2013 08:16:16PM 2 points [-]

How do you know this kid? Do you know the parents, and are you implicitly relying on that trust network?

Comment author: EHeller 02 August 2013 02:32:56AM 1 point [-]

How do you know this kid?

He has been doing the work for about 3 years now, and was the third kid I tried to hire. The first two didn't work out. My parents know him decently well now, because my Mom usually insists he come in and have lunch with them during days he is working. None of us knew him when he started.