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The AI Unemployment Anti-FAQ (2013)

140 points by apsec112 10y ago

runin2k1 10y ago
This is from 2013 so in terms of recovery years it is a bit dated... But the first three questions all posit that unemployment was rising, and that reemployment was not occurring which is(and was) belied by this graph -https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
- mikepurvis 10y ago
  Does that one graph really tell the whole story? Things not captured here include: - underemployment, like law school grads working in book stores because no lawyer needs a clerk now that computers do the research for them. - contractors vs. part time vs. full time. I've seen it asserted that we've lost a lot of salaried positions in favour of contractor arrangements (gig economy) or shift work. - people who've transitioned from unemployed to being on long-term Medicaid—I don't believe they count as "unemployed", but various mental illness issues can be caused or made worse by being long-term out of work.
mehwoot 10y ago
The entire argument is that "automation didnt get invented recently so how can it be the cause of a recent phenomenon". This seems pretty weak to me. Maybe automation has finally automated all (or enough) of the jobs that any human can be trained to do with minimal education, so there aren't any jobs for a percentage of the population anymore? Assuming that people who lose their jobs to automation will find new ones requires every person be able to perform some sort of new job. But with automation doing most physical tasks and now some mental ones, is it so crazy to think that the bar of competency required to do anything worth paying for is being raised?
- apsec112 10y ago
  The article addresses that explicitly. Some questions in the "Anti-FAQ" are: "Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be done, or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be even more easily automated." "What if what's changed is that we're out of new jobs to create? What if we've already got enough hot dog buns, for every kind of hot dog bun there is in the labor market, and now AI is automating away the last jobs and the last of the demand for labor?" "How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?" and then there are responses to each of these. Do you think the responses are unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why in some more detail?
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    I can't read it due to the site apparently being down for me, but - the issue isn't in the creative and skilled job markets, it's with the people who never went to university, wound up working e.g. retail for life, and now have family which is living on the brink of homelessness so they can't retrain without having them looked after. The individualist viewpoint is to say "they fucked up, so screw them", but this is going to lead to people dipping into even more severe poverty and possibly even dying. I think we as individuals have a duty towards the society we were brought up in, which has helped most of us in at least some degree - so what are we going to do about it?
  - wvenable 10y ago
    The responses are pretty unsatisfying; there isn't really any meat there at all. Just a bunch of hand-waving "it can go any way". It also fails to recognize that computers don't need to be powerful human-level AI's to displace workers -- they've been doing that from day 1.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    That's a straw man. It's obvious that there are still jobs around - (almost, there's always somebody crazy) nobody is arguing that jobs don't exist anymore. The real question is if automation is finally faster than what society can adapt to. The article makes no effort to answer this.
- deleted 10y ago
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mey 10y ago
As a counter point from today, not 2013 http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/federal-report-ai-could-threaten-up-to-47-percent-of-jobs-in-two-decades/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/federal-report-ai-co... Edit: Salient point in article from one of the reports "If labor productivity increases do not translate into wage increases, then the large economic gains brought about by AI could accrue to a select few," the report says. "Instead of broadly shared prosperity for workers and consumers, this might push towards reduced competition and increased wealth inequality."
jawns 10y ago
> for AI or productivity growth or increased trade or immigration or graduating students to increase unemployment, instead of resulting in more hot dogs and buns for everyone, you must be doing something terribly wrong that you weren't doing wrong in 1950. Not necessarily. There's going to eventually come a point where any job that can be performed by a low-skilled worker can be performed by automation. The example used to combat this notion is that servants used to be more plentiful than they are now, and low-skilled workers would be ripe for these types of careers. Well, what did servants do? The same thing my robot vacuum cleaner and dishwasher and microwave and Amazon Echo do now.
- apsec112 10y ago
  If the examples in the article aren't convincing, there are plenty of other ones. Eg., construction involves lots of manual labor, and lots of machines that are designed only for human operators. If automation reduces the demand for low-skill labor in other fields, the result should be a construction boom, as that sector reduces costs and snaps up more workers. But that's not what we see. In fact, in many ways it's the opposite - in NYC, subways now cost ~30x as much per track-mile (inflation-adjusted) as in the 1920s.
  - philipkglass 10y ago
    Unemployment in other sectors "should" result in a subway construction boom/plummeting costs only if low-skill labor were the largest cost component of subway construction in the recent past. Was it? I tried searching for a few minutes on Google Scholar to find the share of subway project costs going to labor but didn't turn up anything; maybe you can find something. I did find articles that say labor costs have increased over time, but none that were quantitative about it. Without quantification it's not helpful.
    - makomk 10y ago
      Now extend that thinking. What if low-skill labour isn't the largest cost component in anything much worthwhile that we're not already doing? How would that affect the reasoning in this FAQ?
noetic_techy 10y ago
This article just leans on the same historic analogies that don't hold up to scrutiny. These answers fall way short of the effect of automation and AI will have. You are not replacing the job with another, you are replacing the human brain! I always refer people to this video to explain what it will be like, and it debases almost all the points made in this FAQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU All these historical analogies fall flat on their face when it comes to an AI being trained to do your exact job. This is not another case of farmers moving to different higher skilled jobs. We are the employed horses of the 1800s about to be made unemployable by the advent of cars.
- slaveofallah93 10y ago
  Terrible video. Even the creator admits he was probably wrong with the points that he made. Low quality youtube video that doesn't hold up when you actually look at the points he's making. Humans are not horses.
- deleted 10y ago
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- apsec112 10y ago
  "We are the employed horses of the 1800s about to be made unemployable by the advent of cars." The article explicitly addresses that: "Q. How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?" "A. If we imagine that in future decades machine intelligence is slowly going past the equivalent of IQ 70, 80, 90, eating up more and more jobs along the way... then I defer to Robin Hanson's analysis in Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence, in which, as the abstract says, "Machines complement human labor when [humans] become more productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At ﬁrst, complementary eﬀects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do."" "Q. Could we already be in this substitution regime -" "A. No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned. That sentence in Hanson's paper has nothing to do with what is going on right now. The future cannot be a cause of the past. Future scenarios, even if they seem to associate the concept of AI with the concept of unemployment, cannot rationally increase the probability that current AI is responsible for current unemployment." "Q. But AI will inevitably become a problem later?" "A. Not necessarily. We only get the Hansonian scenario if... (etc, etc.)"
neonbat 10y ago
space bat real talk. people will only be paid if they can give something valuable in return. if people dont have something valuable to offer or they have something of low value, they will not be hired or they will be hired for very little. so if people cant get jobs or become chronically underemployed the question is 'why dont people have anything valuable to offer?' there are probably many reasons, education, technology substitution for human capital, 'automation' though i dont get accused of being a luddite (which i am not) or sharing their fallacies (which i do not). automation will not take away someones job irreplaceably until that automation is 'strong' enough to do lots of stuff. its getting there and it may be contributing to our problems. but its not a reason to panic, if less people can have jobs thats actually a very good thing, we can spend time on other cool stuff. its a reason to restructure our society a little. things that work often work for a period, very few things/processes continue or work indefinitely in the universe. so we could maybe rethink how our society distributes wealth, ownership, etc. how do we get people in a position to offer something valuable? economists spouting dogma and ignoring real problems is pretty dysfunctional. they teach this sort of junk in schools too. its important to fall back on what we know but its also important to re examine what we think we know. its important to think in simple principles when reexamining. gorund-up. economists/many scientists dont like doing that for more reasons that id like to get into here. it falls to people with common sense frankly, which i find lacking on blogs like this.
michaelchisari 10y ago
There may be new jobs that come around, but new jobs require retraining. And what if we automate those new jobs faster than people can be reasonably expected to retrain for them?
Analemma_ 10y ago
Eliezer really needs to learn how to stick to his areas of expertise. When he talks about decision theory or the mathematical formalisms of AI it can be spectacular; when he wades into economics or quantum mechanics it's frequently embarrassing.
- apsec112 10y ago
  Could you explain why you think he's wrong in more detail? As written, this reads like a Bulverism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism): "The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error". The Bulverist assumes a speaker's argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake, attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive."
- notahacker 10y ago
  As someone who is degree-qualified in the area of economics, I have to say I prefer this facetious and reasonably well-informed takedown of bad pop economics (and his HP fanfic!) to his utterly serious entertainment of ridiculous ideas like Roko's Basilisk in the area of expertise he's dedicating his life to... (Rothbard's law: people tend to specialize in what they are worst at [also applied to Rothbard])
  - apsec112 10y ago
    Eliezer never took Roko's Basilisk seriously; unfortunately, there's a great deal of misinformation about this online. Here's what happened: "What I considered to be obvious common sense was that you did not spread potential information hazards because it would be a crappy thing to do to someone. The problem wasn't Roko's post itself, about CEV, being correct. That thought never occurred to me for a fraction of a second. The problem was that Roko's post seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards, all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they presented no potential benefit to anyone. They were pure infohazards. The only thing they could possibly do was be detrimental to brains that represented them, if one of the possible variants of the idea turned out to be repairable of the obvious objections and defeaters. So I deleted it, because on my worldview there was no reason not to. I did not want LessWrong.com to be a place where people were exposed to potential infohazards because somebody like me thought they were being clever about reasoning that they probably weren't infohazards. On my view, the key fact about Roko's Basilisk wasn't that it was plausible, or implausible, the key fact was just that shoving it in people's faces seemed like a fundamentally crap thing to do because there was no upside. Again, I deleted that post not because I had decided that this thing probably presented a real hazard, but because I was afraid some unknown variant of it might, and because it seemed to me like the obvious General Procedure For Handling Things That Might Be Infohazards said you shouldn't post them to the Internet. If you look at the original SF story where the term "basilisk" was coined, it's about a mind-erasing image and the.... trolls, I guess, though the story predates modern trolling, who go around spraypainting the Basilisk on walls, using computer guidance so they don't know themselves what the Basilisk looks like, in hopes the Basilisk will erase some innocent mind, for the lulz. These people are the villains of the story. The good guys, of course, try to erase the Basilisk from the walls. Painting Basilisks on walls is a crap thing to do. Since there was no upside to being exposed to Roko's Basilisk, its probability of being true was irrelevant. And Roko himself had thought this was a thing that might actually work. So I yelled at Roko for violating basic sanity about infohazards for stupid reasons, and then deleted the post. He, by his own lights, had violated the obvious code for the ethical handling of infohazards, conditional on such things existing, and I was indignant about this." https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_basilisk/cjjbqqo/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_ba...
anton_tarasenko 10y ago
It's funny that automation is under attack. Any conventional measure says that productivity growth declines and the number of jobs grows. First, the rise of unemployment is not supported by facts. The widely cited unemployment rate went down to 4.6%.[1] That's the pre-crisis level of the overheated 2008 economy. This reduction is costly, but manageable. Jobs disappear, but new ones get created. Nonfarm payrolls (aka "created jobs") are well above zero.[2] So what's the unemployment the media keep talking about? The unemployment voter. 4.6% is greater than the winner's margin in any of the recent presidential elections. It's a valuable asset to candidates and, thus, a hot media topic. The average voter actually gets better thanks to productivity gains, not employment (which we can't reduce below 4% anyway). Productivity accounted for 2 percentage points of per-hour output growth.[3] It still contributes at least 0.5 pp. This decline is the real problem: losing those 2% means being poorer by 21.9% by the end of the decade. But productivity doesn't vote, so this loss is going to happen. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=4CaW https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=4CaW [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?category_id=0&graph_id=12880 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?category_id=0&graph_id=12... [3] Gordon, “Perspectives on The Rise and Fall of American Growth.” p. 73.
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  Unemployment, in the sense of "who is looking for a job but can't find one" is low, but the labor force participation rate is at 62.7%, close to a 30-year low [0][1]. It seems to have bottomed-out in the last couple years and is currently holding steady, but the current level is not encouraging. Note that a low participation rate, as in, "people have just given up looking for a job and resigned themselves to permanent unemployment because there are no economic prospects in their vicinity" does tally quite well with the stories the media keeps talking. Note also that median wages are not yet climbing after their recession decline, despite the falling unemployment (classically, 5% is about the level at which you expect wages to start rising), suggesting that a lot of the new jobs being created are kind of shitty. [0] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rate-september-2014-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rat...
MustrumRidcully 10y ago
The problem with this explaination is that it focuses on the technical aspect and not on the economical one : how is the value created shared among the people in the economy? Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient capital : with the new machine you can make 15 buns whereas you made less with the new one. The employee is not paid more : the capitalist earns the cost saved. Problem is that the capitalist doesn't spend 100% of his income : he will consume some, invest some and save the rest in unproductive accounts or stocks. He may produce 50% more hot dogs, but the demand will not follow. Economics theory says that in this case prices may go down, but that would mean a lowering of the capitalist's profits. He may in this case reduce quality in order to lower the prices while preserving his margins. Hence we see here 3 things : accumation of capital in a few hands, an era of deflation and low yields due to low demand and high monetary stock needed to be invested, and a reduction of quality of the product. The last one is counter intuitive but may be seen in reality : buildings have reached the point where it's commodity, replaced every 30 years, clothes are worthless and the quality of food has been decreasing for the last 30 years (at least in my country, France). If we get richer everyday, why can't we make buildings that are aesthical, solid and durable anymore? Why is quality food reserved only for rich people?
- apsec112 10y ago
  Returns to capital in the form of ownership of companies (including eg. the source code to automate labor that's owned by those companies) have been flat. Higher returns on capital have almost entirely been caused by higher housing prices. See eg. Rognlie's paper at http://www.mit.edu/~mrognlie/piketty_diminishing_returns.pdf http://www.mit.edu/~mrognlie/piketty_diminishing_returns.pdf.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    It's almost as if the rate of profit tends to fall.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
narrator 10y ago
I think Jevon's Paradox[1] might apply to our relationship with AI. Jevon's Paradox states that the more efficiently a resource is used, the more the demand for it increases. Thus with AI, the more efficiently human labor is used, the more demand for it increases? Thus one person is able to accomplish far more with the aid of robots, therefore the usefulness of labor increases. The out of work argument only works if there is a fixed amount of production that needs to be done and then there's no more to be done after that. However, if that were the case, then we'd have all we would need and no one would have to work because working more would just produce useless stuff that would not be used. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox
- AJ007 10y ago
  I think the question of what happens if humans have no jobs left to do is extremely premature. Different stages of AI and automation are being conflated in to the same arguments. Rather, the issue that needs to be considered right now is what happens, in the US, if there is a big disruption to a large group of jobs which have been fairly stable for decades in a very short period of time? Specifically I am thinking about accounting (imminent), lawyers (already happening), financial advisors (happening), insurance agents (happening), real estate agents (imminent), drivers (coming soon), travel agents (transition complete) and so on. Society as a whole gains benefits, if not direct access, but perhaps at a cost of removing the socio-economic status of a large group of people. This, of course, has happened many times before. The greater AI-employment questions should be answered after we are pretty sure humans are even going to survive 5, 10 decades from now.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Humans made it through Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, chattel slavery, WWII and various flu epidemics. I doubt we'll end ourselves in 10 years. "Removing socio-economic status" SHOULD be a goal, to the extent that that status comes from rents ( which it usually does ) . Status seeking is a huge drain on us, and if production starts to go exponential, then the "economic" part fades in importance.
- 10y ago
ikeboy 10y ago
Apparently LW got the hug of death. https://archive.fo/8ew3S https://archive.fo/8ew3S has an archive.
runeks 10y ago
Cached link, for those who can't reach the site (I get a 504): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YP88PLEg9AEJ:lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YP88PLE...
espadrine 10y ago
Some parts are good points, but some parts are strawman arguments. If all jobs require four years of expertise to apply for, every time one job gets mechanized, while employers switch over to automation, the employees made redundant would need to sustain themselves while studying to gain the expertise required for a job in a different field at the same salary. We do have an increasing number of distinct jobs that each take many years of study. So far, I have felt confident in my ability to evolve in this job sector because I am good at logic, which most of programming relates to. But if the logic aspect of the job was trivialized to the point that anyone could tell a machine what it must do, I might have to move towards a new field, and learn to solve Schrödinger's equations and be deeply knowledgeable about quantum mechanics to be able to program some future, more complex machine. And yet even that is easier than having to go from driving trucks to managing logistics.
- apsec112 10y ago
  "If all jobs require four years of expertise to apply for, every time one job gets mechanized, while employers switch over to automation, the employees made redundant would need to sustain themselves while studying to gain the expertise required for a job in a different field at the same salary." That is completely true, but it's also something that applies to every other means of labor automation (going back to the 18th century or earlier), so it's nothing we haven't seen before.
  - makomk 10y ago
    Not really. Up until I think at least the 1970s, on-the-job training and apprenticeships were a lot more common. Both the expectation that employees will already have the required skills and expertise and across-the-board requirements for university qualifications are relatively new changes.
    - setr 10y ago
      Isn't that just another example of the author's point? Automation hasn't changed, the world around it has
st3v3r 10y ago
I think this ignores the most important question of all: Given the rises in automation, how do we avoid adding up in a Hunger Games-esque future? And before anyone says UBI: Do you honestly think that Paul Ryan, who is planning on gutting Social Security and Medicare right this second, would go along with that? UBI is going to be off the table for at least 20 years.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I think this ignores the most important question of all: Given the rises in automation, how do we avoid adding up in a Hunger Games-esque future? Unconditional Basic Income, or something very similar. > And before anyone says UBI: Do you honestly think that Paul Ryan, who is planning on gutting Social Security and Medicare right this second, would go along with that? Probably not. Paul Ryan remaining in a position to exert decisive control over policy and avoiding a dystopian future may well be mutually exclusive options. > UBI is going to be off the table for at least 20 years. Congressional and Presidential elections are much more frequent than that and can result in sudden and dramatic reversal of policy direction, especially in the face of widespread economic concerns. Sufficient economic pain, historically and globally speaking, has also been known to provoke large and fundamental political change outside of normal electoral timelines and succession processes.
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    >Congressional and Presidential elections are much more frequent than that and can result in sudden and dramatic reversal of policy direction, especially in the face of widespread economic concerns. The frequency of elections is immaterial in the era of uber-gerrymandering and population migration. Censuses are every 10 years.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  Milton Friedman proposed something like a UBI back in the 1950s (a "negative income tax"), and he has cachet with some Republicans.
  - 10y ago
bikamonki 10y ago
Anecdata: we are a 4 head-count startup. One of our heads is leaving soon. I thought about the impact on operations and realized most of his tasks can be automated and the rest we can absorb without overloading. Automation and AI are surely a main factor in some jobs never coming back. High productivity (also thanks to cheaper/better/faster IT-related services) is also a factor.
george_ciobanu 10y ago
It's more than just technology: anxiety went up substantially from a mix of -social status awareness (Facebook and other social networks allow me to constantly compare myself to others) -for older white Americans the world seems to be under a liberal assault: gay rights, genderless bathrooms, black lives matter, muslim immigrants, a black president, microaggressions etc. All these changes came in relatively rapid succession and the old guard felt it strongly. I'm a liberal man in NYC but I also feel stressed when talking with people: what if I accidentally say something inappropriate, am considered racist or sexist despite my best intentions, wtf is a microaggression etc. I'm for these changes but I think they came in too fast. -world news are now delivered as they happen, way more effectively than in the past; it's well-known that reading news causes anxiety -the US Republicans deliberately misinformed and angered their constituency in their quest to fight Obama. They essentially subverted democracy by blindly resisting the other side and not engaging in any dialogue whatsoever. To justify their position and keep their constituency's support, they had to misinform and anger them. The world is in a much better spot than ever before, but our awareness to every problem around the globe has also heightened. We are also just developing the right mechanisms to defend from information manipulation - fake news, clickbait and super-biased reporting (on both sides) erode trust - it's hard to know what is true and what not anymore, and some people don't even try, they just react (see pizzagate). I also disagree with the author - a lot of jobs disappeared and this time they are not coming back in the form of other jobs. Through automation and information technologies one person can do the work many many others used to before. Revenue-per-employee increased dramatically because of this very reason, in all areas from finance to tech and services. Many jobs that were be doable with a high-school degree disappeared and they are not coming back. http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving-assurance-makes-your-facebook-use-problematic-uncontrolled-356646 http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving-assur... http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Gad, I wish social status would just die already. To the extent that they are not bubbly[1], trades are still a solid way to make money and don't require classroom training beyond high school. Sure, your knees might be shot when you're... forty, but still... [1] thinking oilfield here...
marcosdumay 10y ago
Although the article has little evidence substantiating it, and many, many argument flaws, I do think its main hypothesis is correct, and the current unemployment is not caused mainly by automation. If you look at the graphs at [0], productivity is falling, not increasing, as is capital. It looks much more that the world is getting old-fashioned poor than automation pushing people out of work. EDIT: Forgot the link 0: https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/11/17/there-are-two-productivity-puzzles/ https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/11/17/there-are-two-produ...
transfire 10y ago
I would laugh, but I have a robot that does that for me now.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fleevy 10y ago
The problem with the economy is Obamacare. Once that's gone, the jobs will come pouring back. Easy
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
People have too much debt, housing costs are too high, and poorly designed social assistance programs discourages work. Suppose Bob is unemployed and lives with his parents in the suburbs. Bob collects unemployment, is eligible for several social programs and has a deferral on his student loans. Bob could get hired at $50,000/year in New York City in a second. But housing within any reasonable distance is $2000/month, taking the job would require Bob to start making $1000/month payments on his student loans and cause him to lose $15,000/year in unemployment and other benefits. Which means Bob can't take that job. He would need a job that pays more than that, which isn't available. So Bob remains unemployed. Construct a lot of new housing, replace existing social assistance with a UBI, and introduce moderate inflation to reduce the real value of existing debts and maintain the nominal value of housing while reducing its real cost, and we've solved a big part of it.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Why should debt be forgiven via inflation? Also, this causes interest rates to go up as lenders will expect another surprise inflation.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > Why should debt be forgiven via inflation? Because the debt was induced by harmful interest rate subsidies that bring about a highly undesirable wealth transfer from government (i.e. all taxpayers) to banks, distort markets like housing and education by inflating their prices relative to the rest of the economy (including wages), and cause people to take on excessive debt because people care about monthly payments rather than principal amounts and subsidized interest causes the borrowable principal amount to explode at a given monthly payment, since government-subsidized interest then constitutes a large fraction of the payment and is at no risk of default so lenders are willing to make excessively large loans. See also housing crisis. Undoing the damage done by those subsidies requires their inverse, which is inflation. It transfers wealth from banks to the government to the benefit of taxpayers, allows the real price of housing and education to fall to where they should be without shocking the market by reducing their nominal prices, and allows people to pay off the unwisely-induced existing debt principal with lower value currency. > Also, this causes interest rates to go up as lenders will expect another surprise inflation. And then people won't borrow as much principal in the future, so paying down principal will be easier at prevailing wages, which is the desired result. You're also assuming lenders have control over that given the way the government creating money affects interest rates. When the government creates money it has the effect of reducing the amount of government debt in circulation (they have money, they don't need to issue bonds), which reduces interest rates on bonds and forces would-be bond purchasers into buying some other debt, which increases competition for lending and reduces interest rates in other lending markets too.
jstewartmobile 10y ago
This is pretty bad. He goes on for pages taking down his own straw men without even getting close to the completely artificial "make-work" nature of most of our pre-AI economy. We spend hundreds of billions above-and-beyond what could be strictly considered defense. To this day, a great deal of our interior is subsidized into farming, even though that level of effort has not been necessary for over 100 years. We are bankrupting ourselves on a health care system that costs almost twice as much as its western european counterpart to produce uniformly inferior outcomes, and contrary to the right-wing propaganda of torts-gone-wild, much of this cost is pure admin/bureaucratic overhead. Don't even get me started on the bureaucracy and make work of our various educational systems! Municipalities across the nation throw millions of dollars, bad after good, without claw-backs, to any pack of two-bit hucksters rolling into town with a promise of jobs. If you ask me, our present system is already under tremendous stress just trying to find work for people. It doesn't even care that much if it is productive--just keep those peasants busy so they won't get into trouble.
blazespin 10y ago
The jobs are coming back, sure, but they're all bullsh*t jobs. And more and more we're all at the beck and call of computers. Seriously? Just so we can say we have a job?

140 points by apsec112 10y ago

This is from 2013 so in terms of recovery years it is a bit dated... But the first three questions all posit that unemployment was rising, and that reemployment was not occurring which is(and was) belied by this graph -https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

mikepurvis 10y ago
Does that one graph really tell the whole story? Things not captured here include: - underemployment, like law school grads working in book stores because no lawyer needs a clerk now that computers do the research for them. - contractors vs. part time vs. full time. I've seen it asserted that we've lost a lot of salaried positions in favour of contractor arrangements (gig economy) or shift work. - people who've transitioned from unemployed to being on long-term Medicaid—I don't believe they count as "unemployed", but various mental illness issues can be caused or made worse by being long-term out of work.

mehwoot 10y ago

The entire argument is that "automation didnt get invented recently so how can it be the cause of a recent phenomenon". This seems pretty weak to me. Maybe automation has finally automated all (or enough) of the jobs that any human can be trained to do with minimal education, so there aren't any jobs for a percentage of the population anymore? Assuming that people who lose their jobs to automation will find new ones requires every person be able to perform some sort of new job. But with automation doing most physical tasks and now some mental ones, is it so crazy to think that the bar of competency required to do anything worth paying for is being raised?

apsec112 10y ago
The article addresses that explicitly. Some questions in the "Anti-FAQ" are: "Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be done, or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be even more easily automated." "What if what's changed is that we're out of new jobs to create? What if we've already got enough hot dog buns, for every kind of hot dog bun there is in the labor market, and now AI is automating away the last jobs and the last of the demand for labor?" "How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?" and then there are responses to each of these. Do you think the responses are unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why in some more detail?
- vertex-four 10y ago
  I can't read it due to the site apparently being down for me, but - the issue isn't in the creative and skilled job markets, it's with the people who never went to university, wound up working e.g. retail for life, and now have family which is living on the brink of homelessness so they can't retrain without having them looked after. The individualist viewpoint is to say "they fucked up, so screw them", but this is going to lead to people dipping into even more severe poverty and possibly even dying. I think we as individuals have a duty towards the society we were brought up in, which has helped most of us in at least some degree - so what are we going to do about it?
- wvenable 10y ago
  The responses are pretty unsatisfying; there isn't really any meat there at all. Just a bunch of hand-waving "it can go any way". It also fails to recognize that computers don't need to be powerful human-level AI's to displace workers -- they've been doing that from day 1.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  That's a straw man. It's obvious that there are still jobs around - (almost, there's always somebody crazy) nobody is arguing that jobs don't exist anymore. The real question is if automation is finally faster than what society can adapt to. The article makes no effort to answer this.
deleted 10y ago
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mey 10y ago

As a counter point from today, not 2013 http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/federal-report-ai-could-threaten-up-to-47-percent-of-jobs-in-two-decades/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/federal-report-ai-co... Edit: Salient point in article from one of the reports "If labor productivity increases do not translate into wage increases, then the large economic gains brought about by AI could accrue to a select few," the report says. "Instead of broadly shared prosperity for workers and consumers, this might push towards reduced competition and increased wealth inequality."

jawns 10y ago

> for AI or productivity growth or increased trade or immigration or graduating students to increase unemployment, instead of resulting in more hot dogs and buns for everyone, you must be doing something terribly wrong that you weren't doing wrong in 1950. Not necessarily. There's going to eventually come a point where any job that can be performed by a low-skilled worker can be performed by automation. The example used to combat this notion is that servants used to be more plentiful than they are now, and low-skilled workers would be ripe for these types of careers. Well, what did servants do? The same thing my robot vacuum cleaner and dishwasher and microwave and Amazon Echo do now.

apsec112 10y ago
If the examples in the article aren't convincing, there are plenty of other ones. Eg., construction involves lots of manual labor, and lots of machines that are designed only for human operators. If automation reduces the demand for low-skill labor in other fields, the result should be a construction boom, as that sector reduces costs and snaps up more workers. But that's not what we see. In fact, in many ways it's the opposite - in NYC, subways now cost ~30x as much per track-mile (inflation-adjusted) as in the 1920s.
- philipkglass 10y ago
  Unemployment in other sectors "should" result in a subway construction boom/plummeting costs only if low-skill labor were the largest cost component of subway construction in the recent past. Was it? I tried searching for a few minutes on Google Scholar to find the share of subway project costs going to labor but didn't turn up anything; maybe you can find something. I did find articles that say labor costs have increased over time, but none that were quantitative about it. Without quantification it's not helpful.
  - makomk 10y ago
    Now extend that thinking. What if low-skill labour isn't the largest cost component in anything much worthwhile that we're not already doing? How would that affect the reasoning in this FAQ?

noetic_techy 10y ago

This article just leans on the same historic analogies that don't hold up to scrutiny. These answers fall way short of the effect of automation and AI will have. You are not replacing the job with another, you are replacing the human brain! I always refer people to this video to explain what it will be like, and it debases almost all the points made in this FAQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU All these historical analogies fall flat on their face when it comes to an AI being trained to do your exact job. This is not another case of farmers moving to different higher skilled jobs. We are the employed horses of the 1800s about to be made unemployable by the advent of cars.

slaveofallah93 10y ago
Terrible video. Even the creator admits he was probably wrong with the points that he made. Low quality youtube video that doesn't hold up when you actually look at the points he's making. Humans are not horses.
deleted 10y ago
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apsec112 10y ago
"We are the employed horses of the 1800s about to be made unemployable by the advent of cars." The article explicitly addresses that: "Q. How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?" "A. If we imagine that in future decades machine intelligence is slowly going past the equivalent of IQ 70, 80, 90, eating up more and more jobs along the way... then I defer to Robin Hanson's analysis in Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence, in which, as the abstract says, "Machines complement human labor when [humans] become more productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At ﬁrst, complementary eﬀects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do."" "Q. Could we already be in this substitution regime -" "A. No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned. That sentence in Hanson's paper has nothing to do with what is going on right now. The future cannot be a cause of the past. Future scenarios, even if they seem to associate the concept of AI with the concept of unemployment, cannot rationally increase the probability that current AI is responsible for current unemployment." "Q. But AI will inevitably become a problem later?" "A. Not necessarily. We only get the Hansonian scenario if... (etc, etc.)"

neonbat 10y ago

space bat real talk. people will only be paid if they can give something valuable in return. if people dont have something valuable to offer or they have something of low value, they will not be hired or they will be hired for very little. so if people cant get jobs or become chronically underemployed the question is 'why dont people have anything valuable to offer?' there are probably many reasons, education, technology substitution for human capital, 'automation' though i dont get accused of being a luddite (which i am not) or sharing their fallacies (which i do not). automation will not take away someones job irreplaceably until that automation is 'strong' enough to do lots of stuff. its getting there and it may be contributing to our problems. but its not a reason to panic, if less people can have jobs thats actually a very good thing, we can spend time on other cool stuff. its a reason to restructure our society a little. things that work often work for a period, very few things/processes continue or work indefinitely in the universe. so we could maybe rethink how our society distributes wealth, ownership, etc. how do we get people in a position to offer something valuable? economists spouting dogma and ignoring real problems is pretty dysfunctional. they teach this sort of junk in schools too. its important to fall back on what we know but its also important to re examine what we think we know. its important to think in simple principles when reexamining. gorund-up. economists/many scientists dont like doing that for more reasons that id like to get into here. it falls to people with common sense frankly, which i find lacking on blogs like this.

michaelchisari 10y ago

There may be new jobs that come around, but new jobs require retraining. And what if we automate those new jobs faster than people can be reasonably expected to retrain for them?

Analemma_ 10y ago

Eliezer really needs to learn how to stick to his areas of expertise. When he talks about decision theory or the mathematical formalisms of AI it can be spectacular; when he wades into economics or quantum mechanics it's frequently embarrassing.

apsec112 10y ago
Could you explain why you think he's wrong in more detail? As written, this reads like a Bulverism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism): "The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error". The Bulverist assumes a speaker's argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake, attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive."
notahacker 10y ago
As someone who is degree-qualified in the area of economics, I have to say I prefer this facetious and reasonably well-informed takedown of bad pop economics (and his HP fanfic!) to his utterly serious entertainment of ridiculous ideas like Roko's Basilisk in the area of expertise he's dedicating his life to... (Rothbard's law: people tend to specialize in what they are worst at [also applied to Rothbard])
- apsec112 10y ago
  Eliezer never took Roko's Basilisk seriously; unfortunately, there's a great deal of misinformation about this online. Here's what happened: "What I considered to be obvious common sense was that you did not spread potential information hazards because it would be a crappy thing to do to someone. The problem wasn't Roko's post itself, about CEV, being correct. That thought never occurred to me for a fraction of a second. The problem was that Roko's post seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards, all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they presented no potential benefit to anyone. They were pure infohazards. The only thing they could possibly do was be detrimental to brains that represented them, if one of the possible variants of the idea turned out to be repairable of the obvious objections and defeaters. So I deleted it, because on my worldview there was no reason not to. I did not want LessWrong.com to be a place where people were exposed to potential infohazards because somebody like me thought they were being clever about reasoning that they probably weren't infohazards. On my view, the key fact about Roko's Basilisk wasn't that it was plausible, or implausible, the key fact was just that shoving it in people's faces seemed like a fundamentally crap thing to do because there was no upside. Again, I deleted that post not because I had decided that this thing probably presented a real hazard, but because I was afraid some unknown variant of it might, and because it seemed to me like the obvious General Procedure For Handling Things That Might Be Infohazards said you shouldn't post them to the Internet. If you look at the original SF story where the term "basilisk" was coined, it's about a mind-erasing image and the.... trolls, I guess, though the story predates modern trolling, who go around spraypainting the Basilisk on walls, using computer guidance so they don't know themselves what the Basilisk looks like, in hopes the Basilisk will erase some innocent mind, for the lulz. These people are the villains of the story. The good guys, of course, try to erase the Basilisk from the walls. Painting Basilisks on walls is a crap thing to do. Since there was no upside to being exposed to Roko's Basilisk, its probability of being true was irrelevant. And Roko himself had thought this was a thing that might actually work. So I yelled at Roko for violating basic sanity about infohazards for stupid reasons, and then deleted the post. He, by his own lights, had violated the obvious code for the ethical handling of infohazards, conditional on such things existing, and I was indignant about this." https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_basilisk/cjjbqqo/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_ba...

anton_tarasenko 10y ago

It's funny that automation is under attack. Any conventional measure says that productivity growth declines and the number of jobs grows. First, the rise of unemployment is not supported by facts. The widely cited unemployment rate went down to 4.6%.[1] That's the pre-crisis level of the overheated 2008 economy. This reduction is costly, but manageable. Jobs disappear, but new ones get created. Nonfarm payrolls (aka "created jobs") are well above zero.[2] So what's the unemployment the media keep talking about? The unemployment voter. 4.6% is greater than the winner's margin in any of the recent presidential elections. It's a valuable asset to candidates and, thus, a hot media topic. The average voter actually gets better thanks to productivity gains, not employment (which we can't reduce below 4% anyway). Productivity accounted for 2 percentage points of per-hour output growth.[3] It still contributes at least 0.5 pp. This decline is the real problem: losing those 2% means being poorer by 21.9% by the end of the decade. But productivity doesn't vote, so this loss is going to happen. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=4CaW https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=4CaW [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?category_id=0&graph_id=12880 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?category_id=0&graph_id=12... [3] Gordon, “Perspectives on The Rise and Fall of American Growth.” p. 73.

Analemma_ 10y ago
Unemployment, in the sense of "who is looking for a job but can't find one" is low, but the labor force participation rate is at 62.7%, close to a 30-year low [0][1]. It seems to have bottomed-out in the last couple years and is currently holding steady, but the current level is not encouraging. Note that a low participation rate, as in, "people have just given up looking for a job and resigned themselves to permanent unemployment because there are no economic prospects in their vicinity" does tally quite well with the stories the media keeps talking. Note also that median wages are not yet climbing after their recession decline, despite the falling unemployment (classically, 5% is about the level at which you expect wages to start rising), suggesting that a lot of the new jobs being created are kind of shitty. [0] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rate-september-2014-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rat...

MustrumRidcully 10y ago

The problem with this explaination is that it focuses on the technical aspect and not on the economical one : how is the value created shared among the people in the economy? Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient capital : with the new machine you can make 15 buns whereas you made less with the new one. The employee is not paid more : the capitalist earns the cost saved. Problem is that the capitalist doesn't spend 100% of his income : he will consume some, invest some and save the rest in unproductive accounts or stocks. He may produce 50% more hot dogs, but the demand will not follow. Economics theory says that in this case prices may go down, but that would mean a lowering of the capitalist's profits. He may in this case reduce quality in order to lower the prices while preserving his margins. Hence we see here 3 things : accumation of capital in a few hands, an era of deflation and low yields due to low demand and high monetary stock needed to be invested, and a reduction of quality of the product. The last one is counter intuitive but may be seen in reality : buildings have reached the point where it's commodity, replaced every 30 years, clothes are worthless and the quality of food has been decreasing for the last 30 years (at least in my country, France). If we get richer everyday, why can't we make buildings that are aesthical, solid and durable anymore? Why is quality food reserved only for rich people?

apsec112 10y ago
Returns to capital in the form of ownership of companies (including eg. the source code to automate labor that's owned by those companies) have been flat. Higher returns on capital have almost entirely been caused by higher housing prices. See eg. Rognlie's paper at http://www.mit.edu/~mrognlie/piketty_diminishing_returns.pdf http://www.mit.edu/~mrognlie/piketty_diminishing_returns.pdf.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  It's almost as if the rate of profit tends to fall.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago

narrator 10y ago

I think Jevon's Paradox[1] might apply to our relationship with AI. Jevon's Paradox states that the more efficiently a resource is used, the more the demand for it increases. Thus with AI, the more efficiently human labor is used, the more demand for it increases? Thus one person is able to accomplish far more with the aid of robots, therefore the usefulness of labor increases. The out of work argument only works if there is a fixed amount of production that needs to be done and then there's no more to be done after that. However, if that were the case, then we'd have all we would need and no one would have to work because working more would just produce useless stuff that would not be used. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox

AJ007 10y ago
I think the question of what happens if humans have no jobs left to do is extremely premature. Different stages of AI and automation are being conflated in to the same arguments. Rather, the issue that needs to be considered right now is what happens, in the US, if there is a big disruption to a large group of jobs which have been fairly stable for decades in a very short period of time? Specifically I am thinking about accounting (imminent), lawyers (already happening), financial advisors (happening), insurance agents (happening), real estate agents (imminent), drivers (coming soon), travel agents (transition complete) and so on. Society as a whole gains benefits, if not direct access, but perhaps at a cost of removing the socio-economic status of a large group of people. This, of course, has happened many times before. The greater AI-employment questions should be answered after we are pretty sure humans are even going to survive 5, 10 decades from now.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Humans made it through Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, chattel slavery, WWII and various flu epidemics. I doubt we'll end ourselves in 10 years. "Removing socio-economic status" SHOULD be a goal, to the extent that that status comes from rents ( which it usually does ) . Status seeking is a huge drain on us, and if production starts to go exponential, then the "economic" part fades in importance.
10y ago

ikeboy 10y ago

Apparently LW got the hug of death. https://archive.fo/8ew3S https://archive.fo/8ew3S has an archive.

runeks 10y ago

Cached link, for those who can't reach the site (I get a 504): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YP88PLEg9AEJ:lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YP88PLE...

espadrine 10y ago

Some parts are good points, but some parts are strawman arguments. If all jobs require four years of expertise to apply for, every time one job gets mechanized, while employers switch over to automation, the employees made redundant would need to sustain themselves while studying to gain the expertise required for a job in a different field at the same salary. We do have an increasing number of distinct jobs that each take many years of study. So far, I have felt confident in my ability to evolve in this job sector because I am good at logic, which most of programming relates to. But if the logic aspect of the job was trivialized to the point that anyone could tell a machine what it must do, I might have to move towards a new field, and learn to solve Schrödinger's equations and be deeply knowledgeable about quantum mechanics to be able to program some future, more complex machine. And yet even that is easier than having to go from driving trucks to managing logistics.

apsec112 10y ago
"If all jobs require four years of expertise to apply for, every time one job gets mechanized, while employers switch over to automation, the employees made redundant would need to sustain themselves while studying to gain the expertise required for a job in a different field at the same salary." That is completely true, but it's also something that applies to every other means of labor automation (going back to the 18th century or earlier), so it's nothing we haven't seen before.
- makomk 10y ago
  Not really. Up until I think at least the 1970s, on-the-job training and apprenticeships were a lot more common. Both the expectation that employees will already have the required skills and expertise and across-the-board requirements for university qualifications are relatively new changes.
  - setr 10y ago
    Isn't that just another example of the author's point? Automation hasn't changed, the world around it has

st3v3r 10y ago

I think this ignores the most important question of all: Given the rises in automation, how do we avoid adding up in a Hunger Games-esque future? And before anyone says UBI: Do you honestly think that Paul Ryan, who is planning on gutting Social Security and Medicare right this second, would go along with that? UBI is going to be off the table for at least 20 years.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I think this ignores the most important question of all: Given the rises in automation, how do we avoid adding up in a Hunger Games-esque future? Unconditional Basic Income, or something very similar. > And before anyone says UBI: Do you honestly think that Paul Ryan, who is planning on gutting Social Security and Medicare right this second, would go along with that? Probably not. Paul Ryan remaining in a position to exert decisive control over policy and avoiding a dystopian future may well be mutually exclusive options. > UBI is going to be off the table for at least 20 years. Congressional and Presidential elections are much more frequent than that and can result in sudden and dramatic reversal of policy direction, especially in the face of widespread economic concerns. Sufficient economic pain, historically and globally speaking, has also been known to provoke large and fundamental political change outside of normal electoral timelines and succession processes.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  >Congressional and Presidential elections are much more frequent than that and can result in sudden and dramatic reversal of policy direction, especially in the face of widespread economic concerns. The frequency of elections is immaterial in the era of uber-gerrymandering and population migration. Censuses are every 10 years.
abecedarius 10y ago
Milton Friedman proposed something like a UBI back in the 1950s (a "negative income tax"), and he has cachet with some Republicans.
- 10y ago

bikamonki 10y ago

Anecdata: we are a 4 head-count startup. One of our heads is leaving soon. I thought about the impact on operations and realized most of his tasks can be automated and the rest we can absorb without overloading. Automation and AI are surely a main factor in some jobs never coming back. High productivity (also thanks to cheaper/better/faster IT-related services) is also a factor.

george_ciobanu 10y ago

It's more than just technology: anxiety went up substantially from a mix of -social status awareness (Facebook and other social networks allow me to constantly compare myself to others) -for older white Americans the world seems to be under a liberal assault: gay rights, genderless bathrooms, black lives matter, muslim immigrants, a black president, microaggressions etc. All these changes came in relatively rapid succession and the old guard felt it strongly. I'm a liberal man in NYC but I also feel stressed when talking with people: what if I accidentally say something inappropriate, am considered racist or sexist despite my best intentions, wtf is a microaggression etc. I'm for these changes but I think they came in too fast. -world news are now delivered as they happen, way more effectively than in the past; it's well-known that reading news causes anxiety -the US Republicans deliberately misinformed and angered their constituency in their quest to fight Obama. They essentially subverted democracy by blindly resisting the other side and not engaging in any dialogue whatsoever. To justify their position and keep their constituency's support, they had to misinform and anger them. The world is in a much better spot than ever before, but our awareness to every problem around the globe has also heightened. We are also just developing the right mechanisms to defend from information manipulation - fake news, clickbait and super-biased reporting (on both sides) erode trust - it's hard to know what is true and what not anymore, and some people don't even try, they just react (see pizzagate). I also disagree with the author - a lot of jobs disappeared and this time they are not coming back in the form of other jobs. Through automation and information technologies one person can do the work many many others used to before. Revenue-per-employee increased dramatically because of this very reason, in all areas from finance to tech and services. Many jobs that were be doable with a high-school degree disappeared and they are not coming back. http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving-assurance-makes-your-facebook-use-problematic-uncontrolled-356646 http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving-assur... http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Gad, I wish social status would just die already. To the extent that they are not bubbly[1], trades are still a solid way to make money and don't require classroom training beyond high school. Sure, your knees might be shot when you're... forty, but still... [1] thinking oilfield here...

marcosdumay 10y ago

Although the article has little evidence substantiating it, and many, many argument flaws, I do think its main hypothesis is correct, and the current unemployment is not caused mainly by automation. If you look at the graphs at [0], productivity is falling, not increasing, as is capital. It looks much more that the world is getting old-fashioned poor than automation pushing people out of work. EDIT: Forgot the link 0: https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/11/17/there-are-two-productivity-puzzles/ https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/11/17/there-are-two-produ...

transfire 10y ago

I would laugh, but I have a robot that does that for me now.

deleted 10y ago

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fleevy 10y ago

The problem with the economy is Obamacare. Once that's gone, the jobs will come pouring back. Easy

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

People have too much debt, housing costs are too high, and poorly designed social assistance programs discourages work. Suppose Bob is unemployed and lives with his parents in the suburbs. Bob collects unemployment, is eligible for several social programs and has a deferral on his student loans. Bob could get hired at $50,000/year in New York City in a second. But housing within any reasonable distance is $2000/month, taking the job would require Bob to start making $1000/month payments on his student loans and cause him to lose $15,000/year in unemployment and other benefits. Which means Bob can't take that job. He would need a job that pays more than that, which isn't available. So Bob remains unemployed. Construct a lot of new housing, replace existing social assistance with a UBI, and introduce moderate inflation to reduce the real value of existing debts and maintain the nominal value of housing while reducing its real cost, and we've solved a big part of it.

witty_username 10y ago
Why should debt be forgiven via inflation? Also, this causes interest rates to go up as lenders will expect another surprise inflation.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > Why should debt be forgiven via inflation? Because the debt was induced by harmful interest rate subsidies that bring about a highly undesirable wealth transfer from government (i.e. all taxpayers) to banks, distort markets like housing and education by inflating their prices relative to the rest of the economy (including wages), and cause people to take on excessive debt because people care about monthly payments rather than principal amounts and subsidized interest causes the borrowable principal amount to explode at a given monthly payment, since government-subsidized interest then constitutes a large fraction of the payment and is at no risk of default so lenders are willing to make excessively large loans. See also housing crisis. Undoing the damage done by those subsidies requires their inverse, which is inflation. It transfers wealth from banks to the government to the benefit of taxpayers, allows the real price of housing and education to fall to where they should be without shocking the market by reducing their nominal prices, and allows people to pay off the unwisely-induced existing debt principal with lower value currency. > Also, this causes interest rates to go up as lenders will expect another surprise inflation. And then people won't borrow as much principal in the future, so paying down principal will be easier at prevailing wages, which is the desired result. You're also assuming lenders have control over that given the way the government creating money affects interest rates. When the government creates money it has the effect of reducing the amount of government debt in circulation (they have money, they don't need to issue bonds), which reduces interest rates on bonds and forces would-be bond purchasers into buying some other debt, which increases competition for lending and reduces interest rates in other lending markets too.

jstewartmobile 10y ago

This is pretty bad. He goes on for pages taking down his own straw men without even getting close to the completely artificial "make-work" nature of most of our pre-AI economy. We spend hundreds of billions above-and-beyond what could be strictly considered defense. To this day, a great deal of our interior is subsidized into farming, even though that level of effort has not been necessary for over 100 years. We are bankrupting ourselves on a health care system that costs almost twice as much as its western european counterpart to produce uniformly inferior outcomes, and contrary to the right-wing propaganda of torts-gone-wild, much of this cost is pure admin/bureaucratic overhead. Don't even get me started on the bureaucracy and make work of our various educational systems! Municipalities across the nation throw millions of dollars, bad after good, without claw-backs, to any pack of two-bit hucksters rolling into town with a promise of jobs. If you ask me, our present system is already under tremendous stress just trying to find work for people. It doesn't even care that much if it is productive--just keep those peasants busy so they won't get into trouble.

blazespin 10y ago

The jobs are coming back, sure, but they're all bullsh*t jobs. And more and more we're all at the beck and call of computers. Seriously? Just so we can say we have a job?