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Stuart_Armstrong comments on A thought on AI unemployment and its consequences - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 18 August 2014 12:10PM

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Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 20 August 2014 10:54:08AM 2 points [-]

Are things “different this time”?

Things are always "different this time" ;-)

More seriously, employment and unemployment rates are complex and dependent on what kind of macro-economics you use, and there are some impacts of government interventions, etc...

But this change can have a strong effect even outside the employment rate, which is what we are seeing: the wages of the low skilled and those who cannot retrain are plummeting, and we're seeing a division into "lovely" versus "lousy" jobs (eg: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20002/1/Lousy_and_Lovely_Jobs_the_Rising_Polarization_of_Work_in_Britain.pdf ).