I think we need to be careful when we talk about AI and automation not to commit the lump of labor fallacy. When we say that a certain fraction of economically valuable work will be automated at any given time, or that this fraction will increase, we shouldn’t implicitly assume that the total amount of work being done in the economy is constant. Historically, automation has increased the size of the economy, thereby creating more work to be done, whether by humans or by machines; we should expect the same to happen in the future. (Note that this doesn’t exclude the possibility of increasingly general AI systems performing almost all economically valuable work. This could very well happen even as the total amount of work available skyrockets.)
Late comment, I basically agree with the point being made here that we should avoid committing a fallacy of assuming work done is constant/​lump of labor fallacies, but I don’t think this weakens the argument that human work will be replaced by AI work totally, for 2 reasons:
In a world where you can copy AI labor hugely readily, wages fall for the same reason why prices fall when more goods are supplied, and in particular humans have a biological minimum wage of 20-100 watts that fundamentally makes them unemployable once AIs can be run for cheaper than this, and human wages are likely to fall below subsistence if AIs are copied hugely.
While more work will happen from growing the economy, it is still better to invest in AIs to do the work than it is to invest in humans, and thus even while labor grows, human labor specifically can fall to essentially 0, so the automation hypothesis is at least a consistent hypothesis to hold economically.
I think we need to be careful when we talk about AI and automation not to commit the lump of labor fallacy. When we say that a certain fraction of economically valuable work will be automated at any given time, or that this fraction will increase, we shouldn’t implicitly assume that the total amount of work being done in the economy is constant. Historically, automation has increased the size of the economy, thereby creating more work to be done, whether by humans or by machines; we should expect the same to happen in the future. (Note that this doesn’t exclude the possibility of increasingly general AI systems performing almost all economically valuable work. This could very well happen even as the total amount of work available skyrockets.)
Late comment, I basically agree with the point being made here that we should avoid committing a fallacy of assuming work done is constant/​lump of labor fallacies, but I don’t think this weakens the argument that human work will be replaced by AI work totally, for 2 reasons:
In a world where you can copy AI labor hugely readily, wages fall for the same reason why prices fall when more goods are supplied, and in particular humans have a biological minimum wage of 20-100 watts that fundamentally makes them unemployable once AIs can be run for cheaper than this, and human wages are likely to fall below subsistence if AIs are copied hugely.
While more work will happen from growing the economy, it is still better to invest in AIs to do the work than it is to invest in humans, and thus even while labor grows, human labor specifically can fall to essentially 0, so the automation hypothesis is at least a consistent hypothesis to hold economically.
Also see a recent paper finding no evidence for the automation hypothesis:
http://​​www.overcomingbias.com/​​2019/​​12/​​automation-so-far-business-as-usual.html