Economic Singularity Review

The Economic Singularity: Artificial intelligence and the death of capitalism .. This new book from best-selling AI writer Calum Chace argues that within a few decades, most humans will not be able to work for money.

A strong claim! This book mentions me by name 15 times, especially on my review of Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, wherein I complain that Ford’s main evidence for saying “this time is different” is all the impressive demos he’s seen lately. Even though this was the main reason given in each previous automation boom for saying “this time is different.” This seems to be Chace’s main evidence as well:

Faster computers, the availability of large data sets, and the persistence of pioneering researchers have finally rendered [deep learning] effective this decade, leading to “all the impressive computing demos” referred to by Robin Hanson in chapter 3.3, along with some early applications. But the major applications are still waiting in the wings, poised to take the stage. ..

It’s time to answer the question: is it really different this time? Will machine intelligence automate most human jobs within the next few decades, and leave a large minority of people – perhaps a majority – unable to gain paid employment? It seems to me that you have to accept that this proposition is at least possible if you admit the following three premises: 1. It is possible to automate the cognitive and manual tasks that we carry out to do our jobs. 2. Machine intelligence is approaching or overtaking our ability to ingest, process and pass on data presented in visual form and in natural language. 3. Machine intelligence is improving at an exponential rate. This rate may or may not slow a little in the coming years, but it will continue to be very fast. No doubt it is still possible to reject one or more of these premises, but for me, the evidence assembled in this chapter makes that hard.

Well of course it is possible for this time to be different. But, um, why can’t these three statements have been true for centuries? It will eventually be possible to automate tasks, and we have been slowly but exponentially “approaching” that future point for centuries. And so we may still have centuries to go. As I recently explained, exponential tech growth is consistent with a relatively constant rate at which jobs are displaced by automation.

Chace makes a specific claim that seems to me quite wrong.

Geoff Hinton – the man whose team won the landmark 2012 ImageNet competition – went further. In May 2015 he said that he expects machines to demonstrate common sense within a decade. .. Facebook has declared its ambition to make Hinton’s prediction come true. To this end, it established a basic research unit in 2013 called Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) with 50 employees, separate from the 100 people in its Applied Machine Learning team. So within a decade, machines are likely to be better than humans at recognising faces and other images, better at understanding and responding to human speech, and may even be possessed of common sense. And they will be getting faster and cheaper all the time. It is hard to believe that this will not have a profound impact on the job market.

I’ll give 50-1 odds against full human level common sense AI with a decade! Chace, I offer my $5,000 against your $100. Also happy to bet on “profound” job market impact, as I mentioned in my review of Ford. Chace, to his credit, sees value in such bets:

The economist Robin Hanson thinks that machines will eventually render most humans unemployed, but that it will not happen for many decades, probably centuries. Despite this scepticism, he proposes an interesting way to watch out for the eventuality: prediction markets. People make their best estimates when they have some skin in the forecasting game. Offering people the opportunity to bet real money on when they see their own jobs or other peoples’ jobs being automated may be an effective way to improve our forecasting.

Finally, Chace repeats Ford’s error in claiming economic collapse if median wages fall:

But as more and more people become unemployed, the consequent fall in demand will overtake the price reductions enabled by greater efficiency. Economic contraction is pretty much inevitable, and it will get so serious that something will have to be done. .. A modern developed society is not sustainable if a majority of its citizens are on the bread line.

Really, an economy can do fine if average demand is high and growing, even if median demand falls. It might be ethically lamentable, and the political system may have problems, but markets can do just fine.