Q. Regardless, if the engine of re-employment is broken for whatever reason, then AI really is killing jobs - a marginal job automated away by advances in AI algorithms won't come back.
A. Then it's odd to see so many news articles talking about AI killing jobs, when plain old non-AI computer programming and the Internet have affected many more jobs than that. The buyer ordering books over the Internet, the spreadsheet replacing the accountant - these processes are not strongly relying on the sort of algorithms that we would usually call 'AI' or 'machine learning' or 'robotics'. The main role I can think of for actual AI algorithms being involved, is in computer vision enabling more automation. And many manufacturing jobs were already automated by robotic arms even before robotic vision came along. Most computer programming is not AI programming, and most automation is not AI-driven. And then on near-term scales, like changes over the last five years, trade shifts and financial shocks and new labor market entrants are more powerful economic forces than the slow continuing march of computer programming. (Automation is a weak economic force in any given year, but cumulative and directional over decades. Trade shifts and financial shocks are stronger forces in any single year, but might go in the opposite direction the next decade. Thus, even generalized automation via computer programming is still an unlikely culprit for any sudden drop in employment as occurred in the Great Recession.)
Q. Okay, you've persuaded me that it's ridiculous to point to AI while talking about modern-day unemployment. What about future unemployment?
A. Like after the next ten years? We might or might not see robot-driven cars, which would be genuinely based in improved AI algorithms, and would automate away another bite of human labor. Even then, the total number of people driving cars for money would just be a small part of the total global economy; most humans are not paid to drive cars most of the time. Also again: 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.
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.
- The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
A. Then it's odd to see so many news articles talking about AI killing jobs, when plain old non-AI computer programming and the Internet have affected many more jobs than that. The buyer ordering books over the Internet, the spreadsheet replacing the accountant - these processes are not strongly relying on the sort of algorithms that we would usually call 'AI' or 'machine learning' or 'robotics'. The main role I can think of for actual AI algorithms being involved, is in computer vision enabling more automation. And many manufacturing jobs were already automated by robotic arms even before robotic vision came along. Most computer programming is not AI programming, and most automation is not AI-driven. And then on near-term scales, like changes over the last five years, trade shifts and financial shocks and new labor market entrants are more powerful economic forces than the slow continuing march of computer programming. (Automation is a weak economic force in any given year, but cumulative and directional over decades. Trade shifts and financial shocks are stronger forces in any single year, but might go in the opposite direction the next decade. Thus, even generalized automation via computer programming is still an unlikely culprit for any sudden drop in employment as occurred in the Great Recession.)
Q. Okay, you've persuaded me that it's ridiculous to point to AI while talking about modern-day unemployment. What about future unemployment?
A. Like after the next ten years? We might or might not see robot-driven cars, which would be genuinely based in improved AI algorithms, and would automate away another bite of human labor. Even then, the total number of people driving cars for money would just be a small part of the total global economy; most humans are not paid to drive cars most of the time. Also again: 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.
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.
- The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
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