We live at a time where a company like Amazon with has massive AI capacity lets humans watch football games to update scores for Alexa. Automating tasks with AI is in many cases more expensive than simply paying a few people minimum wage to do the task.
If you believe that it’s possible to build machine that replaces so much humans within the next decades, why is capital so cheap at the moment?
It feels to me like automation of robots is a topic because we say so little change in the last two decades compared to the decades before that even the small change that’s there gets seem as upsetting our status quo.
Maybe it’s like public perception of crime where as crime goes down people felt over the last decades that crime rose.
Yes, the piece is conditional; the “47% of jobs in the next few decades” estimate, which spurred me to write this, is more or less naive top-down extrapolation.
But many of the same considerations apply if long-term labour trends continue:
Anyway other powerful forces (e.g. global outsourcing, the decay of unions) besides robots have led to the 40-year decline in labour’s share of global income. But those will produce similar dystopian problems if the trend continues, and there’s enough of a risk of the above scenario for us to put a lot of thought and effort into protecting people, either way.
The IMF data suggests that labors share was lower in 2015 than 40 years ago but it was higher than 10 years ago. The last ten years correspond to the time with extremely low interest rates.
Interest rates are still extremely low. Currently, there don’t seem to be many option to effectively invest capital. The economic data suggests that we aren’t living in a world where it’s easy to invest capital into automation in a way that produces a good return on that capital but we are rather living in the great stagnation.
Automating tasks with AI is most effective when a lot of labor can be saved. Given the number of football games, you would only need a couple of full time workers at most to update the scores. Until AI improvements require less expert time to automate jobs, it isn’t economic to replace jobs that so few people do.
It’s not something where Amazon would have to write an AI denovo. There are vendors on the market who provide API where you get football results if you are willing to pay for it.
We live at a time where a company like Amazon with has massive AI capacity lets humans watch football games to update scores for Alexa. Automating tasks with AI is in many cases more expensive than simply paying a few people minimum wage to do the task.
If you believe that it’s possible to build machine that replaces so much humans within the next decades, why is capital so cheap at the moment?
Why is the rate of job creation and job destruction falling in the US?
It feels to me like automation of robots is a topic because we say so little change in the last two decades compared to the decades before that even the small change that’s there gets seem as upsetting our status quo.
Maybe it’s like public perception of crime where as crime goes down people felt over the last decades that crime rose.
In general the complexity of a task usually looks much lower from the outside than from the inside and that matters for automation. Or as Xkcd says it “Why does <your field? need a whole journal, anyway?”.
Yes, the piece is conditional; the “47% of jobs in the next few decades” estimate, which spurred me to write this, is more or less naive top-down extrapolation.
But many of the same considerations apply if long-term labour trends continue:
The IMF data suggests that labors share was lower in 2015 than 40 years ago but it was higher than 10 years ago. The last ten years correspond to the time with extremely low interest rates.
Interest rates are still extremely low. Currently, there don’t seem to be many option to effectively invest capital. The economic data suggests that we aren’t living in a world where it’s easy to invest capital into automation in a way that produces a good return on that capital but we are rather living in the great stagnation.
Automating tasks with AI is most effective when a lot of labor can be saved. Given the number of football games, you would only need a couple of full time workers at most to update the scores. Until AI improvements require less expert time to automate jobs, it isn’t economic to replace jobs that so few people do.
It’s not something where Amazon would have to write an AI denovo. There are vendors on the market who provide API where you get football results if you are willing to pay for it.