Thread by @eriktorenberg

1/ Will AI replace all jobs?

This dystopia rests on 3 premises:

a) Half jobs done by humans are going to be taken away.

b) Mass joblessness with no way for people without work to quickly re-skill and compete with robots.

c) Mass joblessness results in major global unrest.

2/ Every tech revolution has always destroyed old jobs. (e.g. Farmers have gone from 70% to 2% of our economy).

Technology progress means productivity increases — we achieve more with less.

3/ Doesn’t this mean more unemployment?

Lump of Labor Fallacy: implying amount of work to be done in society is fixed

Human needs are infinite — divine discontent! — and we automate the boring + painful parts of the job, so we get to do more meaningful work (e.g. Coaching)

4/ People try to frame this as humans competing with robots in a static economy for a fixed number of jobs, but that hasn’t been the case historically.

Every tech revolution has brought more new jobs.

We replaced half of our jobs every 90 years for about 300 years now

5/ Example: Cars.

People thought that the rise of the auto would result in job loss for people who took care of the horses for a living.

“Cars created so many jobs we had to bail out the car companies!

2nd order effects too:
Restaurants, apartment complexes, suburbs, etc

6/ Old Jobs are destroyed, but new jobs are always created.

Some that may be created in this revolution:

— Coaching
— Senior care
— Vr world designers
— Chief of staffs
— Data analysis
— Energy

7/ People frame it as “is someone going to replace you?”

Instead of something that just replaces machine component of jobs.

Also we don’t consider that lots of jobs are either mentally or physically back-breaking, literally (e.g farming).

8/ Humans + AI will work together and some jobs will be augmented.

When Deep Blue beat the best human champion, people thought it was the end of human chess. But actually the best is a mix of AI + Human.

Same with medicine, education, etc

9/ Learn from computer programs — but discuss with peers. Motivation from teacher.

Get diagnoses from computers — but get an explanation from a doctor.

10/ People thought ATM meant the end of bank tellers. Yet there are more today than they were in 1970s, because they’re now more productive.

More teachers and more doctors too.

11/ Of course, many jobs just went away.

And timelines also matter. In the short term, it sucked for railroad engineers who were displaced by the car.

Even if better in long run, it’s going to temporarily suck for drivers and truckers displaced by self-driving cars.

12/ How do we help the victims of transition?

— Make it easier to relocate (ease immigration, fight NIMBY-ism, make better transpiration)

— Make it easier, from regulatory perspective, to be an entrepreneur and to invest

— Skill development

— Vigorous social safety net

13/ Some people ask “what if this time is different”

They say General AI will mean that, sure, there will be new jobs, but AI will be better to do them better than humans can.

14/ If General AI becomes a thing, it’s sort of like answering “what if Aliens came to this planet?”

Our first Q wouldn’t be : “What happens to the unemployment rate?” We’d have bigger problems (e.g are the aliens friendly?)

15/ So robots will eat some jobs but they will create more than they take away, even if indirect.

In fact, the concern is not that that they’ll take your job. It’s that they won’t.

16/ If that happens, and we have less productivity, we will have to either reduce living standards of the elderly by cutting benefits, or reduce the living standards of the rest of society by raising taxes or cutting critical gov’t programs.

17/ And we’ve been having less productivity since 1970s.

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by @eriktorenberg view original on Twitter

We need economic progress more than ever, while also having a social safety net like above that takes care of the people disclosed from automation.

/fin