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Central Bankers Warned Of Possible Economic 'Robocalypse' (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Times:
At an exclusive gathering at a golf resort near Lisbon, the big minds of monetary policy were seriously discussing the risk that artificial intelligence could eliminate jobs on a scale that would dwarf previous waves of technological change. "There is no question we are in an era of people asking, 'Is the Robocalpyse upon us?'" David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told an audience Tuesday that included Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and dozens of other top central bankers and economists... [A]long with the optimism is a fear that the economic expansion might bypass large swaths of the population, in part because a growing number of jobs could be replaced by computers capable of learning -- artificial intelligence.
Policymakers and economists conceded that they have not paid enough attention to how much technology has hurt the earning power of some segments of society, or planned to address the concerns of those who have lost out... In the past, technical advances caused temporary disruptions but ultimately improved living standards, creating new categories of employment along the way... But artificial intelligence threatens broad categories of jobs previously seen as safe from automation, such as legal assistants, corporate auditors and investment managers. Large groups of people could become obsolete, suffering the same fate as plow horses after the invention of the tractor. "More and more, we are seeing economists saying, 'This time could be different,'âS" said Autor, who presented a paper on the subject that he wrote with Anna Salomons, an associate professor at the Utrecht University School of Economics in the Netherlands.
Ultimately we'll just have to wait and see, Autor concluded. "I say not Robocalpyse now. Perhaps Robocalpyse later."
Policymakers and economists conceded that they have not paid enough attention to how much technology has hurt the earning power of some segments of society, or planned to address the concerns of those who have lost out... In the past, technical advances caused temporary disruptions but ultimately improved living standards, creating new categories of employment along the way... But artificial intelligence threatens broad categories of jobs previously seen as safe from automation, such as legal assistants, corporate auditors and investment managers. Large groups of people could become obsolete, suffering the same fate as plow horses after the invention of the tractor. "More and more, we are seeing economists saying, 'This time could be different,'âS" said Autor, who presented a paper on the subject that he wrote with Anna Salomons, an associate professor at the Utrecht University School of Economics in the Netherlands.
Ultimately we'll just have to wait and see, Autor concluded. "I say not Robocalpyse now. Perhaps Robocalpyse later."
Poor, poor investment managers, how will they screw us over when their jobs are obsolete? How will they ever earn millions and millions of dollars without pushing papers around and destroying people while doing it?
I'm actually preparing for this right now. I've been - broadly speaking - doing web development for a living for the last 17 years and most of it was bullshit work or so marginal and specialised it could've been forgone completely without anybody noticing. I wasn't saving the environment, doing any meaningful medical IT, helping the transition to renewable energy, doing useful political work or any of the sorts. I was however trying to be a good father to my daughter and I'm confident I pretty much succeeded in that, including holding a steady job that may be bullshit but actually brings in some cash.
But she's doing her last A-Level exams in 3 days and will be off to south america for a volunteer year in a few months once she's recovered from the learning binge she's been on the last 10 months.
With all that right up next for us I'm regrouping my emotions and my take on my life considerably. I have no doubt that if things play out correctly the work I do right will appear beyond pointless in 5 years from now, no matter how much they pay me. Consulting people, helping others out or doing similar stuff is where I find I gain new meaning. I think I will attempt to see programming more as an art than a job and I will further limit my screen time and do yoga, dancing or surfing instead. I'm two steps away from moving all of my everday work into the cloud and on a chromebook, with googles AI taking care of everything in my digital life, Googles every-watching lidless eye be damned. It's so much easyer than worring about someone pinching some 1000 Euro ultrabook vis-a-vis a 300 Euro cheapo Chromebook.
I expect huge swaths of our professions to fall prone to automation and cloud-centric consolidation and 90% of the remaining fields to be sucked up by Facebook and other online services. Physical and Mental Coaching, Lifestyle design and perhaps some useful environmental activism is where the useful stuff is at IMHO, and I will attempt to move further into those fields rather than stick around for another dreary decade of people who don't know what piece of websoftware they want but always seem to know what it may cost and when it needs to be finished.
AI & cloud are coming for us and will change our lives big time and we'd better be prepared.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
All other paradigm shifts in working environment that have displaced people opened up new opportunities. Farm hands that got obsolete when farming was automated were needed by the emerging industries in the towns. When these jobs got hit with automation, the developing service industry needed those now free workers.
Yes, the jobs got more "brainy" with every iteration, but in the end, whether someone is pulling a rake across the soil, putting part A into assembly B or carrying some glasses and plates to a table, the qualification level isn't that high in either of those jobs. They can be done by (nearly) anyone.
The problem this time around is that AI (let's use the term in the colloquial sense here, yes, I know it's just algorithms, but ... let's humor the markedroids for now) is at a level where all low qualification jobs are being replaced. And then some of higher qualification, too. Soon middle management is going to be eliminated. It's no longer just the no-qualification "you want fries with that" student jobs that get replaced with automation.
And that leaves a lot of people unemployed and, worse, unemployable. Competing with a machine that never sleeps, never gets sick and wants no wage is something you can only do with slaves. And even there only if you work them to death, throw them away and plug the next one in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On a radio program today someone stated money was ultimately a way to transfer debt. If I have money, ultimately that means someone owes me work. To a degree I can randomly choose who that someone is depending on my needs. If, in an extreme case, all the work is being done by robots, nobody would owe anyone any work, money would no longer represent anything and banks would go out of business, which is not something bloody likely for them to let happen.
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We need to get over this idea that one MUST work to make a living. And we need to get over the idea that we live to serve the economy.
Economies are supposed to serve the people but we've been brainwashed into thinking the other way around.
As automation increases, the folks with earning power under our current economic system will be the folks who own the robots and the folks who make them.
And we need to get over this delusion that all one needs to do when displaced by automation is get retrained in something "marketable".
When automation is touching just about all aspects of life, opportunities shrink. We could grasp at the magical idea that some new industry someday will pop-up somewhere and absorb all the extra workers - by the tens of millions - and then end up with a very horrible situation.
Tens of millions of out of work folks rioting because there's nothing for them to do. Or I see a situation where wars are created and those tens of millions are drafted into the military to "fight for freedom" in China or North Korea. That's a great way to subdue a populace - war.
Regardless of what one believes, we are headed for some more social turmoil in the near future. This current social unrest is just the beginning. People's standard of living has been steadily eroded for years and they are just starting to wake up and realize that they can't work any harder and retraining is just a way for schools to line their pockets. They can't put their fingers on it and therefore blame immigrants or some other boogeyman and vote for folks who promise solutions that sound good but will not work.
Our way of life will end.
We pay for the human labour that went to building the machine but we don't pay the machine to perform its job. Just the same as we don't pay money for the Sun to evaporate the water and for it to fall back to Earth. When the construction of the machine no longer has human input then it costs nothing to build, and it's produce therefore also costs nothing.
We got a ways to go yet, but that is the path this appears to be leading to.
The real question is: What will we do to each other if the machines can do our bidding and we have no need to depend on one another? Will this be what creates the real "three laws"?
Inequality right now is largely based on differences in skill and intelligence: people who are smarter and more capable earn more. The more jobs become automated, the more those differences will disappear.
In addition, money is only worth what you can buy for it. To the degree that AI devalues labor, it simply decreases the value of money that they (formerly) wealthy hold. That is, billions aren't worth a lot if you can't buy anything for them.
Now, you might say, what if a few really wealthy people buy all the land and all the mines and all the natural resources. That's possible, but unlikely: first of all, the reason people have been able to acquire large holdings in the past is because land ended up being of little value to those without the skill to make it productive, and of great value to those with the necessary skills; the premise of automation is that that won't be the case anymore. Second, we already tax land, and even at current levels of taxation, the land would get redistributed fairly quickly; if land is the only source of income, you can only hold on to land if your put it to more productive use than other people, and the premise of AI is that you can't.
Automation erased the advantage that physical strength used to give, which is why we moved to a much wealthier democratic society. If AI does the same for mental advantages, the net effect will be more equality, not less, since inequality is ultimately based on individual advantages and strengths.
the industrial revolution just put people out of work. Than about 50-80 years latter other tech caught up (plus two World Wars thinned the herd) and things got better.
There's a reason the Luddites existed and it wasn't because they were prototypical Amish. They lost their livelihoods and were starving in the streets. It takes decades for a society to adjust to these kinds of changes and in the meantime there's poverty, death and war. The difference today is information is widespread enough that we can see it coming and react if we want.
Or we could just keep telling ourselves everything is fine because eventually it might correct itself. But think of it like this: When in our lives has a complex problem been best solved by ignoring it and letting it sort itself out?
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