Congressional Quarterly Researcher has a new issue focused on artificial intelligence. They invited me to write short a op-ed on the question “Will artificial intelligence lead to massive unemployment?” Alas they didn’t tell me the idea was for me to say “No” opposite
No, the primary driver of high birth rates is infant mortality. In many areas additional children also provide wealth as social security for old age or directly through government benefits. In any case in the future the birth rates will be what those in power want them to be through the administration of appropriate incentives.
I wrote similarly here and made up some nifty charts. I also think that this technology-labor displacement effect can explain why the ongoing labor recession is hitting men harder than women.
You're wrong. Before this massive unemployment happens, you will begin to see a fall in the population level. Why? Because in an unregulated economy, when the wage rate starts to bump up against the cost of subsistence, people stop having children, because they aren't be able to afford them.
It's not enough to answer "yes" we must also add "and that is a very good thing." Consider how many hours a day you work compared to your ancestors, and the kind of goods you can afford. The invention of true AI - superhuman AI - would mean humans would need to work far less to afford the abundant automatically manufactured goods.
As for ems, suggestions that they should be cut up into useful chunks misses the point that THESE ARE PEOPLE. Nobody can own them, anymore than when they wore biological bodies. That is something that needs to be established long before ems actually exist.
I’m not sure I understand the economic incentive to create full ems.It seems to me like full ems would be a consumer good, not a production good. Converting yourself into an em would be a form of immortality.
Business-wise, I could see some uses. For instance a mildly paranoid CEO might want an em to make really fast business decisions, but only trust one that was identical to him/her. Similarly, a full em would be good at any job requiring a lot of people skills. I do question Robin's theory that we'll make trillions of ems. Wouldn't modifying a few ems to be much better at multitasking be better than mass duplication, there'd be less redundancy?
Prices will be dramatically different post-ems. People will not be able to make large incomes simply by owning ems, because the wages going to ems will drop just as much as those going to real humans, and probably more, since humans come with a physical body. I think it will be hard for real humans to make money owning ems because ems are real humans. Owning them would be slavery. Even ignoring ethics, if they decided to liberate themselves we'd be no match for a reasonably large number of them, since they'd think as much in a second as we do in a year. The best bet would be to make a bunch of ems who are identical to you who work for your benefit because they love you as a sibling.
I'm not sure I understand the economic incentive to create full ems. Working in neuroscience, I can see the use of replicating various parts of the brain for specific tasks. For example, functionally replicating the visual cortex (which, with a full theory of neuroscience, probably would not require a cell by cell simulation of it) would be tremendously useful for autonomous robots, whether they be manufacturers or self driving cars. Simulated frontal lobes would be useful for research in large data sets. But if you had capital enough to buy the hardware to do this simulation, why waste buying more processors than you need for the task, especially when an employer doesn't really want them to have drives other than processing information? It would seem to be an odd future that we can fully simulate the brain, but not take out all the parts that don't serve the owners purpose.
It may not make too much of a difference in your proposed outcome. It would still drive wealth primarily into the hands of people who had enough wealth to buy the semi-intelligent machines, and replace humans. However, I doubt they would make money themselves, only for their owner. Full brain ems strike me as being like video chatting - something that seemed really cool in the future, but turned out not to be nearly as ubiquitous as people thought it would be. It has its place, but people realized that it doesn't do what they thought it would.
I think you are right. I think there are some things that people would prefer to have a normal person do, rather than an em. It is really hard not to have a comparative advantage in something.
Prices will be dramatically different post-ems. People will not be able to make large incomes simply by owning ems, because the wages going to ems will drop just as much as those going to real humans, and probably more, since humans come with a physical body. You need a Malthusian trap to get the mass poverty.
Agree with Ford and Hanson. Automation of retail, agriculture, distribution, mining, etc is likely to outstrip the human capacity for making unnecessary work for themselves.
i think it would be difficult to argue an em is the same as a human. they may be able to replace much of human decision making if they have a 'brain' similar to whomever was scanned. however, they would not receive signals from other organs (ie pain, sexual hormones, hunger, etc).
this raises the question of wether ems would even be motivated to have the same rights as humans. if they are not motivated to seek pleasure/avoid pain the same way we are, im not sure they'd mind
I agree. There is no moral reason that property owners deserve their property. It just makes society better when we respect property rights. When this stops happening, it will be time to stop respecting property rights.
I just reread David Brin's story "The River of Time," and realized that it has some bearing on the em scenarios. In that story humans, for no apparent reason, suddenly start living at accelarated or decelerated speeds. Some suddenly start moving so slowly they appear as statues, while others live so fast they're nearly invisible. This is very similar to ems, who do everything humans do, only faster. In Brin's story they are able to find productive work for the slowed-down humans to do. I'm assuming Robin would be less optimistic in that regard.
I am also reminded of a Larry Niven story (The Slow Ones) involving aliens with nervous systems so slow that they take months to move place to place and hours to type a single e-mail. Does Robin think that if humans emigrated to the alien's world that they'd immediately take all the jobs from the slow-moving aliens, and only alien property owners who rented things to humans would make any money at all?
My intuition is that the slowed down humans in Brin's story and the slow aliens in Niven's story would still have comparitive advantage in something. But Robin knows far more about econ than I do, and he doesn't think that normal humans will have any comparitive advantage with em humans, so I'm probably wrong. They're very similar scenarios, after all.
“Labor” has “value” only because an “owner” of “property” is “willing” to “exchange” some of that “labor” for some of that “property”.
Of course if a particular unit of labor doesn't benefit a particular owner of property, to that owner of property that labor is useless “make-work”. What is “productive” and what is “make-work” is purely dependent on the whim of property owners to decide to pay for it or not.
If property owners whims are insufficient to provide sufficient funds in exchange for labor to allow those laborers to survive, then those starving laborers will find the need to change the arbitrary definitions of “labor”, “value”, “owner” and “property” until the property owners whims either do change, or until the property owners are changed to those with different whims.
As they say,
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Neither is the arbitrary human convention of property ownership or any other contractual agreement. If property owners wish to continue to own property, they need to appreciate that ownership of property is only an arbitrary human convention that humans can change when they need to.
Maybe AI could be created that would be so tame, and would put so little value on their continued existence that they would turn themselves off if they could not pay their electric bill. No doubt the owner of the electricity they would be using and not paying for would agree.
It is wishful thinking bordering on the delusional on the part of property owners to think that humans would do so.
This op-ed is almost impossible to get hold of, it would be very useful to have sight of now.
No, the primary driver of high birth rates is infant mortality. In many areas additional children also provide wealth as social security for old age or directly through government benefits. In any case in the future the birth rates will be what those in power want them to be through the administration of appropriate incentives.
I wrote similarly here and made up some nifty charts. I also think that this technology-labor displacement effect can explain why the ongoing labor recession is hitting men harder than women.
Doesn't the birth rate do the opposite in real life?
In other words, the workers will not be "unemployed", they will be "unborn" in the first place.
You're wrong. Before this massive unemployment happens, you will begin to see a fall in the population level. Why? Because in an unregulated economy, when the wage rate starts to bump up against the cost of subsistence, people stop having children, because they aren't be able to afford them.
It's not enough to answer "yes" we must also add "and that is a very good thing." Consider how many hours a day you work compared to your ancestors, and the kind of goods you can afford. The invention of true AI - superhuman AI - would mean humans would need to work far less to afford the abundant automatically manufactured goods.
As for ems, suggestions that they should be cut up into useful chunks misses the point that THESE ARE PEOPLE. Nobody can own them, anymore than when they wore biological bodies. That is something that needs to be established long before ems actually exist.
I’m not sure I understand the economic incentive to create full ems.It seems to me like full ems would be a consumer good, not a production good. Converting yourself into an em would be a form of immortality.
Business-wise, I could see some uses. For instance a mildly paranoid CEO might want an em to make really fast business decisions, but only trust one that was identical to him/her. Similarly, a full em would be good at any job requiring a lot of people skills. I do question Robin's theory that we'll make trillions of ems. Wouldn't modifying a few ems to be much better at multitasking be better than mass duplication, there'd be less redundancy?
Prices will be dramatically different post-ems. People will not be able to make large incomes simply by owning ems, because the wages going to ems will drop just as much as those going to real humans, and probably more, since humans come with a physical body. I think it will be hard for real humans to make money owning ems because ems are real humans. Owning them would be slavery. Even ignoring ethics, if they decided to liberate themselves we'd be no match for a reasonably large number of them, since they'd think as much in a second as we do in a year. The best bet would be to make a bunch of ems who are identical to you who work for your benefit because they love you as a sibling.
I'm not sure I understand the economic incentive to create full ems. Working in neuroscience, I can see the use of replicating various parts of the brain for specific tasks. For example, functionally replicating the visual cortex (which, with a full theory of neuroscience, probably would not require a cell by cell simulation of it) would be tremendously useful for autonomous robots, whether they be manufacturers or self driving cars. Simulated frontal lobes would be useful for research in large data sets. But if you had capital enough to buy the hardware to do this simulation, why waste buying more processors than you need for the task, especially when an employer doesn't really want them to have drives other than processing information? It would seem to be an odd future that we can fully simulate the brain, but not take out all the parts that don't serve the owners purpose.
It may not make too much of a difference in your proposed outcome. It would still drive wealth primarily into the hands of people who had enough wealth to buy the semi-intelligent machines, and replace humans. However, I doubt they would make money themselves, only for their owner. Full brain ems strike me as being like video chatting - something that seemed really cool in the future, but turned out not to be nearly as ubiquitous as people thought it would be. It has its place, but people realized that it doesn't do what they thought it would.
I think you are right. I think there are some things that people would prefer to have a normal person do, rather than an em. It is really hard not to have a comparative advantage in something.
Prices will be dramatically different post-ems. People will not be able to make large incomes simply by owning ems, because the wages going to ems will drop just as much as those going to real humans, and probably more, since humans come with a physical body. You need a Malthusian trap to get the mass poverty.
Agree with Ford and Hanson. Automation of retail, agriculture, distribution, mining, etc is likely to outstrip the human capacity for making unnecessary work for themselves.
(not the same Evan)
i think it would be difficult to argue an em is the same as a human. they may be able to replace much of human decision making if they have a 'brain' similar to whomever was scanned. however, they would not receive signals from other organs (ie pain, sexual hormones, hunger, etc).
this raises the question of wether ems would even be motivated to have the same rights as humans. if they are not motivated to seek pleasure/avoid pain the same way we are, im not sure they'd mind
I agree. There is no moral reason that property owners deserve their property. It just makes society better when we respect property rights. When this stops happening, it will be time to stop respecting property rights.
I just reread David Brin's story "The River of Time," and realized that it has some bearing on the em scenarios. In that story humans, for no apparent reason, suddenly start living at accelarated or decelerated speeds. Some suddenly start moving so slowly they appear as statues, while others live so fast they're nearly invisible. This is very similar to ems, who do everything humans do, only faster. In Brin's story they are able to find productive work for the slowed-down humans to do. I'm assuming Robin would be less optimistic in that regard.
I am also reminded of a Larry Niven story (The Slow Ones) involving aliens with nervous systems so slow that they take months to move place to place and hours to type a single e-mail. Does Robin think that if humans emigrated to the alien's world that they'd immediately take all the jobs from the slow-moving aliens, and only alien property owners who rented things to humans would make any money at all?
My intuition is that the slowed down humans in Brin's story and the slow aliens in Niven's story would still have comparitive advantage in something. But Robin knows far more about econ than I do, and he doesn't think that normal humans will have any comparitive advantage with em humans, so I'm probably wrong. They're very similar scenarios, after all.
“Labor” has “value” only because an “owner” of “property” is “willing” to “exchange” some of that “labor” for some of that “property”.
Of course if a particular unit of labor doesn't benefit a particular owner of property, to that owner of property that labor is useless “make-work”. What is “productive” and what is “make-work” is purely dependent on the whim of property owners to decide to pay for it or not.
If property owners whims are insufficient to provide sufficient funds in exchange for labor to allow those laborers to survive, then those starving laborers will find the need to change the arbitrary definitions of “labor”, “value”, “owner” and “property” until the property owners whims either do change, or until the property owners are changed to those with different whims.
As they say,
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Neither is the arbitrary human convention of property ownership or any other contractual agreement. If property owners wish to continue to own property, they need to appreciate that ownership of property is only an arbitrary human convention that humans can change when they need to.
Maybe AI could be created that would be so tame, and would put so little value on their continued existence that they would turn themselves off if they could not pay their electric bill. No doubt the owner of the electricity they would be using and not paying for would agree.
It is wishful thinking bordering on the delusional on the part of property owners to think that humans would do so.