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Should economists be more concerned about AI?
- ThomPete 10y agoYes they are because they treat tech as an externality. This has a double negative effect because that also means that politicians arent being presented with the right scenarios as they are guided by the very economist models that doesent factor tech in. It boggles my mind that the arguments i hear from economist is basically the same tired horse cariages argument. Thats litterally all they have.
- Swizec 10y agoThe question isn't "What happened to horse carriages", they're now cars. Obviously. But where did all the horses go?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Almaviva 10y agoHorses haven't shown the same level of adaptation to different skill sets that humans have.
- ethbro 10y ago(In 50 years) Humans haven't shown the same level of adaptation to different skill sets that GP AIs have.
- ThomPete 10y agoAnd neither have humans. How many +40 will be able to change career? I find the dismissive attitude really unfounded and blind to the realities we live in.
- Almaviva 10y agoThe problem is fundamental and serious, what to do when a growing number of people have literally nothing valuable to contribute to an economy. But horses aren't a good analogy to shed light on it. Horses are more analogous to steam engines than people, in their historical function on the economy.
- ThomPete 10y agoHorses are a bad analogy if you want to prove that AI wont take over most jobs. They are however a great analogy if you want to see how technology once it reaches a certain point renders biological beings sub-par useless as part wealth creation.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hacker_9 10y agoThere have been trials of basic income though, so people are thinking about it. Additionally the term 'robot' is very handwavey and could mean anything intelligence wise, so difficult to say what jobs will get replaced and when.
- ThomPete 10y agoThis is one of the very the problems of this discussion. What is important is not robots but ai.
- monk_e_boy 10y agoBill Gates said that no nation on earth is rich enough to afford basic income. It's a long way off.
- speedboat 10y agoBill Gates just want doesn't want to pay more in taxes. That's what UBI requires: more taxes. Considerable tax increases, but there it is. Tax the economic beneficiaries of the economy and divest to everyone to bring the top and bottom closer to GDP per capita.
- massysett 10y agoGates is worth $76 billion. US population is over 300 million. So if we liberated Gates of every penny he has, there would be a one-time payment of less than $253 to every American. The rich do not have enough money to pay for everyone else to be on the dole.
- vorotato 10y agoSure but there were over 10 million millionaires in the US last year. If we took just a million a year just from those guys we'd have 30,000 a year per american. I'm not saying we should, but your math sucks.
- 10y ago
- branchless 10y agoNo idea why the link is to the utterly shallow BB article rather than the BoE blog. Here is another good entry from the same blog about how banks create money when they lend rather than being intermediaries: https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-intermediaries-of-loanable-funds-and-why-this-matters/ https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-inter...
- monk_e_boy 10y agoA small thought. When AI gets good-ish then would it work sort of like this: You go to a supermarket and ask it where the beans are, it tells you. It reminds you to pick up toothpaste. You go to the checkout, but to the AI enabled one because the AI is nice and chatty and asks how your day was. You pop into mcdonalds and the AI greets you, asks you what you'd like to eat (I imagine it will be on a screen as you walk in)... questions - am I talking to mcdonalds AI, or will my personal AI follow me into the store? How will my personal AI interact with mcdonalds - via APIs or something? Or will each store have its own AI, so if I pop to Tesco then Tesco AI will talk to me. I find it weird that on android I have one AI, on my desktop I have Cortana and Google/Chrome, on my iPad it's Siri... I don't want to be interacting with a thousand as I show and game and browse the internet. I want one that follows me around.
- ThomPete 10y agoI am pretty sure we will see a move to nationalize basic production. If you think about it it actually make sense as there is no more competitive advantage to be had if the entire ecosystem is automated.
- WillPostForFood 10y agoAutomation doesn't mean no competitive advantage.
- ThomPete 10y agoFull automation do.
- oh_sigh 10y agoWhy would you need AI for any of those scenarios you mentioned? I agree about your last point though.
- Xuebit 10y agoI have lurked here for a long time but never felt intelligent enough or had anything worthy to contribute, until now. When the article mentions AI (Or any other article/discussion), I don't think it means robots that walk around and greet/interact with you like in iRobot, I would say it means self-serve checkouts, like the ones already in Tescos or McDonalds[1]; or Automated cars/trucks that don't have a need for human interaction[2]. I think that is where the confusion lies with AI, it might not necessarily mean a physical entity. [1]https://i0.wp.com/www.styledemocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/mcdonalds-self-order-kiosks-canada.jpg?w=650canada.jpg?w=650 https://i0.wp.com/www.styledemocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/... [2]https://www.axios.com/heres-where-jobs-will-be-lost-when-robots-drive-trucks-2276682948.html https://www.axios.com/heres-where-jobs-will-be-lost-when-rob...
- MegaButts 10y ago> BOE Chief Economist Andrew Haldane estimating in 2015 that 15 million British jobs and 80 million in the U.S. could be lost to automation I don't understand. He's predicting how many jobs will be lost in the past? Besides that, there's not much concrete in this article. Where are the specific examples of robots that are successfully disrupting industries? General purpose robotics isn't here yet. Maybe it'll happen next year, maybe it'll happen next decade, maybe it won't happen in my lifetime. But just saying "bad things might happen because robots" isn't helpful.
- jdoliner 10y agoThe estimate was made in 2015, not about 2015.
- jdoliner 10y agoSomething interesting that I learned recently from a former Dean of the Industrial Labor Relations School at Cornell: Worry over automation destroying jobs is almost as old as automation itself. Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. Now, that of course, doesn't mean that this is some immutable law of the universe that automation will never destroy jobs. But it does mean we should look very skeptically at all the hand wringing over the impending robot job stealing. It's also important to note that this result is global, not local. The employment situation in the US is obviously different today than it was in the 70s. That may well be due to technology / automation. But jobs haven't been destroyed, they've just moved to different places.
- ThomPete 10y agoAutomation used to be about simply replacing physical labour with more automated systems. The problem with your Deans teaching is that it's not not just physical labour but intellectual capacity. And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago> And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans. If we reach the point where AI can do all human jobs better than humans, that would put us firmly in a post-scarcity world, where humans no longer need to work jobs at all.
- ThomPete 10y agoYou are looking at this the wrong way. No job require all human skills. Most jobs requires only subsets of human skills.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
- mrfusion 10y agoI was thinking about automation and job loss recently. I tried to make a simple model to understand what happens. Can you guys critique this thought experiment? It makes it seem like it won't be a problem. There are three people on an island. One catches fish. One bakes bread and the other one owns the land and takes a portion of the of the fish and bread. Let's say one day the land owner recieves a machine that makes bread and catches fish. He can either continue collecting rent plus his new production. Or he can not collect rent since he doesn't need it. But in either case the other two people are no worse off.
- azernik 10y agoOr the landowner can kick them off the land so he can use it all for himself. Especially if the machine still uses the same resources (land and coastline), and just cuts out the labor component.
- scottmf 10y agoWhy will he continue to let them live on his land? It's a gross oversimplification regardless.
- vorotato 10y agoI'd say it was an appropriate level of simplification given that you arrived at the correct answer and he wasn't able to :P.
- rfrank 10y ago> But in either case the other two people are no worse off. They both lost 50% of their customers, how will they pay their rent? If this island were an apartment building, the owner could just keep his newfound production, evict the other two, and collect rent from new tenants who can afford it.
- mgberlin 10y agoUnless catching the fish and baking the bread are zero sum games, in which the land owner is the winner, leaving the other two with nothing.
- dang 10y agoUrl changed from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-01/economists-may-be-underestimating-how-fast-the-robots-are-coming https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-01/economist..., which points to this.
- fizixer 10y agoAs a technologist, and a follower of automation related news for the past 4+ years, I have basically given up on the economists, save for a handful like Robin Hanson. They will probably realize their folly when it's too late. Even their claims that "automation based disruption didn't happen in the past" is simply false. They back their claims by pointing to current unemployment (or the pre-2007-crisis rate of 4-5%), i.e., obviously unemployment is really low therefore automation didn't take away jobs. No you dummy. Automation did take away jobs, and the people whose jobs were lost were directly affected by it, and millions of families were destroyed. In recent history we can point to two major time periods of this sort, the first industrial revolution (around the turn of 19th century), and the second industrial revolution (at the turn of the 20th century). In the first one, the subject of economics, and statistics, and more involved census-taking was still in its infancy, and Europe was in general in a state of turmoil with warfare more rampant, so it's possible that the harmful effects of automation were not documented thoroughly. The second time, things were a lot more stable, economics and statistics were a lot more developed, and yet: - World War I happened! (why do you think things were so agitated around that time, after many decades of relative peace? Do you not call the events leading up to it social disruption?) - Major recession happened (any chance it had anything to do with the 2nd industrial revolution?) - World War II happened. (again, partly the result of social agitation, WWI, and recession). In the mean time, within decades a whole generation of farmers were rendered obsolete and asked to dismiss themselves. These middle-aged and old farmers were the bread winners of their families and didn't have quite the resources to "retrain" themselves and put themselves back into the workforce, something the economists love to tell you about as a solution. What ended up happening is that, after a lot of pain and suffering, their younger generation (the "millenials" of 100 years ago) got themselves educated in the newer trades, entered the workforce and brought the unemployment back to stable levels. If you can comprehend what happened in the decades roughly a 100 years ago, just know that what's happening this time is at least 10x worse if not more! (I always like to share CGPGrey's 'Humans Need Not Apply'. Go watch it on youtube if you have 10 minutes to spare). edit: not sure what happened but I commented in response to the article [0] not the bankunderground one. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-01/economists-may-be-underestimating-how-fast-the-robots-are-coming https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-01/economist...
- 10y ago
- EGreg 10y agoThats why we need single payer systems to take the place of UBI for everyone
- msluyter 10y agoRelevant to this discussion: A Model of Technological Unemployment http://www.danielsusskind.com/research http://www.danielsusskind.com/research
- vorotato 10y agoIf only there were some entity with the capacity to take that surplus produced by mass automation and help those displaced by it.
- skruzel 10y agoAs a former portfolio manager who also runs a "machine learning for economists company", I have seen many examples where AI and better data can help economists quantify their intuitions and more rigorously test their models. My product is even called the "AI Economist" Let's face it, humans are great at organizing problems and hypothesing about the future, but we are terrible at quickly reasoning about complex interactions and finding patterns in highly noisy data. One area I'm pretty excited about here is using better machine learning algorithms to organize global production, employment and trade data to improve out definitions of business cycles. We have relied on 'high-level stylized facts' to describe the complex and fascinating global economy for too long. If you like geeking out on this stuff, my recent post goes in to it more: https://astrocyte.io/2017/01/11/ml-redefining-business-cycles/ https://astrocyte.io/2017/01/11/ml-redefining-business-cycle...
- glangdale 10y agoI wonder sometimes whether there's another accelerating factor at work; specifically, as this kind of technological advance accelerates, that the prospect of interfacing with another human to get a task done becomes less and less pleasant for people. I've already noticed that quite a number of people of my acquaintance, including occasionally myself, would rather spend 5 minutes poking at radio buttons on my phone to order food vs 45 seconds talking to a human. There may be a premium associated with an absence of human interaction in a task. I'm sure many people would pay more for a robotic cleaner per unit of effectiveness than they would for a human cleaner, just from the perspective of privacy.
- ethbro 10y agoI would counter that it's not privacy / lack of human interaction we're increasingly desiring, but regularity. Or, being able to expect a thing happening in a given situation.
- rpcorb 10y agoCan confirm. I've noticed this social trend as well. However, interestingly, there also seems to be critical threshold (different for every task) beyond which the opposite urge takes hold. Take, for instance, customer/technical support hotlines. The feeling of, "Please just let me talk to a human..." In that case there's a premium on the presence of human interaction. It almost seems like an "uncanny valley" of technological problem solving. In other words, machines are useful but usually brittle. Humans have a flexibility and creativity which won't be easy to replicate.
- glangdale 10y agoYes indeed. Unfortunately one often finds that you are talking to a human who is sitting on the same side of the "uncanny valley of technological problem solving as you". That is, some pleasant and would-be-helpful call center worker who is now just banging their head on the same problem you were. I've had more than a few calls where you can actually hear them getting stuck on the same web page, experiencing the same bug/timeout/whatever that you were getting on the 'public' site. Flexibility and creativity aren't much use when we're all just wrestling with the same brittle machine on the same terms...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Sudharsankp 10y agoAm a big fan of my CEO, in one of his intranet blogs he said something similar to this "AI will make a huge unemployment is a very big claim and an overstatement.. 20 years ago before the computer era people were worried about computers will lead to unemployment and especially all the bank jobs (prestigious jobs back then) but then it is the opposite now, technology always helps you never know in which form" i strongly feel he s right.
- js8 10y agoI believe AI (and automation) are just special cases of growing income inequality (between labor and capital), so it's a little unfair, perhaps, as many economists are worried about that. You can get surplus of labor (and so decreasing its value relative to capital) in two ways - by having too much automation, or by having too much people. The first is the current scenario (of automation), the second is the classic Malthusian one, which I am sure happened many times in history.
- valuearb 10y agoWe should have done something about automation in 1800, we had a country where 95% was gainfully employed in agriculture and those jobs are now gone.