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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Kevin Drum's Article about AI and Technology - Less Wrong Discussion

19 Post author: knb 15 May 2013 07:38AM

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Tags: economics linear thinking exponential law moore's ai

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Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 15 May 2013 03:11:49PM 3 points [-]

Note that the drop in labor's share of income corresponds very highly with the entry into the global market of huge new labor pools in China and the rest of Asia. Very basic economics suffices to explain it: the ratio of labor to capital suddenly went way up, so the price of labor had to go down. I have very high confidence that this situation is going to start to reverse as the Chinese start to accumulate capital.

Comment author: Cyan 15 May 2013 05:35:32PM *  2 points [-]

I have very high confidence that this situation is going to start to reverse as the Chinese start to accumulate capital.

But is your confidence high enough to counterbalance the loss if it turns out you're wrong?

In the piece, Drum links this article by economist Noah Smith, which concludes:

...It may turn out that the "rise of the robots" ends up augmenting human labor instead of replacing it. It may be that technology never exceeds our mental capacity. It may be that the fall in labor's income share has really been due to the great Chinese Labor Dump, and not to robots after all, and that labor will make a comeback as soon as China catches up to the West.

But if not - if the age of mass human labor is about to permanently end - then we need to think fast. Extreme inequality may be "efficient" in the Econ 101 sense, but in the real world it always leads to disaster.

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