
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Labor Demand [pdf] - Dowwie
https://economics.mit.edu/files/16819
======
DebtDeflation
I think he's trying to make the argument that AI need not be limited to
automating tasks that directly replace human jobs but can also augment human
labor in a way that enables people to do new things that couldn't previously
be imagined. It's a variation on the old economics story of how the bulldozer
does not replace humans with shovels, it enables those humans to build
skyscrapers instead of being limited to building shacks.

He's making a valid argument in the abstract. However, like so many authors
from outside the field, his concept of AI is primarily informed by works like
The Singularity Is Near and Superintelligence, and completely disconnected
from the current state of the art and its development for the foreseeable
future.

~~~
cle
Can you elaborate on how his concept of AI is disconnected from reality?

~~~
Retric
Currently AI is based around optimizing something, but AGI has no specific
thing to optimize around. Human intelligence has a lot of issues with for
example mental heath because it’s not so easy to optimize for general
intelligence.

Fiction glosses over that stuff and generally paints AI as some extremely
rational extremely intelligent system. But, rationality may be more of a
social construct than we assume with many or even most AGI turning to criminal
or deviant behavior.

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geomark
Interesting paper. They say that markets fail to bring forward some types of
"reinstating" AI and they give three examples, education being one. But I
think otherwise when it comes to education AI. Lots of people are trying to
develop that kind of thing, an AI that assesses and tailors to individual
learners' needs. And I think so many are trying to do that because they
recognize what a huge market there will be if they can deliver results. I
think the market will yield that one. Then they mention healtcare, which is
such a quagmire of regulations and legislatively enabled special interest
groups that how can one call that a market. If it really was a market it would
already look very different than it does now and might even incentivize the
"right kind of AI".

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lucozade
I don't see where the assertion made in the abstract, that _current_ labor
demand stagnation and wealth inequality is due to AI, is evidenced in the body
of the paper. And I'd find it very surprising if it were true.

Anecdotally, I'd also argue against the thrust of the paper. New roles are
being created as a consequence of AI. One could argue that a significant
proportion of data science is a direct consequence, for example.

That's not to say that it won't be problematic. It's not at all obvious that
the occupants of jobs that will likely disappear through AI automation (call
centres and drivers in the immediate future) are the people that will be
employed in the new fields. However, this strikes me as a version of the
"Detroit problem" rather than something new.

~~~
subjectHarold
pg.3 - this section also references, amongst others, this paper by the same
authors:
[https://economics.mit.edu/files/15254](https://economics.mit.edu/files/15254)

~~~
crdoconnor
This paper fails to separate out the effect of disemployment effects caused by
offshoring, muted demand and robots.

I've seen this in a few other papers on this topic too (e.g. Ball state
university, 2017)

I'm also a bit suspicious of their rationale for not looking at German data
(German adoption of automation isn't much different, but the disemployment
levels are wildly different).

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pseudosimus
> Most AI researchers and economists studying its consequences view it as a
> way of automating yet more tasks. No doubt, AI has this capability, and most
> of its applications to date have been of this mold — e.g., image
> recognition, speech recognition, translation, accounting, recommendation
> systems, and customer support. But we do not need to accept that this as the
> primary way that AI can be and indeed ought to be used.

I don't agree with the premise that automation is necessarily "the wrong kind
of AI". Empowerment of workers as it is described in the article as a means of
creating "many new, high-productivity tasks for labor" mostly requires
automation of simpler routine tasks to be delegated. In that sense, I think
the main problem is making AI tools accessible to the same people whose task
is automated in the first place.

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m00dy
I know Daron from his famous book called 'Why nations fail'. He is an
exceptional writer has an exclusive background on economics. It looks like
he's also upgrading himself for this paradigm change and his paper looks very
interesting.

------
jackcosgrove
I am sympathetic for those who are already working and may be left stranded by
advances in AI. But I am skeptical of economic incentives which may lead to
the birth of too many people in an attempt to preserve the status quo. So
assume for now that AI will indeed lead to a decrease in the demand for human
labor. Eventually that decrease will lead to a decrease in the human
population.

Right now the explosion of the human population, which will peak sometime in
this century or the next before declining, is destroying earth's natural
habitats. I see the decrease in demand for human labor as a good thing in the
long run, although there are lots of unfortunate short-term effects which
hopefully we can mitigate.

The decrease in global human population is already being test-run in a few
countries, and the effects are mild so far: very low unemployment rates,
stable or declining property prices. One worry is paygo pension systems, but
that is a small price to pay for what we have to do in the end. I simply do
not understand the fear of a falling demand for labor and a falling
population.

~~~
XaoDaoCaoCao
"... although there are lots of unfortunate short-term effects which hopefully
we can mitigate."

You paper over a world of demons and degradation with such neutral words.
People want to live. People want to have children, see them grow, see them
thrive, and have children of their own.

Your neutrality only makes sense if the rewards of a new age were more equally
spread out. But both of the social, and hedonic, treadmills drive human
valuation insane if an elite is constantly pumping a vision and an aspiration
that is mocking when compared with ground level humanity.

What you are really saying is "I hope there is a massive war so excess human
capital stock is cleared and the relative valuation of each human is raised
for a generation or two."

What else is there for superfluous human capital to do but to shred itself
apart when even entry into the games of social mobility seem closed off?

To hammer the point, humans can be literally "richer" but much more miserable
than in a society where everyday cognition is less stressed by the need to
push forward in a rat race.

~~~
viscanti
> What you are really saying is "I hope there is a massive war so excess human
> capital stock is cleared and the relative valuation of each human is raised
> for a generation or two."

Your biases are showing or you're being hyperbolic to an unreasonable degree.
The person you're referencing simply says they believe there could be a future
where the world needs less Human labor and they hope we can mitigate the
problems that would come with shifting from a labor based economy to whatever
comes next. To assume they meant massive war instead of something like
Universal Basic Income is silly, they suggested no such thing.

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dannycastonguay
The McKinsey Global Institute has published/invested a lot on the topic and
have a good set of podcasts: [https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/overview/the-new-
world-of-work-...](https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/overview/the-new-world-of-
work-podcast)

------
ArtWomb
>>> recently, the US government has been more frugal in its support for
research and more timid in its determination to steer the direction of
technological change

Decoupling innovation from incentive. The danger being that hard tech funding
potentially forms a "black hole". With limitless funds poured in without any
further illumination into the problem.

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arnaudsm
Is unemployment the problem ? Or the redistribution system itself ?

It's sad that Universal Basic Income and 20h work weeks have been theorized
for decades, but never reached the political debate.

~~~
v_lisivka
See [https://phys.org/news/2019-02-universal-basic-income-
people-...](https://phys.org/news/2019-02-universal-basic-income-people-
happier.html) .

------
mlevental
is this completely speculative, contingent on the far fetched notion of AGI?
which sectors of the labor market have until now been appreciably affected by
ML? how many image labelers has ML put out of business? quite the contrary
right? lots of people in southeast asia now working in labeling sweatshops?

the only industries i see potentially affected (~10 years) is commercial
driving.

~~~
ivanhoe
And packaging/warehouses probably... but problem is that even this limited
change will have much wider effect on economy because for instance self-driven
trucks don't stop to eat in restaurants.

~~~
paganel
It will be a while until we'll get to the point of self-driving trucks, at
least by looking at my brother's job (he's a trucker who has been driving all
over Europe, from Spain up to Turkey).

For once, how do you deal with theft? Because an unattended truck stopped in
the middle of nowhere carrying stuff potentially worth tens if not hundreds of
thousands of euros is going to attract a lot of bad people. Second, how do you
deal with the myriad of specific unknown unknowns that happen daily in the
life of a truck driver? How would an AI truck navigate the unmapped dirt-roads
of Normandy in order to get to a potato field? (a job that my brother has had
to carry out last year). And there are other countless examples like this.

And I'd add a third option, that is that a truck driver is more than just a
plain driver, he has to deal with lots and lots of paper-work, especially in a
place like Europe which still has lots of borders in place (even the "soft"
borders are not that "soft" when you're carrying stuff around).

~~~
UnFleshedOne
How does a truck driver deals with theft currently? Are potential thieves
discouraged by presence of a human because penalties for harming humans are
higher than mere theft?

~~~
paganel
> How does a truck driver deals with theft currently

I can tell you what he did when some fuel thieves tried to steal some of the
fuel from his truck in no-where Bulgary: he took an iron bar from inside his
cabin and started chasing those thieves, accompanied by an Hungarian fellow
truck driver who had noticed the thieves in the first place.

> Are potential thieves discouraged by presence of a human because penalties
> for harming humans are higher than mere theft

Yeah, that’s how things stand right now in these parts of the world (I live in
Romania). An unattended house in a village will most certainly attract some
unwanted eyes, much more so compared to a house where people live day-to-day.
The same goes for trucks, or for anything with value, really.

------
nabnob
It's interesting to see a marxist/materialist analysis of labor and technology
in a mainstream academic paper.

Technology and automation increase the total productivity in an economy, but
only people who own these technologies benefit from the profits.

For example, say that Uber succeeds with creating self-driving cars in a
particular city (but Lyft does not). People in that city might benefit from
having cheaper Uber rides - but is that benefit offset by the number of people
who can no longer make a living driving for Uber? Let's say those drivers now
only drive for Lyft - in the economy of this city, these Lyft drivers now
compete with self-driving Ubers that have a much lower cost of operation
because Uber doesn't have to pay minimum wage.

The paper mentions a couple areas where AI would help increase productivity
and lower costs in a way that benefit working people as a whole - in
healthcare, education, and augmented reality. I think AI could also be very
useful for people who are disabled.

However, in a capitalist economy, the biggest incentive for creating AI is to
reduce labor costs - compare something like a warehouse worker, who must be
paid every week, with a warehouse AI robot. After the initial investment
developing this warehouse AI, the company that owns this warehouse AI has a
source of productive labor with a very low operational cost, much lower than
employing warehouse workers.

The incentive for developing AI that can replace physical human labor is huge
- and humanity as a whole could reap the benefits if we collectivized
owenership of these technologies, rather than allowing a few shareholders to
extract profit from their perpetual labor machines.

~~~
CryptoPunk
>>Technology and automation increase the total productivity in an economy, but
only people who own these technologies benefit from the profits.

That is not true. It lowers consumer costs, reducing living expenses and
making it easier for more people to come to own technology. Look at smart
phone ownership rates since 2007. It went from 40 million people owning one to
2.5 billion owning one today.

Thanks to the proliferation of automation, in the form of factories with
mechanized manufacturing processes, smart phones are much more affordable
today than in 2007.

A smart phone is a computer with a camera and microphone that enables and
automates many tasks, meaning the automation of smart phone manufacturing is
increasing the automation technology that people own.

>>However, in a capitalist economy, the biggest incentive for creating AI is
to reduce labor costs - compare something like a warehouse worker, who must be
paid every week, with a warehouse AI robot.

Lower labor costs per unit of output means more people can afford services and
products, including products that allow them to automate their own personal
production.

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pauljeba
Interesting topic, but I would have liked it more if only there was a single
trend graph.

