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> We will discover new jobs–we always do after a technological revolution CGP grey put this well > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about t

> We will discover new jobs–we always do after a technological revolution CGP grey put this well > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles (cars etc) will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier - remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding into battle? All terrible! These new city jobs are pretty cushy, and with so many humans in the cities there will be more jobs for horses than ever. Even if this car thingy takes off, he might say, there will be new jobs for horses we can't imagine. > But you know what happened. There are still working horses, but nothing like before. The horse population peaked in 1915 - from that point on it was nothing but down. > There's no law of economics that says that better technology makes more better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud. But swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right. "Humans need not apply" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

colinmhayes 6y ago
I don't necessarily disagree but that's really not a good analogy. Horses aren't people. When their jobs disappear no one gives a fuck. No one speaks up for their interests. People will not go so easy. They are able to create amazing things if given the opportunity. No one wants mass human unemployment.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  You realize it's an allegory, right?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    It's fine to reply to an allegory with "you're right, that solution doesn't work, but it doesn't preclude other solutions because of these reasons, so don't use it to make decisions".
    - Judgmentality 6y ago
      That's very different from a comment which suggests he doesn't realize it's an allegory.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        The comment directly says it's not a good analogy. Complaining that they didn't specifically say "allegory" is really nitpicky. The terms are very close and overlap.
        Judgmentality 6y ago
        If someone says Animal Farm is a good story, but it wouldn't work if the animals were humans, I would say they didn't get the message.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        Depends on what reason they gave. If they misunderstand something about humanity, that's a great jumping point toward discussion. But if they said "yes, those politics would happen in humans, but some of these other factors are more important toward the eventual outcome[...]" then that's perfectly compatible with understanding the story. And that's roughly what the earlier commenter did! They accepted the argument that jobs will go away, while saying the secondary and tertiary effects would be different.
        Judgmentality 6y ago
        Fair, I'm sure it doesn't seem like it but I really don't want to argue. We're obviously reading that comment differently. Cheers.
        colinmhayes 6y ago
        Animal farm is a fictional story about humans disguised as animals. The horse allegory is a non-fictional story about the downfall of horses which are very much not human-like.
- soperj 6y ago
  We already have mass human unemployment. What's the average daily wage? It's not that low because everyone is gainfully employed.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    Pre-covid, Global wages and employment levels have never been higher. Global poverty levels have never been lower. Either way, I don't disagree that AI will replace some jobs, I'm just not sold on the horse story.
    - soperj 6y ago
      and? We still have people dying of starvation world wide. We have scads of homeless in the richest country on earth. Why do you think anyone will care at all?
      - buildstatements 6y ago
        You have to be willfully ignorant to believe a proposition that no one cares, and willfully naive to believe everyone will. Look at https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth and take 5 minutes to look at the data on the rest of the site and you will understand how much life has improved not just in raw numbers (there are more people living above the poverty line than existed 100 years ago), but more importantly in percentage terms - a far smaller fraction of people live in poverty today than in 1880. In fact, the number last time I ran it was that less people live in abject poverty in 2019 than did so in 1880 - despite a 7-8 fold increase in population.
- elihu 6y ago
  People have an advantage that horses don't have: people can own property, and they have legal rights, like the ability to vote in elections. When we're talking about AI, though, it's not too hard to imagine computer programs eventually being allowed to legally own things and accrue wealth. It's harder to imagine them being allowed to vote (how would that even work?) but something like it could happen. We can also imagine this going the other way: economically "useless" people losing the right to own property or the right to vote. Or if the rights continue to exist in theory, in practice they become poor and disenfranchised. And then "the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must." It happens all the time. I think in the long run we need to figure out a reasonable economic system that can deal with abundance of the things people want/need, and scarcity of work. Maybe it's as simple as making a 30, or a 20 hour work week the norm. The default alternative seems to be to have more and more people fighting for fewer and fewer jobs, to the point where everyone who has a job has to work extremely hard under long hours and bad conditions for low pay because if they don't there's ten more people ready to take their place at the drop of a hat.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > It's harder to imagine them being allowed to vote (how would that even work?) They don't have to actually vote, anymore than corporations or wealthy humans do, in order to exert their will on the political process. That's what campaign contributions, PACs, lobbyists, astroturfing, think-tanks, etc. are for.
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
Horses aren't the center of the economy, though. It's fundamentally different. Horses might always want more and more things no matter how much they get. But they don't create demand in our economy, so we'll never know. No matter how much humans get, they'll always want more. And other humans will have to come up with ways to meet that demand. Sure - if we ever reach a time where the entire human race says "this is enough" and everything is automated, then there won't be any jobs. But we're a very far way away from that point. In 2013, 60% of people on the planet didn't even have a toilet [1]. There are obvious problems. In the Western world, it certainly seems like we don't have enough jobs for workers without certain skillsets - or at least jobs that employers are willing to pay minimum wage for. But there are also lots of jobs available. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/60-percent-of-the-world-population-still-without-toilets.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/60-percent-of-the-world...
- S_A_P 6y ago
  I think this is a good take- Having things be better for horses was never the point of the economy. In fact horses were probably the main driver for developing mechanical solutions since horse ownership is expensive and time consuming. There was no incentive to make life/jobs better for horses, and as soon as a better replacement was available horses were not necessary for most people. So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is completely flawed.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    But having things be better for humans was never the point of the economy either. The actual point has always been making things better for a subset of humans, everywhere throughout history. I don't see why an unemployable horse would be considered any differently from an unemployable human to the cold profit motive.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Until true modern style democracy yes, but in modern democracies the people get to decide how the country and the economy are run. Yes, really. The fact that the consensus view happens not to align with what some people (perhaps yourself included) seem to think it should doesn't make that not true. Sometimes that leads to really unfortunate outcomes (in my view) like Trump and Brexit, but those things were the result of genuine democratic processes and driven by the choices of individual voters. That's true generally in the democratic world too. It may be convenient to blame the state of the world on shadowy anti-democratic forces running things from the shadows, because that can be used to de-legitimise the current state of the democratic world, but I'm afraid that's self-delusion. This is the world we have chosen through a process of consensus and compromise.
imtringued 6y ago
If you could restrain those pesky humans or prevent them from reproducing then it would be a valid concern.
- aksss 6y ago
  As prosperity increases, growth booms but then predictably falls below replacement rate. So humans kind of do this on their own if you can get through the boom period without breaking things too badly.
  - NortySpock 6y ago
    But why would we not see "those who desire to have kids" out-reproduce those who don't have kids, within a few generations?
    - aksss 6y ago
      Maybe I don't understand the question, but you can see that in population statistics - certain populations reproduce at an above replacement rate, some below. In a lot of the developing world, however, and no different 150 years ago in the developed world, you'd have a lot of kids because you'd expect several to die early. Once a certain level of prosperity and peace is reached, this doesn't become as much of a biological imperative.
      - NortySpock 6y ago
        I am aware that some countries reproduce above replacement rate and some below, and that this rate is normally tied with country economic prosperity. My point was an evolutionary one: wouldn't those couples who choose to reproduce more (assuming you can afford to raise your kids) be selected for, evolutionarily, vs couples who chose to remain childfree? Thus, even in a few generations, I would assume a moderate cultural shift towards having kids, since now only those who want kids, have them. The first hormonal birth control method (The Pill) was invented in 1960; we're 60 years beyond that (~3 generations). Maybe my theory isn't panning out as fast as I assumed.
hospadar 6y ago
I hope we discover less work! I so agree that increasing automation doesn't always mean more Jobs That Make Money (even if it might continue to for a while yet). Maybe when there's less work for humans to do we just... work less? and get more?
- nine_k 6y ago
  You can do it right now — become a contractor or a consultant. You will immediately notice that nobody likes it when work is done slowly. Working for 4 hours a day is only possible if you complete a paid portion of work at that time (e.g. teach 2-3 classes). Nearly any project that has work for multiple days would benefit from people working on it 24/7 and completing it faster, but it's often too expensive. So your less work schedule often becomes a high-energy consulting gig when you work 12 hours a day, and then a couple months of leisurely coasting. I have no reason to think that the future would be materially different. Just finding the gigs is going to become harder. This very future has already arrived for many low-skilled workers, like those in Amazon warehouses; they never know if there will be demand for their service today, and need to apply daily.
bobm_kite9 6y ago
Another way to think of this: imagine two equally-sized countries A and B. A implements Sam’s suggestion, taxing everything at 2.5% pa, B doesn’t. In A, people are happy, we’ll fed, Pursuing their interests, living meaningful lives. In B they are not. however, in A, companies and the economy are not growing so fast: resources are funnelled into a populace that takes but doesn’t give back. Over a long period of time, the extra 2.5% growth in country B will become so meaningful that it will look back on the savages in country A and decide that it’s resources would be better off under B’s management. It’s AI colonialism.
- confidantlake 6y ago
  The 2.5% tax doesn't mean country B is growing 2.5% faster. The 2.5% in country B could be sitting in a vault doing nothing or being spent on yachts. Conversely the 2.5% in country A is being invested in making the workforce more productive.
  - R0b0t1 6y ago
    In general it is right to assume that free capital will be used as productively as possible.
    - thyrsus 6y ago
      Please provide evidence.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > In general it is right to assume that free capital will be used as productively as possible. Only if you define 'productive' as 'generating more capital'. Yes, over the very very long term, externalities that aren't accounted for (it doesn't matter whether we're talking about negative externalities not mitigated, or positive externalities not invested in) will eventually exact their toll on capital, but in the short, medium, and even moderately long term, any externalities that can possibly be dismissed as irrelevant to the fundamental mission of turning large piles of money into larger piles, will be. It is also worth noting that by ignoring externalities until some crisis forces the issue, opportunities are opened up for capital to (quite profitably) address the resulting crisis. Whereas addressing an externality in a more timely manner, while reducing overall costs, even more sharply reduces those opportunities.
rmah 6y ago
Yes, some people will get screwed end up like those out-of-work horses because of AI or automation. Other people will benefit greatly. On average, most people will benefit a little bit. This is how every technological advance has worked for the last few hundred years. The promise of higher efficiency == higher standard of living is a general promise for society as a whole, not for any particular individual.
- musingsole 6y ago
  > end up like those out-of-work horses As long as this is like a retired horse given support to last out its years in a nice pasture (i.e. UBI) and not the dog food route, we'll be ok. If the change comes too fast leaving too many without too much while too few have it all, then we'll have problems.
joe_the_user 6y ago
I agree that the "new jobs are generated automatically" claim isn't supported by any good argument. But the horse analogy isn't good way to show this imo. I hate to be "specie-ist" but human beings have a remarkable ability to learn new skills and attain new abilities. Horses don't. The human consumption of human's time, attention and so-forth is at the center of the economy. Human consumption of horse time isn't all that high a priority. Human flexibility makes human activity something that can satisfy a vast number of human wants (and it means that there are a vast number of those wants to satisfy). That still doesn't mean you'll always have people employed but it makes employment a more plausible thing.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  Yes, intuitively, over the last 50 years, the world population increased substantially, meanwhile, global poverty decreased manifold (90%?) over the last 50 years, and the vast majority of humanity is employed doing 'something'. Even with the greatly increased productivity of automation in farming and manufacturing, humans are creating new industries that build on what's been developed in the past. What are the trends that will lead to mass unemployment, even decades hence?
  - rebelos 6y ago
    > What are the trends that will lead to mass unemployment, even decades hence? Visit a slum in Mumbai or a village in the Congo. Better yet, visit a trailer park in the Rust Belt. I really don't get why people don't understand how the future for most people - who don't manage to accrue capital prior to the substantial advent of AI and automation - is already out there for us to observe.
spir 6y ago
However, the horse struggles to be customer centric
adam_arthur 6y ago
As technology advances, more "wealth" can be created with fewer inputs, of course. Greater wealth means a bigger "pie" to split. Inequality obviously comes into question here, but objectively there is more total wealth that can be spread around, so it's a net good, if we can optimize the distribution. It also means that the contribution of an individual can create more value. In some ways this leads to inequality, where the most capable people are able to capitalize on technology and make a lot more money than was possible in the past... see: any of the FAANG founders. Taking the thought experiment to a logical extreme: in a hypothetical world where 100% of the supply chain is automated, people would no longer be required to work. So it must be true that there's some level of automation that will produce a net decrease in jobs. At that point some form of UBI likely makes sense. Though I'm doubtful we'll ever reach that kind of state. Realistically people will continue to divert their efforts into new things.
musingsole 6y ago
Horse population peaked? So what? That assumes the population number is an indicator on their quality of life. However, as the allegory indicates, a horse's quality of life today is leagues better than what it once was. Better feed, better health care. A good barn is a harder to come by, but what "good barn" means is a raising bar by the day. Pretty good odds of making it into your late 20's. There's fewer horses now, but it's not like they were taken en masse out back and shot in the head (though that certainly happened to some). They just aren't bred as much. I don't think anyone (horses included) bemoan that. If horses are the comparison, then I don't think humans have a thing to worry about.
- adwf 6y ago
  That logic only works because we have no issue with slaughtering horses en masse. It'll take 100+ years of economic deprivation for the human population to balance out.
  - musingsole 6y ago
    Some humans have issue slaughtering horses en masse. But still, I don't follow your point. Horses WERE NOT slaughtered. They were just bred at a point lower than replacement.
    - burlesona 6y ago
      Actually they were slaughtered. > Processing wild horses into chicken food in the 1930s reached its peak, when nearly 30 million pounds of horse flesh were canned. http://netnebraska.org/basic-page/television/wild-horses-slaughter http://netnebraska.org/basic-page/television/wild-horses-sla...
Threeve303 6y ago
This graph shows how much of an impact cars had over time between 1850-2007 on the U.S. horse population. - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based-Horse-Population-1850-2007_fig1_254456029 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based...
YinLuck- 6y ago
That CGP Grey video is 6+ years old already and none of its claims have come to pass. That video and this blog post both seem like the usual techno-utopian fluff -- a sermon to the already converted. Here's the truth: life expectancy is going down, birth rates are below replacement, sperm counts are down something like 90% in less than a century, we're working longer hours than medieval serfs, and suffering from more disease than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This Techno-religion of AI, genetic engineering, automation, etc being "right around the corner" is the opiate of the masses -- the propaganda keeping the working class from revolting.
- DSingularity 6y ago
  For me, it’s enough to consider the state of our hearts to realize how much more we need before this utopian vision comes to be. We may be extremely educated and creative but we still walk and drive by homeless people in the wealthiest country in the world. We still work for and consume the products of companies see nothing wrong with profiting from things universally obscene. Compared to our minds — our hearts have made little progress.
BurningFrog 6y ago
This is a very misleading metaphor. Horses were not workers. The were tools workers used. Farmers used horses to plow the fields. Transport workers used them to transport goods and people. As those workers got better tools to plow and transport, productivity increased, society got richer. There are also millions of old telegraphs, slide rules, and rotary phones "unemployed" across the world. The fate of these no longer needed tools tells us nothing about the conditions for human workers. Also, the fact that you can't find a human example to make this argument, but have to use a loyal, brave, and majestic animal instead, should be enough to hint that this is maybe a bit of emotional manipulation rather than a rational argument.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  I think his logic holds. The point is that we found new jobs for horses because there were areas where machines were inferior to them. Once machines could do everything that a horse could do (probably some mixture of load carrying and agility / endurance) we had no more work for them. To bring the same logic to humans, in history machines freed up humans to do better work than before. Let's say what humans excel at is dexterity and thinking. Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for.
  - hooande 6y ago
    The number of jobs that horses can do is a rounding error compared to the number of jobs that humans can do. If we're living in an imaginary future where machines can be trained to 90% of jobs, sure. But google a list of "most common jobs" and see how many a computer could do fully. Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor
    - ben_w 6y ago
      > Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor As someone who does expect an AI revolution, I think you’re being overly literal with an analogy. For arguments’ sake, a toy model of AGI: copy a human brain onto a substrate that costs less to run than a real human costs to feed [0]. For every intellectual task this human could have performed, it is now cheaper to have the AI do it. As this AI could be based on any human by the nature of the hypothetical, any human intellectual task is now done cheaper by the corresponding AGI. Current robot bodies (for the hypothetical uploaded minds) are currently a bit meh, but (a) not so much as to make the idea ridiculous, and (b) we’ve already got BCIs demonstrated in animals, so an AGI puppeting a fast growing cheap animal is also entirely within the realm of the plausible if you don’t want robots and don’t care much about animal rights (though not much worse in that regard than current meat production, IMO). As an aside: tasks is a better metric than jobs, as almost all jobs have many tasks some of which are easier to automate than others. [0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/when-will-uploaded-minds-be-a-reality/67531#67531 https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/when...
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
Horses didn't have the vote. Unemployment is not a technological problem. It's a political problem, and in fact, one that shows the causal arrow runs the other way. Scarce labor spurs innovation, but when labor is cheap, businesses just sweat the workers instead of building new machines.
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majjgepolja 6y ago
Wrong analogy. Horses could not be retrained to do jobs other than those replaced by machines. Horses did not have voting power. A large number of unemployed horses would not go on robbing and killing humans in a mob. And decrease in human population is welcome until some point. (We have relatively more educated people having less / no children, and backward, dumb stupid people having more children, which is BAD).
sytelus 6y ago
Our goal shouldn’t be to have jobs but rather no one having to go to work at all. That’s the age of abundance that is possible through AI and robotics at some point. Our goal should be 100% unemployment for humans. We should be focusing on art, outdoors and other creative pursuits. Future generations will be surprised we lived so that we can have “job”.
- majjgepolja 6y ago
  What about 1% people doing hard work but most being satisfied and lazy with the status quo? Idle mind is devil's something. I'd rather have something like 15-hour workweeks.
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colinmhayes 6y ago

I don't necessarily disagree but that's really not a good analogy. Horses aren't people. When their jobs disappear no one gives a fuck. No one speaks up for their interests. People will not go so easy. They are able to create amazing things if given the opportunity. No one wants mass human unemployment.

Judgmentality 6y ago
You realize it's an allegory, right?
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  It's fine to reply to an allegory with "you're right, that solution doesn't work, but it doesn't preclude other solutions because of these reasons, so don't use it to make decisions".
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    That's very different from a comment which suggests he doesn't realize it's an allegory.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      The comment directly says it's not a good analogy. Complaining that they didn't specifically say "allegory" is really nitpicky. The terms are very close and overlap.
      - Judgmentality 6y ago
        If someone says Animal Farm is a good story, but it wouldn't work if the animals were humans, I would say they didn't get the message.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        Depends on what reason they gave. If they misunderstand something about humanity, that's a great jumping point toward discussion. But if they said "yes, those politics would happen in humans, but some of these other factors are more important toward the eventual outcome[...]" then that's perfectly compatible with understanding the story. And that's roughly what the earlier commenter did! They accepted the argument that jobs will go away, while saying the secondary and tertiary effects would be different.
        Judgmentality 6y ago
        Fair, I'm sure it doesn't seem like it but I really don't want to argue. We're obviously reading that comment differently. Cheers.
        colinmhayes 6y ago
        Animal farm is a fictional story about humans disguised as animals. The horse allegory is a non-fictional story about the downfall of horses which are very much not human-like.
soperj 6y ago
We already have mass human unemployment. What's the average daily wage? It's not that low because everyone is gainfully employed.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Pre-covid, Global wages and employment levels have never been higher. Global poverty levels have never been lower. Either way, I don't disagree that AI will replace some jobs, I'm just not sold on the horse story.
  - soperj 6y ago
    and? We still have people dying of starvation world wide. We have scads of homeless in the richest country on earth. Why do you think anyone will care at all?
    - buildstatements 6y ago
      You have to be willfully ignorant to believe a proposition that no one cares, and willfully naive to believe everyone will. Look at https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth and take 5 minutes to look at the data on the rest of the site and you will understand how much life has improved not just in raw numbers (there are more people living above the poverty line than existed 100 years ago), but more importantly in percentage terms - a far smaller fraction of people live in poverty today than in 1880. In fact, the number last time I ran it was that less people live in abject poverty in 2019 than did so in 1880 - despite a 7-8 fold increase in population.
elihu 6y ago
People have an advantage that horses don't have: people can own property, and they have legal rights, like the ability to vote in elections. When we're talking about AI, though, it's not too hard to imagine computer programs eventually being allowed to legally own things and accrue wealth. It's harder to imagine them being allowed to vote (how would that even work?) but something like it could happen. We can also imagine this going the other way: economically "useless" people losing the right to own property or the right to vote. Or if the rights continue to exist in theory, in practice they become poor and disenfranchised. And then "the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must." It happens all the time. I think in the long run we need to figure out a reasonable economic system that can deal with abundance of the things people want/need, and scarcity of work. Maybe it's as simple as making a 30, or a 20 hour work week the norm. The default alternative seems to be to have more and more people fighting for fewer and fewer jobs, to the point where everyone who has a job has to work extremely hard under long hours and bad conditions for low pay because if they don't there's ten more people ready to take their place at the drop of a hat.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > It's harder to imagine them being allowed to vote (how would that even work?) They don't have to actually vote, anymore than corporations or wealthy humans do, in order to exert their will on the political process. That's what campaign contributions, PACs, lobbyists, astroturfing, think-tanks, etc. are for.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago

Horses aren't the center of the economy, though. It's fundamentally different. Horses might always want more and more things no matter how much they get. But they don't create demand in our economy, so we'll never know. No matter how much humans get, they'll always want more. And other humans will have to come up with ways to meet that demand. Sure - if we ever reach a time where the entire human race says "this is enough" and everything is automated, then there won't be any jobs. But we're a very far way away from that point. In 2013, 60% of people on the planet didn't even have a toilet [1]. There are obvious problems. In the Western world, it certainly seems like we don't have enough jobs for workers without certain skillsets - or at least jobs that employers are willing to pay minimum wage for. But there are also lots of jobs available. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/60-percent-of-the-world-population-still-without-toilets.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/60-percent-of-the-world...

S_A_P 6y ago
I think this is a good take- Having things be better for horses was never the point of the economy. In fact horses were probably the main driver for developing mechanical solutions since horse ownership is expensive and time consuming. There was no incentive to make life/jobs better for horses, and as soon as a better replacement was available horses were not necessary for most people. So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is completely flawed.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  But having things be better for humans was never the point of the economy either. The actual point has always been making things better for a subset of humans, everywhere throughout history. I don't see why an unemployable horse would be considered any differently from an unemployable human to the cold profit motive.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Until true modern style democracy yes, but in modern democracies the people get to decide how the country and the economy are run. Yes, really. The fact that the consensus view happens not to align with what some people (perhaps yourself included) seem to think it should doesn't make that not true. Sometimes that leads to really unfortunate outcomes (in my view) like Trump and Brexit, but those things were the result of genuine democratic processes and driven by the choices of individual voters. That's true generally in the democratic world too. It may be convenient to blame the state of the world on shadowy anti-democratic forces running things from the shadows, because that can be used to de-legitimise the current state of the democratic world, but I'm afraid that's self-delusion. This is the world we have chosen through a process of consensus and compromise.

imtringued 6y ago

If you could restrain those pesky humans or prevent them from reproducing then it would be a valid concern.

aksss 6y ago
As prosperity increases, growth booms but then predictably falls below replacement rate. So humans kind of do this on their own if you can get through the boom period without breaking things too badly.
- NortySpock 6y ago
  But why would we not see "those who desire to have kids" out-reproduce those who don't have kids, within a few generations?
  - aksss 6y ago
    Maybe I don't understand the question, but you can see that in population statistics - certain populations reproduce at an above replacement rate, some below. In a lot of the developing world, however, and no different 150 years ago in the developed world, you'd have a lot of kids because you'd expect several to die early. Once a certain level of prosperity and peace is reached, this doesn't become as much of a biological imperative.
    - NortySpock 6y ago
      I am aware that some countries reproduce above replacement rate and some below, and that this rate is normally tied with country economic prosperity. My point was an evolutionary one: wouldn't those couples who choose to reproduce more (assuming you can afford to raise your kids) be selected for, evolutionarily, vs couples who chose to remain childfree? Thus, even in a few generations, I would assume a moderate cultural shift towards having kids, since now only those who want kids, have them. The first hormonal birth control method (The Pill) was invented in 1960; we're 60 years beyond that (~3 generations). Maybe my theory isn't panning out as fast as I assumed.

hospadar 6y ago

I hope we discover less work! I so agree that increasing automation doesn't always mean more Jobs That Make Money (even if it might continue to for a while yet). Maybe when there's less work for humans to do we just... work less? and get more?

nine_k 6y ago
You can do it right now — become a contractor or a consultant. You will immediately notice that nobody likes it when work is done slowly. Working for 4 hours a day is only possible if you complete a paid portion of work at that time (e.g. teach 2-3 classes). Nearly any project that has work for multiple days would benefit from people working on it 24/7 and completing it faster, but it's often too expensive. So your less work schedule often becomes a high-energy consulting gig when you work 12 hours a day, and then a couple months of leisurely coasting. I have no reason to think that the future would be materially different. Just finding the gigs is going to become harder. This very future has already arrived for many low-skilled workers, like those in Amazon warehouses; they never know if there will be demand for their service today, and need to apply daily.

bobm_kite9 6y ago

Another way to think of this: imagine two equally-sized countries A and B. A implements Sam’s suggestion, taxing everything at 2.5% pa, B doesn’t. In A, people are happy, we’ll fed, Pursuing their interests, living meaningful lives. In B they are not. however, in A, companies and the economy are not growing so fast: resources are funnelled into a populace that takes but doesn’t give back. Over a long period of time, the extra 2.5% growth in country B will become so meaningful that it will look back on the savages in country A and decide that it’s resources would be better off under B’s management. It’s AI colonialism.

confidantlake 6y ago
The 2.5% tax doesn't mean country B is growing 2.5% faster. The 2.5% in country B could be sitting in a vault doing nothing or being spent on yachts. Conversely the 2.5% in country A is being invested in making the workforce more productive.
- R0b0t1 6y ago
  In general it is right to assume that free capital will be used as productively as possible.
  - thyrsus 6y ago
    Please provide evidence.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > In general it is right to assume that free capital will be used as productively as possible. Only if you define 'productive' as 'generating more capital'. Yes, over the very very long term, externalities that aren't accounted for (it doesn't matter whether we're talking about negative externalities not mitigated, or positive externalities not invested in) will eventually exact their toll on capital, but in the short, medium, and even moderately long term, any externalities that can possibly be dismissed as irrelevant to the fundamental mission of turning large piles of money into larger piles, will be. It is also worth noting that by ignoring externalities until some crisis forces the issue, opportunities are opened up for capital to (quite profitably) address the resulting crisis. Whereas addressing an externality in a more timely manner, while reducing overall costs, even more sharply reduces those opportunities.

rmah 6y ago

Yes, some people will get screwed end up like those out-of-work horses because of AI or automation. Other people will benefit greatly. On average, most people will benefit a little bit. This is how every technological advance has worked for the last few hundred years. The promise of higher efficiency == higher standard of living is a general promise for society as a whole, not for any particular individual.

musingsole 6y ago
> end up like those out-of-work horses As long as this is like a retired horse given support to last out its years in a nice pasture (i.e. UBI) and not the dog food route, we'll be ok. If the change comes too fast leaving too many without too much while too few have it all, then we'll have problems.

joe_the_user 6y ago

I agree that the "new jobs are generated automatically" claim isn't supported by any good argument. But the horse analogy isn't good way to show this imo. I hate to be "specie-ist" but human beings have a remarkable ability to learn new skills and attain new abilities. Horses don't. The human consumption of human's time, attention and so-forth is at the center of the economy. Human consumption of horse time isn't all that high a priority. Human flexibility makes human activity something that can satisfy a vast number of human wants (and it means that there are a vast number of those wants to satisfy). That still doesn't mean you'll always have people employed but it makes employment a more plausible thing.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Yes, intuitively, over the last 50 years, the world population increased substantially, meanwhile, global poverty decreased manifold (90%?) over the last 50 years, and the vast majority of humanity is employed doing 'something'. Even with the greatly increased productivity of automation in farming and manufacturing, humans are creating new industries that build on what's been developed in the past. What are the trends that will lead to mass unemployment, even decades hence?
- rebelos 6y ago
  > What are the trends that will lead to mass unemployment, even decades hence? Visit a slum in Mumbai or a village in the Congo. Better yet, visit a trailer park in the Rust Belt. I really don't get why people don't understand how the future for most people - who don't manage to accrue capital prior to the substantial advent of AI and automation - is already out there for us to observe.

spir 6y ago

However, the horse struggles to be customer centric

adam_arthur 6y ago

As technology advances, more "wealth" can be created with fewer inputs, of course. Greater wealth means a bigger "pie" to split. Inequality obviously comes into question here, but objectively there is more total wealth that can be spread around, so it's a net good, if we can optimize the distribution. It also means that the contribution of an individual can create more value. In some ways this leads to inequality, where the most capable people are able to capitalize on technology and make a lot more money than was possible in the past... see: any of the FAANG founders. Taking the thought experiment to a logical extreme: in a hypothetical world where 100% of the supply chain is automated, people would no longer be required to work. So it must be true that there's some level of automation that will produce a net decrease in jobs. At that point some form of UBI likely makes sense. Though I'm doubtful we'll ever reach that kind of state. Realistically people will continue to divert their efforts into new things.

musingsole 6y ago

Horse population peaked? So what? That assumes the population number is an indicator on their quality of life. However, as the allegory indicates, a horse's quality of life today is leagues better than what it once was. Better feed, better health care. A good barn is a harder to come by, but what "good barn" means is a raising bar by the day. Pretty good odds of making it into your late 20's. There's fewer horses now, but it's not like they were taken en masse out back and shot in the head (though that certainly happened to some). They just aren't bred as much. I don't think anyone (horses included) bemoan that. If horses are the comparison, then I don't think humans have a thing to worry about.

adwf 6y ago
That logic only works because we have no issue with slaughtering horses en masse. It'll take 100+ years of economic deprivation for the human population to balance out.
- musingsole 6y ago
  Some humans have issue slaughtering horses en masse. But still, I don't follow your point. Horses WERE NOT slaughtered. They were just bred at a point lower than replacement.
  - burlesona 6y ago
    Actually they were slaughtered. > Processing wild horses into chicken food in the 1930s reached its peak, when nearly 30 million pounds of horse flesh were canned. http://netnebraska.org/basic-page/television/wild-horses-slaughter http://netnebraska.org/basic-page/television/wild-horses-sla...

Threeve303 6y ago

This graph shows how much of an impact cars had over time between 1850-2007 on the U.S. horse population. - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based-Horse-Population-1850-2007_fig1_254456029 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/United-States-Farm-based...

YinLuck- 6y ago

That CGP Grey video is 6+ years old already and none of its claims have come to pass. That video and this blog post both seem like the usual techno-utopian fluff -- a sermon to the already converted. Here's the truth: life expectancy is going down, birth rates are below replacement, sperm counts are down something like 90% in less than a century, we're working longer hours than medieval serfs, and suffering from more disease than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This Techno-religion of AI, genetic engineering, automation, etc being "right around the corner" is the opiate of the masses -- the propaganda keeping the working class from revolting.

DSingularity 6y ago
For me, it’s enough to consider the state of our hearts to realize how much more we need before this utopian vision comes to be. We may be extremely educated and creative but we still walk and drive by homeless people in the wealthiest country in the world. We still work for and consume the products of companies see nothing wrong with profiting from things universally obscene. Compared to our minds — our hearts have made little progress.

BurningFrog 6y ago

This is a very misleading metaphor. Horses were not workers. The were tools workers used. Farmers used horses to plow the fields. Transport workers used them to transport goods and people. As those workers got better tools to plow and transport, productivity increased, society got richer. There are also millions of old telegraphs, slide rules, and rotary phones "unemployed" across the world. The fate of these no longer needed tools tells us nothing about the conditions for human workers. Also, the fact that you can't find a human example to make this argument, but have to use a loyal, brave, and majestic animal instead, should be enough to hint that this is maybe a bit of emotional manipulation rather than a rational argument.

xyzelement 6y ago
I think his logic holds. The point is that we found new jobs for horses because there were areas where machines were inferior to them. Once machines could do everything that a horse could do (probably some mixture of load carrying and agility / endurance) we had no more work for them. To bring the same logic to humans, in history machines freed up humans to do better work than before. Let's say what humans excel at is dexterity and thinking. Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for.
- hooande 6y ago
  The number of jobs that horses can do is a rounding error compared to the number of jobs that humans can do. If we're living in an imaginary future where machines can be trained to 90% of jobs, sure. But google a list of "most common jobs" and see how many a computer could do fully. Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor
  - ben_w 6y ago
    > Even if you think a miracle ai revolution is on the horizon, humans and horses are not comparable in terms of diversity of labor As someone who does expect an AI revolution, I think you’re being overly literal with an analogy. For arguments’ sake, a toy model of AGI: copy a human brain onto a substrate that costs less to run than a real human costs to feed [0]. For every intellectual task this human could have performed, it is now cheaper to have the AI do it. As this AI could be based on any human by the nature of the hypothetical, any human intellectual task is now done cheaper by the corresponding AGI. Current robot bodies (for the hypothetical uploaded minds) are currently a bit meh, but (a) not so much as to make the idea ridiculous, and (b) we’ve already got BCIs demonstrated in animals, so an AGI puppeting a fast growing cheap animal is also entirely within the realm of the plausible if you don’t want robots and don’t care much about animal rights (though not much worse in that regard than current meat production, IMO). As an aside: tasks is a better metric than jobs, as almost all jobs have many tasks some of which are easier to automate than others. [0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/when-will-uploaded-minds-be-a-reality/67531#67531 https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/when...

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

Horses didn't have the vote. Unemployment is not a technological problem. It's a political problem, and in fact, one that shows the causal arrow runs the other way. Scarce labor spurs innovation, but when labor is cheap, businesses just sweat the workers instead of building new machines.

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majjgepolja 6y ago

Wrong analogy. Horses could not be retrained to do jobs other than those replaced by machines. Horses did not have voting power. A large number of unemployed horses would not go on robbing and killing humans in a mob. And decrease in human population is welcome until some point. (We have relatively more educated people having less / no children, and backward, dumb stupid people having more children, which is BAD).

sytelus 6y ago

Our goal shouldn’t be to have jobs but rather no one having to go to work at all. That’s the age of abundance that is possible through AI and robotics at some point. Our goal should be 100% unemployment for humans. We should be focusing on art, outdoors and other creative pursuits. Future generations will be surprised we lived so that we can have “job”.

majjgepolja 6y ago
What about 1% people doing hard work but most being satisfied and lazy with the status quo? Idle mind is devil's something. I'd rather have something like 15-hour workweeks.

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