I'll admit you changed my opinion of AI's future impact on employment, but I don't think anything will change my attitude on AI in general. As the old saying goes - garbage in, garbage out. Knowing the effect censorious, prejudicial algorithms and their creators have on what you get when using it, makes me suspicious of anything it spits out.
I know and understand this whole argument and grant its acuity. But I’m still hanging on what seems different this time. Automation is well on the way to taking out truck drivers and warehouse workers in the same way it has done with manufacturing line jobs. Those are workers who will not be moving laterally into another unskilled blue collar vocational, like farm workers moving into Henry Ford’s factories. We already know the auto workers and steel mill workers of the 90s mostly died of despair and addiction—they did not find new and higher employment. Wiping out such a vast layer of manual labor seems different this time in the scale of human wreckage it will leave behind without remedy. Granted there will be new and unforeseen job categories called forth by the wealth accreting upward in the hands of those capable of manipulating AI systems of various sorts. But the working class is paying the full cost of this for the upcoming generation, and at a scale greater than in the other transitions
This does not mean every worker is safe or every transition is painless. The displaced clerk, teller, farmhand, or analyst deserves seriousness, not slogans. But fear is not strategy. Freezing technology to protect yesterday’s job is how nations become poor, dependent, and beaten by rivals that choose growth. America’s answer should be training, ownership, entrepreneurship, energy abundance, and freedom to build. AI will punish pass-through workers and reward operators, principals, builders, and people who own judgment. Ricardo’s ghost still haunts the debate because panic sounds rigorous. History says otherwise. The machine comes. The economy grows.
My own view is that the situation with AI is different. It is not so much a tool or a machine as an extension of the human mind , with all the potential good and bad that entails. How will we regulate and manage a tool that is orders of magnitude (it soon will be) more intelligent than the smartest human being? How will we prevent our adversaries from using AI against us, rather than with our own AI. Human beings could become witnesses rather than protagonists to their own very existence. I’m not saying it will happen, I don’t know, but the threat is real.
I've been suffering in transition, if we can call it that, for about 60 years, as technology constantly changed what I could offer the market at an acceptable price. I used to type term papers for a living on electric typewriters (having learned on manual ones). I'm pretty good at glazing windows. No one needs those skills any more.
I'm now retired from the practice of large-scale corporate law, but for the first time, in my old age, I can offer ordinary consumer law help to my neighbors at a reasonable price to them and an attractive wage for me, because AI does the grunt work very, very fast, even in areas that are fairly unfamiliar to me. Much earlier in my career, I had to do legal research by scanning not-very-helpful paper digests and out-of-date treatises. Then came computers and LEXIS or WestLaw research, an improvement, but still extremely slow and limited. For all the wrinkles and quibbles we can find in AI legal research, it is astounding faster and less likely to miss something crucial because of the limitations of old-fashioned word searches and digest keys. Just the savings in expensive time and effort in reworking correspondence, memoranda, and pleadings every time the document needs to reflect a change in factual assumptions or the thrust of a legal argument is more than I could possibly have imagined a year or two ago.
Unstated conclusion: the people I serve now at a price that suits both them and me simply couldn't have afforded my services before, and for the most part would have made do without the legal help altogether. Now they can afford to get help that wouldn't have existed in the economy at all for all practical purposes.
No two ways about it: this was a fun and illuminating essay.
I'll admit you changed my opinion of AI's future impact on employment, but I don't think anything will change my attitude on AI in general. As the old saying goes - garbage in, garbage out. Knowing the effect censorious, prejudicial algorithms and their creators have on what you get when using it, makes me suspicious of anything it spits out.
The counterfactual/premise assumption is 100% subjective. This is why economics, like psychology, is considered a "soft science."
I know and understand this whole argument and grant its acuity. But I’m still hanging on what seems different this time. Automation is well on the way to taking out truck drivers and warehouse workers in the same way it has done with manufacturing line jobs. Those are workers who will not be moving laterally into another unskilled blue collar vocational, like farm workers moving into Henry Ford’s factories. We already know the auto workers and steel mill workers of the 90s mostly died of despair and addiction—they did not find new and higher employment. Wiping out such a vast layer of manual labor seems different this time in the scale of human wreckage it will leave behind without remedy. Granted there will be new and unforeseen job categories called forth by the wealth accreting upward in the hands of those capable of manipulating AI systems of various sorts. But the working class is paying the full cost of this for the upcoming generation, and at a scale greater than in the other transitions
This does not mean every worker is safe or every transition is painless. The displaced clerk, teller, farmhand, or analyst deserves seriousness, not slogans. But fear is not strategy. Freezing technology to protect yesterday’s job is how nations become poor, dependent, and beaten by rivals that choose growth. America’s answer should be training, ownership, entrepreneurship, energy abundance, and freedom to build. AI will punish pass-through workers and reward operators, principals, builders, and people who own judgment. Ricardo’s ghost still haunts the debate because panic sounds rigorous. History says otherwise. The machine comes. The economy grows.
My own view is that the situation with AI is different. It is not so much a tool or a machine as an extension of the human mind , with all the potential good and bad that entails. How will we regulate and manage a tool that is orders of magnitude (it soon will be) more intelligent than the smartest human being? How will we prevent our adversaries from using AI against us, rather than with our own AI. Human beings could become witnesses rather than protagonists to their own very existence. I’m not saying it will happen, I don’t know, but the threat is real.
I've been suffering in transition, if we can call it that, for about 60 years, as technology constantly changed what I could offer the market at an acceptable price. I used to type term papers for a living on electric typewriters (having learned on manual ones). I'm pretty good at glazing windows. No one needs those skills any more.
I'm now retired from the practice of large-scale corporate law, but for the first time, in my old age, I can offer ordinary consumer law help to my neighbors at a reasonable price to them and an attractive wage for me, because AI does the grunt work very, very fast, even in areas that are fairly unfamiliar to me. Much earlier in my career, I had to do legal research by scanning not-very-helpful paper digests and out-of-date treatises. Then came computers and LEXIS or WestLaw research, an improvement, but still extremely slow and limited. For all the wrinkles and quibbles we can find in AI legal research, it is astounding faster and less likely to miss something crucial because of the limitations of old-fashioned word searches and digest keys. Just the savings in expensive time and effort in reworking correspondence, memoranda, and pleadings every time the document needs to reflect a change in factual assumptions or the thrust of a legal argument is more than I could possibly have imagined a year or two ago.
Unstated conclusion: the people I serve now at a price that suits both them and me simply couldn't have afforded my services before, and for the most part would have made do without the legal help altogether. Now they can afford to get help that wouldn't have existed in the economy at all for all practical purposes.