Automating jobs is the thing that gets people out of poverty.
The exception is when the regulatory environment prevents certain jobs from being automated or otherwise competitive, resulting in artificial scarcity of necessities. But then your problem isn't AI, it's market consolidation and regulatory capture.
In Estonia we largely don't have human cashiers in grocery stores anymore. What a few years ago was almost entirely human driven thing is now almost entirely automated registries, with only 1 person overseeing any potential issues. The vast majority of cashiers are now unemployed, and need to figure out how to get a new job or a new skill, which can be hard to do if you previously made minimum wage, lived paycheck to paycheck, and don't have the luxury of time.
I have a hard time seeing how automation helps these people. And these people are growing a disdain towards people like me, tech people, who put them out of work. Low-skilled jobs are becoming increasingly scarce to find, and with people not having resources or time to level up their education, they are stuck. I know many people like this myself. Struggling to pay bills, no light at the end of the tunnel.
If the government would give some support to these people misplaced by automation, maybe it would help lift these people out of poverty indeed, but that's not happening. There is no support. These people are on their own.
It seems, however, that AI development (as opposed to what automation has been doing so far) will to a large part affect higher-income jobs. Your examples are "old-school automation" and don't involve AI.
It's quite possible, for example, that the value of "skilled jobs" and "knowledge work" will go down because it's easier to automate if you don't need to build hardware to manipulate things in the world.
I think I agree with you. Seeing how something as rudimentary still (in regards to the potential it has) such as Github Copilot makes me write code approx. 30% faster simply by auto-completing the mundane, boring bits of code for me, I'm pretty sure this would have the domino effect that a company can soon not need as many software developers anymore, since 3 devs can do the job of 4 devs.
No it isn't. It might work that way on a spreadsheet model, but in practice people whose jobs are automated away become unemployed. To the extent that their job was skillful, acquiring another skillset is likely to take a while. I suspect that there will also be a subtle kind fo discrimination attendant on this, with the assumption that if one was replaced by AI, one must not have been very good at the previous line of work.
AI is manifestly not automating away the shittiest jobs like hand-digging for rare earth minerals, subsistence agriculture, sorting through garbage to collect recyclables and so on. It is being very disruptive to cottage industries like graphic design, tech consulting and the like. In some cases it will certainly free up providers to skip the boring stuff and move up market or serve a larger number of customers, but in other cases it's just going to make people redundant. For example, it's entirely practical right now to launch and run a greeting card company without ever hiring an artist.
in practice people whose jobs are automated away become unemployed.
And then the products they used to make become less expensive because they require less labor to produce, which reduces amount of pay or hours anyone needs to make a living. Meanwhile all of the people who didn't lose their jobs now have that much more disposable income, which they use to buy something else, which creates new jobs doing whatever it is they're buying with the money they saved.
AI is manifestly not automating away the shittiest jobs like hand-digging for rare earth minerals, subsistence agriculture, sorting through garbage to collect recyclables and so on.
You're describing work that has been under heavy and increasing automation for decades. Farmers use combines and sophisticated irrigation systems. Miners use heavy machinery, not their hands.
It is being very disruptive to cottage industries like graphic design, tech consulting and the like.
Obviously the people who used to do the thing being automated will have to do something else, but then they do something else. If there is a something else then that's fine (and this has been the historical norm), if there ever comes to be no something else then substantially everything has been automated and the cost of living should be negligible absent some kind of government regulatory dysfunction.
And then the products they used to make become less expensive because they require less labor to produce, which reduces amount of pay or hours anyone needs to make a living.
That's textbook deflationary, and mistakenly assumes that consumer products make up the bulk of discretionary spending. A more likely outcome is that whole fields of endeavor will become areas where hardly anyone can make a living, because the marginal cost of the product has fallen to zero. Your argument would have more force if UBI were an established norm, but it isn't. People whose income shrinks drastically or dries up due to AI are not going to have their rent or food costs reduced, they're just going to have to find some other form of work to pay their bills.
You're describing work that has been under heavy and increasing automation for decades. Farmers use combines and sophisticated irrigation systems. Miners use heavy machinery, not their hands.
First, that's not AI - the subject we're discussing. Second, it's not true. The existence of automation and industry does not mean that manual labor under terrible conditions ceases to exist. A huge portion of the food industry is done through manual labor, often illegally hired. Here's a current example of how mining continues to be done by hand, at scale:
While I'm very much a tech person and excited about the possibilities for AI, I'm also keenly aware of the downsides and economic dislocation it's likely to inflict, and how these could be worse as well as better. You seem to have a very idealistic view of the world, but not a great deal of experience.
Deflation reflects the value of the currency. This reflects the value of some products and services relative to others. Obviously some things decline in cost over time -- compute is the obvious example, but just look at your own examples:
For example, it's entirely practical right now to launch and run a greeting card company without ever hiring an artist.
In other words, the cost of commodity art has gone down.
Whether the long-term result is net deflation depends on whether the government is concurrently printing up any new currency, but in general they are, because currency deflation is bad but easy to offset by doing just that.
mistakenly assumes that consumer products make up the bulk of discretionary spending.
Where does it assume that? What it assumes is that labor is the primary component of the cost of living -- which it is. There are some things with true scarcity in theory, but those are rarely the bottleneck in practice. It's not that we can't grow enough food to feed everyone, or build enough housing etc. -- it's that those things take labor to deliver, so if we automate that labor the cost of living goes down.
First, that's not AI - the subject we're discussing.
We're discussing automation, of which AI is a subset. The Luddites weren't upset about AI and nobody really expects AI to somehow automate mining, but that doesn't mean mining automation isn't possible. You might even use AI to devise new technology to automate mining.
People whose income shrinks drastically or dries up due to AI are not going to have their rent or food costs reduced,
The overall economy no longer has to pay them to do something the machine will do basically for free, so that thing will cost less. Now, this might mean that one specific person loses a $50,000 salary and in exchange the average person (including them) has their costs reduced by $50/year, because that job was only done by one in a thousand people.
But that $50,000 in total is still out there in the pockets of those 1000 people, and they're going to spend it on something instead, and that something is going to create some other new job for that person.
The person who was previously making $50,000/year may not like this. They may even end up with a new job paying $45,000/year and the other $5000 goes to someone else, even though their cost of living only went down by the same $50/year as everyone else. But each $50/year, each occupation that gets automated, adds up. And when you automate more of the old jobs it turns into $5000/year per person or more and outweighs the cost not just on average but for even the people who had to change careers.
they're just going to have to find some other form of work to pay their bills.
But that's just what they'll do, unless there is no other work that needs to be done. Which would imply that everything should be really cheap.
The existence of automation and industry does not mean that manual labor under terrible conditions ceases to exist.
It ceases to exist to the extent it has been automated. If you automate half of something but not the other half, the problem is not the half you've automated, it's the half you haven't yet.
And it's not as if no one is trying to increase the level of automation in general. If your objection is that nobody has automated parts of agriculture yet then forget about AI and focus your efforts on accomplishing that.
We're discussing automation, of which AI is a subset.
No we're not. This is a discussion about the EU rolling out the first regulatory proposals for AI. You don't get to change to subject to whatever is convenient for your argument at a given moment.
I really can't be bothered engaging with the rest of your post, as you simply ignore facts that don't suit your argument and keep reiterating what you want to happen in the ideal economic world you prefer to inhabit. This is just ideology divorced from reality.
No we're not. This is a discussion about the EU rolling out the first regulatory proposals for AI. You don't get to change to subject to whatever is convenient for your argument at a given moment.
Your argument is the one that has been put forth against every form of automation since the industrial revolution. It's not changing the subject to recognize the parallel.
I really can't be bothered engaging with the rest of your post, as you simply ignore facts that don't suit your argument and keep reiterating what you want to happen in the ideal economic world you prefer to inhabit. This is just ideology divorced from reality.
I'm not sure which facts you think I'm ignoring.
Suppose that AI automates 20% of jobs, causing everyone's costs to go down by an average of 20%. Meanwhile the people who lost those jobs have to find different ones, which e.g. may not pay as well (after all, there is a reason they didn't take those jobs before).
Your argument is apparently that this is bad for them and a problem -- they might have to take a job at $45,000 when they currently make $50,000. But if the same forces also cause their annual expenses[0] to go from $50,000 to $40,000, this is neither bad nor a problem. And for some other person making $50,000 doing something else who didn't lose their job, their expenses went down from $50,000 to $40,000 too, which is even better.
[0] In real dollars; in practice the Fed might respond to this by increasing the money supply to prevent nominal consumer prices and wages from going down.
people whose jobs are automated away become unemployed
Meanwhile, the quality of life for the unemployed keeps improving due to those same technologies. If unemployment is a problem because of lack of access to things you want (other than status symbols), then it's hardly a problem anymore in developed countries. If the problem is a feeling of shame or uselessness, then maybe we should be building or growing other institutions to make unemployed people feel good about themselves.
Because most people can't do this or even know what you mean by this sentence. There is a reason why developers exist, and it's not because they can code per se. They solve problems that people don't know how to, and the code is just a means to that end.
You're assuming the person above is a coder. The example I gave earlier was that one could start a greeting card company without hiring any artists. 'Greeting cards' traditionally have art imagery of some kind on the front. I picked this an example because it's a ~$20 billion industry which a lot f artists have sold product to until now.
Comments
Automating jobs is the thing that gets people out of poverty.
The exception is when the regulatory environment prevents certain jobs from being automated or otherwise competitive, resulting in artificial scarcity of necessities. But then your problem isn't AI, it's market consolidation and regulatory capture.
In Estonia we largely don't have human cashiers in grocery stores anymore. What a few years ago was almost entirely human driven thing is now almost entirely automated registries, with only 1 person overseeing any potential issues. The vast majority of cashiers are now unemployed, and need to figure out how to get a new job or a new skill, which can be hard to do if you previously made minimum wage, lived paycheck to paycheck, and don't have the luxury of time.
Another such job that is disappearing in Estonia is food (https://www.starship.xyz/) and package delivery (https://www.dpd.com/cn/en/2022/08/09/self-driving-delivery-r...), which we are also replacing with robots, meaning all those people will soon be unemployed, if not already in some amount.
I have a hard time seeing how automation helps these people. And these people are growing a disdain towards people like me, tech people, who put them out of work. Low-skilled jobs are becoming increasingly scarce to find, and with people not having resources or time to level up their education, they are stuck. I know many people like this myself. Struggling to pay bills, no light at the end of the tunnel.
If the government would give some support to these people misplaced by automation, maybe it would help lift these people out of poverty indeed, but that's not happening. There is no support. These people are on their own.
It seems, however, that AI development (as opposed to what automation has been doing so far) will to a large part affect higher-income jobs. Your examples are "old-school automation" and don't involve AI.
It's quite possible, for example, that the value of "skilled jobs" and "knowledge work" will go down because it's easier to automate if you don't need to build hardware to manipulate things in the world.
I think I agree with you. Seeing how something as rudimentary still (in regards to the potential it has) such as Github Copilot makes me write code approx. 30% faster simply by auto-completing the mundane, boring bits of code for me, I'm pretty sure this would have the domino effect that a company can soon not need as many software developers anymore, since 3 devs can do the job of 4 devs.
"do you have any statistics, sources for your claim of disappearing jobs?
No it isn't. It might work that way on a spreadsheet model, but in practice people whose jobs are automated away become unemployed. To the extent that their job was skillful, acquiring another skillset is likely to take a while. I suspect that there will also be a subtle kind fo discrimination attendant on this, with the assumption that if one was replaced by AI, one must not have been very good at the previous line of work.
AI is manifestly not automating away the shittiest jobs like hand-digging for rare earth minerals, subsistence agriculture, sorting through garbage to collect recyclables and so on. It is being very disruptive to cottage industries like graphic design, tech consulting and the like. In some cases it will certainly free up providers to skip the boring stuff and move up market or serve a larger number of customers, but in other cases it's just going to make people redundant. For example, it's entirely practical right now to launch and run a greeting card company without ever hiring an artist.
And then the products they used to make become less expensive because they require less labor to produce, which reduces amount of pay or hours anyone needs to make a living. Meanwhile all of the people who didn't lose their jobs now have that much more disposable income, which they use to buy something else, which creates new jobs doing whatever it is they're buying with the money they saved.
You're describing work that has been under heavy and increasing automation for decades. Farmers use combines and sophisticated irrigation systems. Miners use heavy machinery, not their hands.
Obviously the people who used to do the thing being automated will have to do something else, but then they do something else. If there is a something else then that's fine (and this has been the historical norm), if there ever comes to be no something else then substantially everything has been automated and the cost of living should be negligible absent some kind of government regulatory dysfunction.
And then the products they used to make become less expensive because they require less labor to produce, which reduces amount of pay or hours anyone needs to make a living.
That's textbook deflationary, and mistakenly assumes that consumer products make up the bulk of discretionary spending. A more likely outcome is that whole fields of endeavor will become areas where hardly anyone can make a living, because the marginal cost of the product has fallen to zero. Your argument would have more force if UBI were an established norm, but it isn't. People whose income shrinks drastically or dries up due to AI are not going to have their rent or food costs reduced, they're just going to have to find some other form of work to pay their bills.
You're describing work that has been under heavy and increasing automation for decades. Farmers use combines and sophisticated irrigation systems. Miners use heavy machinery, not their hands.
First, that's not AI - the subject we're discussing. Second, it's not true. The existence of automation and industry does not mean that manual labor under terrible conditions ceases to exist. A huge portion of the food industry is done through manual labor, often illegally hired. Here's a current example of how mining continues to be done by hand, at scale:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
While I'm very much a tech person and excited about the possibilities for AI, I'm also keenly aware of the downsides and economic dislocation it's likely to inflict, and how these could be worse as well as better. You seem to have a very idealistic view of the world, but not a great deal of experience.
Deflation reflects the value of the currency. This reflects the value of some products and services relative to others. Obviously some things decline in cost over time -- compute is the obvious example, but just look at your own examples:
In other words, the cost of commodity art has gone down.
Whether the long-term result is net deflation depends on whether the government is concurrently printing up any new currency, but in general they are, because currency deflation is bad but easy to offset by doing just that.
Where does it assume that? What it assumes is that labor is the primary component of the cost of living -- which it is. There are some things with true scarcity in theory, but those are rarely the bottleneck in practice. It's not that we can't grow enough food to feed everyone, or build enough housing etc. -- it's that those things take labor to deliver, so if we automate that labor the cost of living goes down.
We're discussing automation, of which AI is a subset. The Luddites weren't upset about AI and nobody really expects AI to somehow automate mining, but that doesn't mean mining automation isn't possible. You might even use AI to devise new technology to automate mining.
The overall economy no longer has to pay them to do something the machine will do basically for free, so that thing will cost less. Now, this might mean that one specific person loses a $50,000 salary and in exchange the average person (including them) has their costs reduced by $50/year, because that job was only done by one in a thousand people.
But that $50,000 in total is still out there in the pockets of those 1000 people, and they're going to spend it on something instead, and that something is going to create some other new job for that person.
The person who was previously making $50,000/year may not like this. They may even end up with a new job paying $45,000/year and the other $5000 goes to someone else, even though their cost of living only went down by the same $50/year as everyone else. But each $50/year, each occupation that gets automated, adds up. And when you automate more of the old jobs it turns into $5000/year per person or more and outweighs the cost not just on average but for even the people who had to change careers.
But that's just what they'll do, unless there is no other work that needs to be done. Which would imply that everything should be really cheap.
It ceases to exist to the extent it has been automated. If you automate half of something but not the other half, the problem is not the half you've automated, it's the half you haven't yet.
And it's not as if no one is trying to increase the level of automation in general. If your objection is that nobody has automated parts of agriculture yet then forget about AI and focus your efforts on accomplishing that.
We're discussing automation, of which AI is a subset.
No we're not. This is a discussion about the EU rolling out the first regulatory proposals for AI. You don't get to change to subject to whatever is convenient for your argument at a given moment.
I really can't be bothered engaging with the rest of your post, as you simply ignore facts that don't suit your argument and keep reiterating what you want to happen in the ideal economic world you prefer to inhabit. This is just ideology divorced from reality.
Your argument is the one that has been put forth against every form of automation since the industrial revolution. It's not changing the subject to recognize the parallel.
I'm not sure which facts you think I'm ignoring.
Suppose that AI automates 20% of jobs, causing everyone's costs to go down by an average of 20%. Meanwhile the people who lost those jobs have to find different ones, which e.g. may not pay as well (after all, there is a reason they didn't take those jobs before).
Your argument is apparently that this is bad for them and a problem -- they might have to take a job at $45,000 when they currently make $50,000. But if the same forces also cause their annual expenses[0] to go from $50,000 to $40,000, this is neither bad nor a problem. And for some other person making $50,000 doing something else who didn't lose their job, their expenses went down from $50,000 to $40,000 too, which is even better.
[0] In real dollars; in practice the Fed might respond to this by increasing the money supply to prevent nominal consumer prices and wages from going down.
Which part of this are you even disputing?
Meanwhile, the quality of life for the unemployed keeps improving due to those same technologies. If unemployment is a problem because of lack of access to things you want (other than status symbols), then it's hardly a problem anymore in developed countries. If the problem is a feeling of shame or uselessness, then maybe we should be building or growing other institutions to make unemployed people feel good about themselves.
If I can do 10x more work in the same amount of time I can probably charge way more money for my time. Sounds like a great deal.
Why would I hire you at all if I can just spin up an AI tool on AWS or wherever and do it myself?
Because most people can't do this or even know what you mean by this sentence. There is a reason why developers exist, and it's not because they can code per se. They solve problems that people don't know how to, and the code is just a means to that end.
You're assuming the person above is a coder. The example I gave earlier was that one could start a greeting card company without hiring any artists. 'Greeting cards' traditionally have art imagery of some kind on the front. I picked this an example because it's a ~$20 billion industry which a lot f artists have sold product to until now.