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."

Comments

Cry me a river

[Anonymous Coward]

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 preparing for this right now.

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:I've been saying that for a while now

[Anonymous Coward]

So eventually, unless you have a PhD in theoretical physics or math and robotics, you'll be relegated to being a janitor?

We are seeing a bifurcation of compensation and opportunities in our society. The middle ground is disappearing. The best and brightest (and the well connected) have the opportunities while the rest are increasingly having to carve out a living out of lower paid work.

When the farm workers left the fields, they were going to higher paying manufacturing jobs. There were well paying labor intensive industrial jobs to be had. A steel mill would have a 100,000 employees. An auto plant would have tens of thousands of employees.

Today, Amazon for example generates as much revenue as the folks above did with a tiny fraction of people. And they are automating even more.

Even the service jobs are being automated. Self checkout at Walmart, anyone? Warehouse robots?

We will adjust we always do, but when things change fast - too fast - people can't adjust and that's when we start seeing the social unrest. Expect more riots by the hoody anarchists and more armed protests by the freedom guards or whatever those right wing guys call themselves.

When there's violence and folks with guns, we will see something someday that will be very very bad. It's just human nature. It won't take much.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I've been saying that for a while now

[Anonymous Coward]

Self-checkout is the opposite of automation. Where before almost all the work was done by a machine with a bit of assistance by a human, self-checkout takes VASTLY more human time. While it does need a bit more machine processing power, it is actually shifting work from machines to humans.
It's just that the humans doing the work are no longer paid (by the corporation).
And thinking of any company with significant amount of R&D: there are approximately 10x more ideas and things to investigate than there are resources to deal with. So if AI were to do 90% of the work, there'd still be enough work for everyone, we'd just be able to advance at 10x the pace.
Yes, that is the unrealistically optimistic view. But if everyone else peddles the stupid "we're all doomed" view, someone has to put them up a mirror and show them how idiotic that concept is.
It is based on the (especially prevalent in America?) idea that it is better for humans to spend their lives mind-numbing, stupid pointless work instead of them not doing any work while still getting a better living standard, combined with the idea that there is a limited amount of work in the world and we have to fight for it like it was a scarce resource. The concept is so brain-dead, I just don't get why so many people have an unwavering believe in it.

Acutally no, they didn't

[rsilvergun]

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?