Technology causing unemployment is a concern as old as the Industrial Revolution and yet has never been born out.
It creates so many new jobs you cannot fathom. Imagine explaining the job of an SEO consultant to someone in 1990.
Makes me think of Wal Mart. They went to mostly self-checkout (which is awesome). Did they lay off a bunch of cashiers? Heck no. They just launched curbside (also awesome). Joe Schmos like me now have personal shoppers! Thanks to technology.
I think AI would have to be delivering an era of radical abundance before jobs somehow began disappearing, and then, by definition, you wouldn’t need a job anymore.
Here are some thoughts on why AI might be different than previous technologies.
Faster pace of change. E.g. it took less than 3 years to go from GPT-3 to Chat-GPT, and Chat-GPT might already be changing the nature of knowledge work (see this story on Twitter), whereas GPT-3 mostly has not. I think it’s plausible that code-writing AI will cause similar disruptions for software engineering within the next 5 years. In contrast, people had several decades to respond to changes from the industrial revolutions.
Automation and autonomy. AI breakthroughs are especially useful for automating tasks compared to previous technologies (although previous technologies certainly enabled some automation), and automated tasks require less human labor.
Higher time costs to transition between jobs. Some of the new jobs that AI creates may be more technical in nature and require coding skills that take years to develop. Truck drivers can’t retrain as AI researchers. A counterpoint is that there will be new manual labor jobs as well. I like your example of self-checkout enabling curbside pickup.
Performance improvements at many new tasks with a single AI breakthrough. E.g. language models demonstrate in-context learning, and fine-tuning them produces coding and math models. A counterpoint is that there have been other general purpose technologies like electricity and the digital computer.
I do think it’s plausible that we’ll see a period of radical abundance before any serious unemployment difficulties, but I’m not sure that this abundance will reach everyone equally. I could imagine low-income countries missing out on many of the benefits for years, which might cause dangerous political unrest.
Yes. Though I have a higher opinion of how adaptable humans can be.
Using my own work as a benchmark (residential real estate pricing), AI automation would be a huge benefit to enable me to spend my time on higher level analysis. There’s a lot of AI that my role can absorb while my job still being safe.
That’s especially true in my industry in which adverse selection is prominent. AI making me more effective will be necessary merely to keep up with our competition. It won’t replace us because that will be the default starting position from which we as humans need to then compete at another level relative the competition.
I’m not convinced that the AI revolution benefits the high tech roles relative blue collar roles. AI is a lot closer to writing code from a language prompt than it is massaging someone’s back or even truck driving, for that matter.
I hope this is right. Would love the kinds of breakthroughs AI will provide and whatever we can do to get closer to radical abundance, which I think is the holy grail.
I also don’t see a systemic reason thst AI benefits won’t A) be broadly shared, and B) shy of radical abundance, that economic principles won’t continue to reward non-automated work. Automated activities will become cheap because they’re abundant, while activity that can’t be automated will rise in demand/price and be rewarded as a consequence.
Thanks for your reply. I think the biggest cruxes are about how quickly humans can adapt to change and how quickly AI capabilities can grow.
To my original point in (2), I’d also add something like “crossing the finish line” or “reaching the end”: within the next few decades, I expect AI to be capable of automating nearly all knowledge work. By “all knowledge work,” I mean all thinking-related tasks, includes both 2022 jobs and post-2022 jobs. I worry that this capability level (or a level reasonably close to it) might arrive quickly, before we’re prepared to deal with the ensuing unemployment spike.
My half baked theory is that there will always be jobs shy of radical abundance in which case jobs won’t be necessary.
If AI automated all knowledge work WITHOUT delivering radical abundance, then there would still be jobs delivering goods/services that AI is, by definition, not delivering.
I think narrow AIs won’t cause mass unemployment but more general AIs will. I also think that objectively that isn’t a problem at this point anymore because AIs can do all the work but I think it will take at least another decade that humans can accept that.
The narrative that work is good because you contribute something to society and so on is pretty deeply engrained, so I guess lots of people won’t be happy after being automated away.
Technology causing unemployment is a concern as old as the Industrial Revolution and yet has never been born out.
It creates so many new jobs you cannot fathom. Imagine explaining the job of an SEO consultant to someone in 1990.
Makes me think of Wal Mart. They went to mostly self-checkout (which is awesome). Did they lay off a bunch of cashiers? Heck no. They just launched curbside (also awesome). Joe Schmos like me now have personal shoppers! Thanks to technology.
I think AI would have to be delivering an era of radical abundance before jobs somehow began disappearing, and then, by definition, you wouldn’t need a job anymore.
Here are some thoughts on why AI might be different than previous technologies.
Faster pace of change. E.g. it took less than 3 years to go from GPT-3 to Chat-GPT, and Chat-GPT might already be changing the nature of knowledge work (see this story on Twitter), whereas GPT-3 mostly has not. I think it’s plausible that code-writing AI will cause similar disruptions for software engineering within the next 5 years. In contrast, people had several decades to respond to changes from the industrial revolutions.
Automation and autonomy. AI breakthroughs are especially useful for automating tasks compared to previous technologies (although previous technologies certainly enabled some automation), and automated tasks require less human labor.
Higher time costs to transition between jobs. Some of the new jobs that AI creates may be more technical in nature and require coding skills that take years to develop. Truck drivers can’t retrain as AI researchers. A counterpoint is that there will be new manual labor jobs as well. I like your example of self-checkout enabling curbside pickup.
Performance improvements at many new tasks with a single AI breakthrough. E.g. language models demonstrate in-context learning, and fine-tuning them produces coding and math models. A counterpoint is that there have been other general purpose technologies like electricity and the digital computer.
I do think it’s plausible that we’ll see a period of radical abundance before any serious unemployment difficulties, but I’m not sure that this abundance will reach everyone equally. I could imagine low-income countries missing out on many of the benefits for years, which might cause dangerous political unrest.
Yes. Though I have a higher opinion of how adaptable humans can be.
Using my own work as a benchmark (residential real estate pricing), AI automation would be a huge benefit to enable me to spend my time on higher level analysis. There’s a lot of AI that my role can absorb while my job still being safe.
That’s especially true in my industry in which adverse selection is prominent. AI making me more effective will be necessary merely to keep up with our competition. It won’t replace us because that will be the default starting position from which we as humans need to then compete at another level relative the competition.
I’m not convinced that the AI revolution benefits the high tech roles relative blue collar roles. AI is a lot closer to writing code from a language prompt than it is massaging someone’s back or even truck driving, for that matter.
I hope this is right. Would love the kinds of breakthroughs AI will provide and whatever we can do to get closer to radical abundance, which I think is the holy grail.
I also don’t see a systemic reason thst AI benefits won’t A) be broadly shared, and B) shy of radical abundance, that economic principles won’t continue to reward non-automated work. Automated activities will become cheap because they’re abundant, while activity that can’t be automated will rise in demand/price and be rewarded as a consequence.
Thanks for your reply. I think the biggest cruxes are about how quickly humans can adapt to change and how quickly AI capabilities can grow.
To my original point in (2), I’d also add something like “crossing the finish line” or “reaching the end”: within the next few decades, I expect AI to be capable of automating nearly all knowledge work. By “all knowledge work,” I mean all thinking-related tasks, includes both 2022 jobs and post-2022 jobs. I worry that this capability level (or a level reasonably close to it) might arrive quickly, before we’re prepared to deal with the ensuing unemployment spike.
My half baked theory is that there will always be jobs shy of radical abundance in which case jobs won’t be necessary.
If AI automated all knowledge work WITHOUT delivering radical abundance, then there would still be jobs delivering goods/services that AI is, by definition, not delivering.
And if so, we have nothing to fear.
I think narrow AIs won’t cause mass unemployment but more general AIs will. I also think that objectively that isn’t a problem at this point anymore because AIs can do all the work but I think it will take at least another decade that humans can accept that.
The narrative that work is good because you contribute something to society and so on is pretty deeply engrained, so I guess lots of people won’t be happy after being automated away.
General AI isn’t the same as radical abundance, but to the extent they’re the same, I see that as making the unemployment concern moot.
I also have faith that humans will continue with the “purpose driven life” under such circumstances.