I haven’t given much thought to the concept of automation and computer induced unemployment. Others at the FHI have been looking into it in more details—see Carl Frey’s "The Future of Employment", which did estimates for 70 chosen professions as to their degree of automatability, and extended the results of this using O∗NET, an online service developed for the US Department of Labor, which gave the key features of an occupation as a standardised and measurable set of variables.
The reasons that I haven’t been looking at it too much is that AI-unemployment has considerably less impact that AI-superintelligence, and thus is a less important use of time. However, if automation does cause mass unemployment, then advocating for AI safety will happen in a very different context to currently. Much will depend on how that mass unemployment problem is dealt with, what lessons are learnt, and the views of whoever is the most powerful in society. Just off the top of my head, I could think of four scenarios on whether risk goes up or down, depending on whether the unemployment problem was satisfactorily "solved" or not:
AI risk\UnemploymentProblem solvedProblem unsolved
Risk reduced With good practice in dealingwith AI problems, people andorganisations are willing andable to address the big issues. The world is very conscious of themisery that unrestricted AIresearch can cause, and verywary of future disruptions. Thoseat the top want to hang on totheir gains, and they are the onewith the most control over AIsand automation research.
Risk increased Having dealt with the easierautomation problems in aparticular way (eg taxation),people underestimate the riskand expect the samesolutions to work. Society is locked into a bitterconflict between those benefitingfrom automation and thoselosing out, and superintelligenceis seen through the same prism.Those who profited fromautomation are the mostpowerful, and decide to pushahead.
But of course the situation is far more complicated, with many different possible permutations, and no guarantee that the same approach will be used across the planet. And let the division into four boxes not fool us into thinking that any is of comparable probability to the others—more research is (really) needed.
Here’s a video on AI job automation, intended to be accessible to a nontechnical audience, but still interesting:
http://qz.com/250154/still-think-robots-cant-do-your-job-this-video-may-change-your-mind/
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I saw that video from an entirely different site shortly before reading this article for the first time. I think it’s a fairly good video and would recommend it to people that have 15 minutes.
Yep, that’s partially what inspired me to think about this in the first place.
Indeed, the fact that we can tell an equally palusible-sounding story (the contents of each table cell) for opposite outcomes should show that the intuitive plausibility or ability to tell a story about an outcome is worthless evidence of its probability. We should demand very strong proof before trusting a model that tells us opposite outcomes are roughly equally likely.
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Especially when it took me about a minute to come up with all four stories...
Some folks keep suggesting that AI unemployment applies to low IQ people. But if your first link (p. 24-7) is right, it may be better to say it applies to those with low manual dexterity, low social intelligence, and/or low IQ or creative intelligence.
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Indeed! Insurance underwriters (a highly paid position) are ranked as highly likely to be replaced by automation… And cleaners are hanging on pretty well, in contrast.
Bartenders, waiters and restaurant cooks very likely to be automated away? What the heck?
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Automation need not be a perfect substitute (hence need not possess the same skills as those it replaces). Automated ordering systems at tables and automatic cooking systems seem very plausible.
What is amazing is that computers have not already reduced the workforce to run bureaucracies.
In my upcoming book I analyze the Australian Tax Office in 1955 (when Parkinson wrote is great paper) and 2008. At both times it took about 1.5% of GDP to do essentially the same function. (Normalizing for GDP takes into account inflation and population size.)
Back in 1955 tax returns were largely processed by hand, by rows of clerks with fountain pens. Just one ancient mainframe could do the work of thousands of people. Today few returns are even touched by a human hand.
The steam tractor and the combine harvester have reduced the agricultural work force from 80% of the population to less than 20%, depending how you count. But the huge increase in the power of bureaucratic tools has produced no reduction in the proportion of the population that work in bureaucracies, quite the opposite.
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People complain about increased regulation nowadays—are these bureaucrats managing more things than before?
I have trouble understanding what is the problem.
Humans are not neccesary for work but we still command enourmous economic power. It’s not like we are going to be poor. So we might have something like 1 working day and 6 days off in a week.
In the video wasn’t it a happy ending for the horses? Majority of horses are in a life-long pension. I we can get stuff without working, why insist to work?
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Unless those robots will belong to you, or the money from the owners of the robots will somehow get to you (e.g. taxation and basic income), you are going to be poor when you are no longer able to compete with the robots.
By the way, there will also be a robotic police and army, able to protect the system regardless of how dissatisfied how many humans become.
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Okay answers the question. So while we as a society can be rich and "in average" would be better off, the distribution of wealth can still be problematic. It would still not seem to be about computers per se. But it would seem that computers would build up pressure to solve it.
What I find different in this case compared to hard-mode multiple times rediscussed topic on different economic structures for different sections of the population is that computers can potentially operate unmanned. Thus there is no economic necessity to enter into arrangement for the side that has the latest tech and the larger population. Thus a whole lot of humans do not participate. This might mean that instead of suppression, exclusion and isolation would be employed by the robotic police. The haves and have-nots would form separate cities that would not trade with each other (but would probably trade within themselfs and the same kind). While haves would like to have markets for their products the have-nots don’t have anything worthwhile to offer back (as even total economic submission: slavery would not be enough). Not an especially happy outcome, but the standard of living in the have-not side need not be lower than what we currently have (even if the advancement of it would be frozen).
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One day the robot owners may decide they want to take the land of the non-owners, or polute the air or water… and there is no economical pressure to stop them.
As in the debates about AI, malice is not required here, only indifference.
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It strikes me that this might already be happening to an extent in the form of getting favourable access to natural resources. Also within the countries that get their income mostly from exporting natural resources the living standard of people irrelevant to the value extraction process doesn’t develop. Thus you have oil sheiks in a country riddled with poverty.
If the politics shakes out well, yes. If it shakes out badly...