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"This isn't idle speculation: it's exactly what happened to horses once technology obsoleted them which caused them to die off except for some very narrow cases

"This isn't idle speculation: it's exactly what happened to horses once technology obsoleted them which caused them to die off except for some very narrow cases and vanity competitions." The article does explicitly address this. Do you think the response is unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why? "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. (etc.)"

ep103 10y ago
That's not an explanation, that's literally just the author saying "no, no, no, no".
SilasX 10y ago
"Robin Hanson totally thinks that won't happen because human and computer labor are complementary" is not a sufficient response. It's equally true of human and horse labor. Still had the horse die-off. In fact Hanson isn't even disagreeing -- he says that this complement is temporary and will eventually become displacement instead, just like I was saying. That agrees with my point that Yudkowsky has made a case for AI not causing unemployment now but still being a future risk, even with the economic analysis holding true.
st3v3r 10y ago
I am entirely unsatisfied with his address of that problem. Mainly because he doesn't address it. He just kinda hand waves it away. And that's the only interesting thing that there is to address. We all know that automation is coming, and that it's going to replace a lot of workers. Augmentation is also going to come, and it's going to displace many more workers, by allowing one worker to do the work of three. So what do we do with those that are displaced? So far no one has any kind of answer. Most don't even want to think about it, assuming that things will tie up nicely by themselves like on a sitcom episode.
- TillE 10y ago
  > So far no one has any kind of answer. Well, socialists do. Even arch-capitalists are now nervously trying to engineer some light flavor of market socialism with UBI. The problem of distributing the benefits of technology isn't a physical one, it's purely political and social.
deleted 10y ago
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wvenable 10y ago
> The future cannot be a cause of the past. This is the failed assumption of the author; that computers need human intelligence to displace jobs but they don't. They've been displacing jobs since their invention and they're getting better at it every year. They don't need to have an IQ of 70 or even an IQ at all.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  They created jobs too, a lot of which people assume are done by robots because they're done in other countries. Apple may only employ 100,000 people in the US but 1.3 million not-robots work for the company that actually makes those phones. The argument that it automation is "naturally" creating fewer jobs that it eliminates is refuted simply by looking overseas where all those new jobs actually are. Or are they just temporary? Foxconn threatened in 2011 that within three years their 1.2 million strong workforce would be largely replaced by robots: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/foxconn-to-replace-human-workers-with-one-million-robots http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot... Here we are 5 years later with them employing another 100,000 warm bodies while making identical threats.
  - potatolicious 10y ago
    I don't think the argument is that automation creates no jobs, the argument is that (at least in the current instance of automation) it creates dramatically fewer jobs than it eliminates, and the balance is not being made up for over time or in other industries, resulting in a substantial net decrease in employment or wages. Apple's 1.3 million-strong workforce is itself being automated out of existence... http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966
  - wvenable 10y ago
    I'm not even talking about robots; I'm just talking about computers. The majority of people developing software aren't creating new jobs, they're deliberately and explicitly reducing the need for human labor.

ep103 10y ago

That's not an explanation, that's literally just the author saying "no, no, no, no".

SilasX 10y ago

"Robin Hanson totally thinks that won't happen because human and computer labor are complementary" is not a sufficient response. It's equally true of human and horse labor. Still had the horse die-off. In fact Hanson isn't even disagreeing -- he says that this complement is temporary and will eventually become displacement instead, just like I was saying. That agrees with my point that Yudkowsky has made a case for AI not causing unemployment now but still being a future risk, even with the economic analysis holding true.

st3v3r 10y ago

I am entirely unsatisfied with his address of that problem. Mainly because he doesn't address it. He just kinda hand waves it away. And that's the only interesting thing that there is to address. We all know that automation is coming, and that it's going to replace a lot of workers. Augmentation is also going to come, and it's going to displace many more workers, by allowing one worker to do the work of three. So what do we do with those that are displaced? So far no one has any kind of answer. Most don't even want to think about it, assuming that things will tie up nicely by themselves like on a sitcom episode.

TillE 10y ago
> So far no one has any kind of answer. Well, socialists do. Even arch-capitalists are now nervously trying to engineer some light flavor of market socialism with UBI. The problem of distributing the benefits of technology isn't a physical one, it's purely political and social.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wvenable 10y ago

> The future cannot be a cause of the past. This is the failed assumption of the author; that computers need human intelligence to displace jobs but they don't. They've been displacing jobs since their invention and they're getting better at it every year. They don't need to have an IQ of 70 or even an IQ at all.

crdoconnor 10y ago
They created jobs too, a lot of which people assume are done by robots because they're done in other countries. Apple may only employ 100,000 people in the US but 1.3 million not-robots work for the company that actually makes those phones. The argument that it automation is "naturally" creating fewer jobs that it eliminates is refuted simply by looking overseas where all those new jobs actually are. Or are they just temporary? Foxconn threatened in 2011 that within three years their 1.2 million strong workforce would be largely replaced by robots: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/foxconn-to-replace-human-workers-with-one-million-robots http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot... Here we are 5 years later with them employing another 100,000 warm bodies while making identical threats.
- potatolicious 10y ago
  I don't think the argument is that automation creates no jobs, the argument is that (at least in the current instance of automation) it creates dramatically fewer jobs than it eliminates, and the balance is not being made up for over time or in other industries, resulting in a substantial net decrease in employment or wages. Apple's 1.3 million-strong workforce is itself being automated out of existence... http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966
- wvenable 10y ago
  I'm not even talking about robots; I'm just talking about computers. The majority of people developing software aren't creating new jobs, they're deliberately and explicitly reducing the need for human labor.