But the claim that replacement jobs are systematically more difficult, so that newly unemployed lack the capacity to learn the new jobs, is a much stronger claim.
Yes. It’s obviously true that useful things that are easier to automate will get automated more, so the job loss should grow from the easily automated end. The open question is how much do human skill distributions and the human notion of ‘difficulty’ match up with the easier to automate thing. It’s obviously not a complete match, as a human job, bookkeeping is considered to require more skill than warehouse work, but bookkeeping is much more easily automated than warehouse work.
Human labor in basic production, farming, mining, manufacturing, basically relies on humans coming with built-in hand-eye coordination and situation awareness that has been impossible to automate satisfactorily so far. Human labor in these areas mostly consists of following instructions though, so get a good enough machine solutions for hand-eye coordination and situation awareness in the real world, and most just-following-orders, dealing-with-dumb-matter human labor is toast.
Then there’s the simpler service labor where you deal with other humans and need to model humans successfully. This is probably more difficult, AI-wise. Then again, these jobs are also less essential, people don’t seem to miss the telephone and elevator operators much. Human service personnel are an obvious status signal, but if the automated solution is 100x cheaper, actual human service personnel is going to end up a luxury good, and the nearby grocery store and fast food restaurant probably won’t be hiring human servers if they can make do with a clunky automated order and billing system. In addition to being more scarce, high-grade customer service jobs at status-conscious organizations are going to require more skills than a random grocery store cashier job.
This leaves us mostly with various types of abstract knowledge work, which are generally considered the types of job that require the most skill. Also, one dealing with people job sector where the above argument of replacing humans with automated systems that aren’t full AIs won’t work are various security professions. You can’t do away with modeling other humans very well and being very good at social situation awareness there.
Human service personnel are an obvious status signal, but if the automated solution is 100x cheaper, actual human service personnel is going to end up a luxury good
On the other hand, the wealth said automated solutions will generate means that luxury goods are a lot more affordable.
Edit: The downside is that this means that most jobs will essentially consist of playing status games, I believe the common word for this is decadence.
Yes. It’s obviously true that useful things that are easier to automate will get automated more, so the job loss should grow from the easily automated end. The open question is how much do human skill distributions and the human notion of ‘difficulty’ match up with the easier to automate thing. It’s obviously not a complete match, as a human job, bookkeeping is considered to require more skill than warehouse work, but bookkeeping is much more easily automated than warehouse work.
Human labor in basic production, farming, mining, manufacturing, basically relies on humans coming with built-in hand-eye coordination and situation awareness that has been impossible to automate satisfactorily so far. Human labor in these areas mostly consists of following instructions though, so get a good enough machine solutions for hand-eye coordination and situation awareness in the real world, and most just-following-orders, dealing-with-dumb-matter human labor is toast.
Then there’s the simpler service labor where you deal with other humans and need to model humans successfully. This is probably more difficult, AI-wise. Then again, these jobs are also less essential, people don’t seem to miss the telephone and elevator operators much. Human service personnel are an obvious status signal, but if the automated solution is 100x cheaper, actual human service personnel is going to end up a luxury good, and the nearby grocery store and fast food restaurant probably won’t be hiring human servers if they can make do with a clunky automated order and billing system. In addition to being more scarce, high-grade customer service jobs at status-conscious organizations are going to require more skills than a random grocery store cashier job.
This leaves us mostly with various types of abstract knowledge work, which are generally considered the types of job that require the most skill. Also, one dealing with people job sector where the above argument of replacing humans with automated systems that aren’t full AIs won’t work are various security professions. You can’t do away with modeling other humans very well and being very good at social situation awareness there.
On the other hand, the wealth said automated solutions will generate means that luxury goods are a lot more affordable.
Edit: The downside is that this means that most jobs will essentially consist of playing status games, I believe the common word for this is decadence.