

Eliezer Yudkowsky asks about automation - gwern
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/08/eliezer-yudkowsky-asks-about-automation.html

======
jerf
I'll cop to being a bit ideological here (mostly in the form of not fully
justifying the statements here), but I don't think automation is displacing
labor... _yet_. I think _this time_ that the explanation that we grossly
increased regulation, taxation and even more so the fear of _future_ taxation,
government spending and benefits, and just in general have significantly
raised the both the direct cost of hiring someone, and the reasonable
expectations of future cost of hiring someone is a sufficient explanation. I
find the idea that raising hiring costs can be done without resulting in
lowered hiring to be, shall we say, something that can only be rationalized by
a brain in "politics" mode, rather than "rational" mode.

(The test to this theory is that if we elect a regime that tones all of this
back, and the economy comes roaring back 1980s-style, then this theory was
essentially correct. If we do that, and it does _not_ come roaring back, then
my theory here is incorrect. I believe in treating politics scientifically, at
least, my personal politics. My highest allegiance is ultimately to what
works.)

However, lest this sound like a raw ideological rant, I do think it is near
inevitable that either by the 2020s or the 2030s at the latest, that this
automation displacement will be a real problem. We're looking at a world where
trucking is gone as a viable job. Where fast-food will probably be rapidly in
the throes of total roboticization. Where what farming jobs are still
available will be rapidly falling to yet more sophisticated robots that have
human-like dexterity and ability to detect ripeness. Taxis, gone, in favor of
heavily capital-based self-driving car rent pools. I think this whole
automation argument is premature _today_ , but it's going to be a real problem
in a relatively small number of election cycles. How is anyone who is not
suitable for college and has no useful artistic talent combined with enough
work ethic to use it profitably going to make it? I don't know.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>(The test to this theory is that if we elect a regime that tones all of this
back, and the economy comes roaring back 1980s-style, then this theory was
essentially correct. If we do that, and it does not come roaring back, then my
theory here is incorrect. I believe in treating politics scientifically, at
least, my personal politics. My highest allegiance is ultimately to what
works.)

Except that the economy only "roared back" in the 1980s for a narrow subset of
the population. If we're on a labor-replacement curve where rehiring and
growth are going to just keep getting less and less egalitarian, then _an
increasingly large majority_ of the population has the exact same problem as
if jobs were just disappearing outright. The "selectivity" only gives you
personally a fear more years to bury your head in the sand before _you 're_
the one standing in the dole queue.

(Of course, on Hacker News we're _even more goddamn privileged_ , since so
many of us are programmers doing AI-complete jobs.)

~~~
jerf
We'd kill today for any of the 1980s employment numbers during its height. A
generally middle-class lifestyle was still possible on relatively low skill
jobs, the idea that unions would price themselves out of work was still
laughably absurd, etc etc. I really don't think this attempt to project 2010
political rhetoric that far back in time is practical.

It may not have been entirely egalitarian, but that's a chimera anyhow, so I
would consider that a very weak criticism. Failing to achieve impossible goals
is not a useful criticism.

------
Futurebot
I recommend reading gwern's response, as it refutes the major question in
Eliezer's thesis:

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/9fw8)

When someone asks "what's different now?" the answer is sometimes "thresholds,
sweet spots, and tipping points." So often these things are overlooked in so
many areas of life; things don't always turn out the same way _because the
state of things (environment, economy, culture, laws, development, wathever)
is not the same._

------
marvin
So in other words, the theory is that unemployement due to increased
automation is still not a systemic problem - it will just take a number of
years (perhaps decades) for the economy to readjust. The somewhat obvious
corollary to this theory would be that in the meantime, you want to make sure
you're employed in the field which is causing the disruption. This is where
the fruits of the increased automation will be seen first.

I can accept this theory. Personally, I believe we'll eventually get to a
point where the economy will have to do a dramatic shift in the direction of
greater taxation of the richest and more leisure time for most people ("most
work is automated"), but we might not be close to that point yet. As of right
now, these two outcomes are indistinguishable.

~~~
bbddg
I think we'll eventually get to that point as well. We might even need some
form of base salary for everyone. But until we get to that point I think we're
gonna see a transition to more creative work. Design, art, music, movies, ect.
are all things that will probably take the longest for computers to get as
good at as humans. Even when computers do get better at creative work, I think
there will still be a large market for art created by humans and not some AI.

~~~
computer
Or do we just need fewer people in the world? Once much is automated, you no
longer need a lot of people to sustain the luxurious life styles of the rich
(with fewer people: of everybody).

~~~
queensnake
"Fewer people in the world" solves a lot of employment problems - we're a
dime-a-dozen right now.

------
alan-crowe
Here is a counter-example to the general validity of the "it was all right in
the past" argument.

Think about the iteration x_n+1 = a * x_n * (1 - x_n)

Usually one rushes to examine a > 2, where there are interesting phenomena of
bifurcation, period doubling, and chaos. Go back and look at a < 2\. The
iteration converges and defines a function f(a).

It is a rather strange function. For 0<a<1 f(a)=0. Then for 1<a<2, f(a)>0\.
Imagine if this were some kind of theory of technological unemployment, with
the parameter a being the level of technology. Technology grows and grows 0.2,
0.5, 0.9, without any problem of technological unemployment, but there is a
threshold at a=1, and boom! at a = 1.1 there is lots of technological
unemployment.

The most general argument, that technology didn't lead to unemployment in the
past, so it will not do so in future, is at heart a claim that functions like
f never arise naturally. But clearly they do!

On the other hand, showing that an argument is invalid doesn't help with
working out whether the conclusion is true. Indeed, the counter example also
serves as a challenge to believers in technological unemployment. There are
toy models in which things are zero for a good while, then a threshold is
crossed and things start to happen. Is there any model of technological
unemployment with a threshold arising naturally out of the dynamics?

------
uses
Judging by how often this meme gets upvoted on HN, a lot of entrepreneurial-
minded people are thinking about it.

My initial reaction, conditioned by years of reading startup news - and it's
probably the same reaction many of us have to these articles - is "how would
someone make money off this trend".

I'd like to see how someone can make money off reversing this trend of human
unemployment.

Meaning to say, can entrepreneurs create profitable businesses by finding
ways, or creating markets, for average humans to stay _genuinely_ productive
and _feel valuable and independent_? A world where those basic needs aren't
being met isn't going to be safe for anyone, except maybe those rich enough to
maintain their own (robotic?) security force.

We see a lot of activity in the "train to be a hacker" arena, but as has been
mentioned, probably not everyone who wants to make a living is fit for that
type of work.

There are comments in this thread about how it's better to be on the side
that's winning than the side that's losing, and there's a sense of
resignation.

------
sillysaurus2
The reason automation won't replace a human workforce is because it's far
easier to program a person than to program a computer.

There's a cost to automating any task: the time spent designing and testing
the system. So if it doesn't make economic sense to automate a task, then
employment will occur instead.

People are also conservative by nature, so society tends to shun radical new
ideas. That conservatism is why it's usually necessary to start your own
company in order to put such ideas into practice: almost no one believes it'll
work until it's shown to work, so it's rare for big companies to make huge
changes to their established business model.

Most new companies aren't huge successes on the scale of Google because
success is distributed according to a power law. There are only a few big
winners, and big winners are the only companies that can influence a whole
society. Therefore it seems mathematically unlikely that most jobs will
disappear to automation because most companies won't automate unless they're
economically forced to. So even if some work could theoretically be done by a
machine, most companies will choose to employ people right up until
competitive pressure forces them to embrace automation or go out of business.
And that competitive pressure is necessarily infrequent due to the rate of new
and hugely-successful companies being infrequent.

~~~
queensnake
> There's a cost to automating any task: the time spent designing and testing
> the system.

Good point, but, once something's automated, it's automated (and cheaper)
forever.

------
motters
If you want to take a more systematic approach then you could look at the
ratios of intellectual to manual labour over time (they're not strict
categories, but approximations would do) then you could also make an estimate
of the rates at which both kinds of labour are being replaced by automation.

In the limit everything turns into fixed capital, but that wouldn't work
unless the machines themselves become independent economic actors and displace
humans entirely.

