
The AI Unemployment Anti-FAQ (2013) - apsec112
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/
======
MustrumRidcully
The problem with this explaination is that it focuses on the technical aspect
and not on the economical one : how is the value created shared among the
people in the economy?

Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the
capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient capital :
with the new machine you can make 15 buns whereas you made less with the new
one. The employee is not paid more : the capitalist earns the cost saved.

Problem is that the capitalist doesn't spend 100% of his income : he will
consume some, invest some and save the rest in unproductive accounts or
stocks. He may produce 50% more hot dogs, but the demand will not follow.

Economics theory says that in this case prices may go down, but that would
mean a lowering of the capitalist's profits. He may in this case reduce
quality in order to lower the prices while preserving his margins.

Hence we see here 3 things : accumation of capital in a few hands, an era of
deflation and low yields due to low demand and high monetary stock needed to
be invested, and a reduction of quality of the product.

The last one is counter intuitive but may be seen in reality : buildings have
reached the point where it's commodity, replaced every 30 years, clothes are
worthless and the quality of food has been decreasing for the last 30 years
(at least in my country, France).

If we get richer everyday, why can't we make buildings that are aesthical,
solid and durable anymore? Why is quality food reserved only for rich people?

~~~
Pyxl101
> Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds
> the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient
> capital

I do not think that is true. The consumers of all goods and services also
benefit from technological progress, because they become cheaper, more widely
available, higher quality (different ways of saying the same thing).

Technological progress in the last ~200 years has radically improved the lives
of everyone, most significantly by freeing them from being subsistence farmers
and clothes-makers. Even though most people today do not own a lot of capital,
the cost of living well has come down so substantially that even poor people
today arguably have much better quality of life than historical kings. For
example, the majority of US households below the poverty line own an
automobile, have multiple televisions with cable TV, a refrigerator, air
conditioning, mobile phones, etc. [1] Despite owning no capital, the life of
even those in poverty is astronomically better off than 200 years ago.

Are you familiar with the trope where poor people from the distant past would
wear clothes until they literally turned into rags? The reason that happened
is because clothing was _ridiculously expensive_ compared to today. There was
an article about this on Hacker News about two years ago called "The $3500
Shirt - A History Lesson in Economics" [2]. To summarize, in the pre-
industrial age, a _single shirt_ required _so much labor_ that its cost was on
the order of $3500 - $4000 in modern dollars. Buying a single piece of
clothing could cost you multiple months' wages.

> Back in the pre-industrial days, the making of thread, cloth, and clothing
> ate up all the time that a woman wasn't spending cooking and cleaning and
> raising the children. That's why single women were called "spinsters" \-
> spinning thread was their primary job. "I somehow or somewhere got the
> idea," wrote Lucy Larcom in the 18th century, "when I was a small child,
> that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind." [2]

NPR also published an article on called "The History Of Light" [3] which
traces how much light (like candle light or lamp light) you could buy with a
day's worth of labor, at various points in history. In Babylonian times, your
day's wages could buy you 10 minutes worth of light. Light was therefore
relatively expensive and in-affordable. By the 1990s, a day's wages can buy
about 20,000 hours worth of light. Light is so cheap everyone has practically
unlimited amounts, which led to substantial changes across modern society.

Technological progress has drastically improved the lives of _everyone_. It
has not made everyone _rich_ , but those in poverty today are phenomenally
better off than at any time in the past.

[1]
[http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understandi...](http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understanding-
poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950)

[3] [http://www.npr.org/2014/05/02/309040279/in-4-000-years-
one-t...](http://www.npr.org/2014/05/02/309040279/in-4-000-years-one-thing-
hasnt-changed-it-takes-time-to-buy-light)

~~~
MustrumRidcully
This does not contradicts what I'm saying. Maybe you should mention that in
the US this prosperity is financed by debt.

~~~
dmoy
It contradicts one specific bit in your reasoning, namely the "[modern]
clothes are worthless" part.

I think the point that Pyxl101 was getting at is that your assertion that
modern clothes are of vastly inferior quality compared to older clothes is
maybe not well-founded.

Whether or not that's true, idk. Whether or not it's fair to pick out one
specific bit of your reasoning, idk.

If you have sources for any of your claims, then maybe we could continue
discussion.

~~~
MustrumRidcully
I was referring to fast-fashion brands such as Zara, H&M, etc... On a large
scale in the near past, you can see a drop of quality in the clothes sold on
the market. You may say that it is a conterpart of lower prices, but even
expensive clothes are degrading quality in order to preserve their margins.

------
espadrine
Some parts are good points, but some parts are strawman arguments.

If all jobs require four years of expertise to apply for, every time one job
gets mechanized, while employers switch over to automation, the employees made
redundant would need to sustain themselves while studying to gain the
expertise required for a job in a different field at the same salary.

We do have an increasing number of distinct jobs that each take many years of
study.

So far, I have felt confident in my ability to evolve in this job sector
because I am good at logic, which most of programming relates to. But if the
logic aspect of the job was trivialized to the point that anyone could tell a
machine what it must do, I might have to move towards a new field, and learn
to solve Schrödinger's equations and be deeply knowledgeable about quantum
mechanics to be able to program some future, more complex machine.

And yet even that is easier than having to go from driving trucks to managing
logistics.

~~~
crdoconnor
>If all jobs require four years of expertise to apply for, every time one job
gets mechanized, while employers switch over to automation, the employees made
redundant would need to sustain themselves while studying to gain the
expertise required for a job in a different field at the same salary.

>We do have an increasing number of distinct jobs that each take many years of
study.

Can you name say, three or four of these jobs which require four solid years
of study to master and have been automated away completely in the last 20
years?

Because this sounds kinda like bullshit to me.

~~~
tossacct339
The _if_ at the beginning should give away that this isn't hard data from
looking at our current reality, and more a thought experiment as we trend into
a future run by AI.

Things like accounting though; a friend of mine got his CPA. Basically
required to go through two years of college (he had a bachelors already, was
more of a top up in relevant areas), then prep for a shit ton of CPA testing,
work under some CPAs for at least a year, before getting the cert. And any
legit accounting firm here expects that.

That's not a trivial amount of effort.

But now Turbo Tax is walking me through taxes with a few clicks. Not
completely AI managed personal finance, but in 10 years?

What does my 32 year old friend do at 42? Become a programmer? How long will
that take him with no prior knowledge?

~~~
crdoconnor
Most of the accountants I know seem to spend a their time managing flows of
data, forecasting, interpreting legislation & making judgement calls on tax
matters. Things that would require "strong AI" that isn't anywhere to be seen
currently.

All the automation appears to have done (when it works, which it often
doesn't) is made the job less tedious than it was 10-20 years ago.

Automation CLEARLY hasn't reduced the demand for accountants, just the kind of
skills they have, since the numbers have been going up along with inflation:
[https://s3-ap-
southeast-2.amazonaws.com/oca/media/wysiwyg/20...](https://s3-ap-
southeast-2.amazonaws.com/oca/media/wysiwyg/2016/03/Why+%26+How/accountant-
job-outlook.gif)

I could see demand for accountants dry if up tax legislation suddenly became
radically simpler but that doesn't seem likely currently. If anything it's
growing more complex.

~~~
smallnamespace
Those sound like more senior accounting positions, which are _least_
vulnerable to automation.

The problem is at the bottom end of the ladder. As software gets better, the
entry-level positions will disappear. There will be no longer be a viable path
from fresh CPA graduate to 'making judgement calls on tax matters', and you'll
have a bunch of people who paid for a useless degree.

------
jstewartmobile
This is pretty bad.

He goes on for pages taking down his own straw men without even getting close
to the completely artificial "make-work" nature of most of our pre-AI economy.

We spend hundreds of billions above-and-beyond what could be strictly
considered defense. To this day, a great deal of our interior is subsidized
into farming, even though that level of effort has not been necessary for over
100 years. We are bankrupting ourselves on a health care system that costs
almost twice as much as its western european counterpart to produce uniformly
inferior outcomes, and contrary to the right-wing propaganda of torts-gone-
wild, much of this cost is pure admin/bureaucratic overhead. Don't even get me
started on the bureaucracy and make work of our various educational systems!
Municipalities across the nation throw millions of dollars, bad after good,
without claw-backs, to any pack of two-bit hucksters rolling into town with a
promise of jobs.

If you ask me, our present system is already under tremendous stress just
trying to find work for people. It doesn't even care that much if it is
productive--just keep those peasants busy so they won't get into trouble.

------
jawns
> for AI or productivity growth or increased trade or immigration or
> graduating students to increase unemployment, instead of resulting in more
> hot dogs and buns for everyone, you must be doing something terribly wrong
> that you weren't doing wrong in 1950.

Not necessarily. There's going to eventually come a point where any job that
can be performed by a low-skilled worker can be performed by automation.

The example used to combat this notion is that servants used to be more
plentiful than they are now, and low-skilled workers would be ripe for these
types of careers. Well, what did servants do? The same thing my robot vacuum
cleaner and dishwasher and microwave and Amazon Echo do now.

~~~
SilasX
Right. He doesn't seem to address how fully general AI can entirely obviate
(at least some class) of human labor. It's true that comparative advantage
means you can still profitably produce something when others can do it better.
But it doesn't guarantee that the (positive) market price will be enough to
pay for the worker's sustenance.

This isn't idle speculation: it's exactly what happened to horses once
technology obsoleted them, which caused them to die off except for some very
narrow cases (rough terrain) and vanity competitions. I know, "humans aren't
horses", but they're identical in terms of "what happens when technology can
replace all their economic use cases much more cheaply".

So yes: human workers would be able to sell computation services at the market
price of $0.50/PFLOPS-hour ... they just won't be able to feed themselves at
that wage. (This basic dynamic is arguably what's happening with disability
overclassification.)

With that said, Yudkowsky does make a strong case that AI unemployment is not
the problem _now_ and that we aren't in that world yet although IMHO he's
bought too uncritically into the mentality of "historically NGDP solved
everything, just like inflation always cured unemployment, so NGDP must be a
cureall".

~~~
apsec112
"This isn't idle speculation: it's exactly what happened to horses once
technology obsoleted them which caused them to die off except for some very
narrow cases and vanity competitions."

The article does explicitly address this. Do you think the response is
unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why?

"Q. How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of
laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses.
There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left
for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor
productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans
too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?

A. If we imagine that in future decades machine intelligence is slowly going
past the equivalent of IQ 70, 80, 90, eating up more and more jobs along the
way... then I defer to Robin Hanson's analysis in Economic Growth Given
Machine Intelligence, in which, as the abstract says, "Machines complement
human labor when [humans] become more productive at the jobs they perform, but
machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At ﬁrst,
complementary eﬀects dominate, and human wages rise with computer
productivity. But eventually substitution can dominate, making wages fall as
fast as computer prices now do."

Q. Could we already be in this substitution regime -

A. No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned. That
sentence in Hanson's paper has nothing to do with what is going on right now.
The future cannot be a cause of the past. (etc.)"

~~~
wvenable
> The future cannot be a cause of the past.

This is the failed assumption of the author; that computers need human
intelligence to displace jobs but they don't. They've been displacing jobs
since their invention and they're getting better at it every year. They don't
need to have an IQ of 70 or even an IQ at all.

~~~
crdoconnor
They created jobs too, a lot of which people assume are done by robots because
they're done in other countries.

Apple may only employ 100,000 people in the US but 1.3 million not-robots work
for the company that actually _makes_ those phones.

The argument that it automation is "naturally" creating fewer jobs that it
eliminates is refuted simply by looking overseas where all those new jobs
actually are.

Or are they just temporary?

Foxconn threatened _in 2011_ that within three years their 1.2 million strong
workforce would be largely replaced by robots:

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-
robot...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-
robots/foxconn-to-replace-human-workers-with-one-million-robots)

Here we are 5 years later with them employing another 100,000 warm bodies
while making identical threats.

~~~
potatolicious
I don't think the argument is that automation creates _no_ jobs, the argument
is that (at least in the current instance of automation) it creates
dramatically fewer jobs than it eliminates, and the balance is not being made
up for over time or in other industries, resulting in a substantial net
decrease in employment or wages.

Apple's 1.3 million-strong workforce is itself being automated out of
existence...
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966)

------
mey
As a counter point from today, not 2013
[http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/federal-report-ai-
co...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/federal-report-ai-could-
threaten-up-to-47-percent-of-jobs-in-two-decades/)

Edit: Salient point in article from one of the reports

"If labor productivity increases do not translate into wage increases, then
the large economic gains brought about by AI could accrue to a select few,"
the report says. "Instead of broadly shared prosperity for workers and
consumers, this might push towards reduced competition and increased wealth
inequality."

------
anton_tarasenko
It's funny that automation is under attack. Any conventional measure says that
productivity growth declines and the number of jobs grows.

First, the rise of unemployment is not supported by facts.

The widely cited unemployment rate went down to 4.6%.[1] That's the pre-crisis
level of the overheated 2008 economy. This reduction is costly, but
manageable.

Jobs disappear, but new ones get created. Nonfarm payrolls (aka "created
jobs") are well above zero.[2]

So what's the unemployment the media keep talking about?

The unemployment voter. 4.6% is greater than the winner's margin in any of the
recent presidential elections. It's a valuable asset to candidates and, thus,
a hot media topic.

The average voter actually gets better thanks to productivity gains, not
employment (which we can't reduce below 4% anyway). Productivity accounted for
2 percentage points of per-hour output growth.[3] It still contributes at
least 0.5 pp. This decline is the real problem: losing those 2% means being
poorer by 21.9% by the end of the decade.

But productivity doesn't vote, so this loss is going to happen.

[1]
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=4CaW](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=4CaW)

[2]
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?category_id=0&graph_id=12...](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?category_id=0&graph_id=12880)

[3] Gordon, “Perspectives on The Rise and Fall of American Growth.” p. 73.

~~~
Analemma_
Unemployment, in the sense of "who is looking for a job but can't find one" is
low, but the labor force participation rate is at 62.7%, close to a 30-year
low [0][1]. It seems to have bottomed-out in the last couple years and is
currently holding steady, but the current level is not encouraging. Note that
a low participation rate, as in, "people have just given up looking for a job
and resigned themselves to permanent unemployment because there are no
economic prospects in their vicinity" _does_ tally quite well with the stories
the media keeps talking.

Note also that median wages are not yet climbing after their recession
decline, despite the falling unemployment (classically, 5% is about the level
at which you expect wages to start rising), suggesting that a lot of the new
jobs being created are kind of shitty.

[0]
[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000)
[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-
rat...](http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rate-
september-2014-2014-10)

~~~
dragonwriter
> labor force participation rate is at 62.7%, close to a 30-year low. It seems
> to have bottomed-out in the last couple years and is currently holding
> steady

The LFPP is the share over the 16-and-over (with no upper age limit)
population that is in working or seeking work. The effect you describe is kind
of what you'd expect if a big demographic bulge had been passing into
retirement age, and but then largely completed that move.

~~~
Clubber
This is true, but I assume you are referring to the Baby Boomers. That
generation wasn't so much a bulge as it was a boom, meaning the boomers also
had at least as many children as they were (average 2 kids per couple). When
the next generation goes to retirement, it will be just as large.

I guess what I'm saying is if you believe the participation rate will increase
because a large group of people are retired and the next generation is
smaller, it isn't.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States)

~~~
dragonwriter
Actually, no, Gen X was a bust compared to the Boomer generation, followed by
another boom with the Millennials, which is why there is a transition directly
from Boomers to Millennials as the numerically dominant generation. Fertility
dropped starting in the late 50s and more sharply after 1964.

~~~
Clubber
Yes, you are correct, even accounting for immigration. GenX is of course
larger than the Greatest Generation and the Lost Generation that preceded the
boomers. We will get a little labor participation relief, but not much. GenX
is still significantly larger than the generations proceeding the boomers.

------
narrator
I think Jevon's Paradox[1] might apply to our relationship with AI. Jevon's
Paradox states that the more efficiently a resource is used, the more the
demand for it increases.

Thus with AI, the more efficiently human labor is used, the more demand for it
increases? Thus one person is able to accomplish far more with the aid of
robots, therefore the usefulness of labor increases. The out of work argument
only works if there is a fixed amount of production that needs to be done and
then there's no more to be done after that. However, if that were the case,
then we'd have all we would need and no one would have to work because working
more would just produce useless stuff that would not be used.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox)

~~~
AJ007
I think the question of what happens if humans have no jobs left to do is
extremely premature. Different stages of AI and automation are being conflated
in to the same arguments.

Rather, the issue that needs to be considered right now is what happens, in
the US, if there is a big disruption to a large group of jobs which have been
fairly stable for decades in a very short period of time? Specifically I am
thinking about accounting (imminent), lawyers (already happening), financial
advisors (happening), insurance agents (happening), real estate agents
(imminent), drivers (coming soon), travel agents (transition complete) and so
on.

Society as a whole gains benefits, if not direct access, but perhaps at a cost
of removing the socio-economic status of a large group of people. This, of
course, has happened many times before.

The greater AI-employment questions should be answered after we are pretty
sure humans are even going to survive 5, 10 decades from now.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Humans made it through Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, chattel slavery, WWII and
various flu epidemics. I doubt we'll end ourselves in 10 years.

"Removing socio-economic status" _SHOULD_ be a goal, to the extent that that
status comes from rents ( which it usually does ) . Status seeking is a huge
drain on us, and if production starts to go exponential, then the "economic"
part fades in importance.

------
noetic_techy
This article just leans on the same historic analogies that don't hold up to
scrutiny. These answers fall way short of the effect of automation and AI will
have. You are not replacing the job with another, you are replacing the human
brain!

I always refer people to this video to explain what it will be like, and it
debases almost all the points made in this FAQ:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

All these historical analogies fall flat on their face when it comes to an AI
being trained to do your exact job. This is not another case of farmers moving
to different higher skilled jobs. We are the employed horses of the 1800s
about to be made unemployable by the advent of cars.

~~~
apsec112
"We are the employed horses of the 1800s about to be made unemployable by the
advent of cars."

The article explicitly addresses that:

"Q. How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of
laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses.
There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left
for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor
productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans
too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?"

"A. If we imagine that in future decades machine intelligence is slowly going
past the equivalent of IQ 70, 80, 90, eating up more and more jobs along the
way... then I defer to Robin Hanson's analysis in Economic Growth Given
Machine Intelligence, in which, as the abstract says, "Machines complement
human labor when [humans] become more productive at the jobs they perform, but
machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At ﬁrst,
complementary eﬀects dominate, and human wages rise with computer
productivity. But eventually substitution can dominate, making wages fall as
fast as computer prices now do.""

"Q. Could we already be in this substitution regime -"

"A. No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned. That
sentence in Hanson's paper has nothing to do with what is going on right now.
The future cannot be a cause of the past. Future scenarios, even if they seem
to associate the concept of AI with the concept of unemployment, cannot
rationally increase the probability that current AI is responsible for current
unemployment."

"Q. But AI will inevitably become a problem later?"

"A. Not necessarily. We only get the Hansonian scenario if... (etc, etc.)"

------
runeks
Cached link, for those who can't reach the site (I get a 504):
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YP88PLE...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YP88PLEg9AEJ:lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

------
mehwoot
The entire argument is that "automation didnt get invented recently so how can
it be the cause of a recent phenomenon". This seems pretty weak to me. Maybe
automation has finally automated all (or enough) of the jobs that any human
can be trained to do with minimal education, so there aren't any jobs for a
percentage of the population anymore?

Assuming that people who lose their jobs to automation will find new ones
requires every person be able to perform some sort of new job. But with
automation doing most physical tasks and now some mental ones, is it so crazy
to think that the bar of competency required to do anything worth paying for
is being raised?

~~~
apsec112
The article addresses that explicitly. Some questions in the "Anti-FAQ" are:

"Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be done,
or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be even
more easily automated."

"What if what's changed is that we're out of new jobs to create? What if we've
already got enough hot dog buns, for every kind of hot dog bun there is in the
labor market, and now AI is automating away the last jobs and the last of the
demand for labor?"

"How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers
permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are
a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses
to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity
dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI
advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?"

and then there are responses to each of these.

Do you think the responses are unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why
in some more detail?

~~~
mehwoot
_Do you think the responses are unsatisfying_

Their response to

 _" Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be
done, or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be
even more easily automated."_

Is

 _If the problem is automation, and we didn 't experience any sudden leap in
automation in 2008, then why can't people get back at least the jobs they used
to have..._

Seems there is a pretty easy explanation- recessions and growth are a feature
of our financial system, the noise of which dominates the underlying trend. So
yes, people lost their jobs in the recession, but jobs have been recovered
since the recession too- just not as many, which is what you would expect from
a gradual trend.

Their responses to the horses question, which I think is a very good question,
is merely

 _No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned._ and then
no mention of the reasons, for which I certainly don't see a dozen.

------
runin2k1
This is from 2013 so in terms of recovery years it is a bit dated...

But the first three questions all posit that unemployment was rising, and that
reemployment was not occurring which is(and was) belied by this graph
-[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000)

~~~
mikepurvis
Does that one graph really tell the whole story? Things not captured here
include:

\- underemployment, like law school grads working in book stores because no
lawyer needs a clerk now that computers do the research for them.

\- contractors vs. part time vs. full time. I've seen it asserted that we've
lost a lot of salaried positions in favour of contractor arrangements (gig
economy) or shift work.

\- people who've transitioned from unemployed to being on long-term Medicaid—I
don't believe they count as "unemployed", but various mental illness issues
can be caused or made worse by being long-term out of work.

------
AnthonyMouse
People have too much debt, housing costs are too high, and poorly designed
social assistance programs discourages work.

Suppose Bob is unemployed and lives with his parents in the suburbs. Bob
collects unemployment, is eligible for several social programs and has a
deferral on his student loans.

Bob could get hired at $50,000/year in New York City in a second. But housing
within any reasonable distance is $2000/month, taking the job would require
Bob to start making $1000/month payments on his student loans and cause him to
lose $15,000/year in unemployment and other benefits.

Which means Bob can't take that job. He would need a job that pays more than
that, which isn't available. So Bob remains unemployed.

Construct a lot of new housing, replace existing social assistance with a UBI,
and introduce moderate inflation to reduce the real value of existing debts
and maintain the nominal value of housing while reducing its real cost, and
we've solved a big part of it.

~~~
witty_username
Why should debt be forgiven via inflation? Also, this causes interest rates to
go up as lenders will expect another surprise inflation.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Why should debt be forgiven via inflation?

Because the debt was induced by harmful interest rate subsidies that bring
about a highly undesirable wealth transfer from government (i.e. all
taxpayers) to banks, distort markets like housing and education by inflating
their prices relative to the rest of the economy (including wages), and cause
people to take on excessive debt because people care about monthly payments
rather than principal amounts and subsidized interest causes the borrowable
principal amount to explode at a given monthly payment, since government-
subsidized interest then constitutes a large fraction of the payment and is at
no risk of default so lenders are willing to make excessively large loans. See
also housing crisis.

Undoing the damage done by those subsidies requires their inverse, which is
inflation. It transfers wealth from banks to the government to the benefit of
taxpayers, allows the real price of housing and education to fall to where
they should be without shocking the market by reducing their nominal prices,
and allows people to pay off the unwisely-induced existing debt principal with
lower value currency.

> Also, this causes interest rates to go up as lenders will expect another
> surprise inflation.

And then people won't borrow as much principal in the future, so paying down
principal will be easier at prevailing wages, which is the desired result.

You're also assuming lenders have control over that given the way the
government creating money affects interest rates. When the government creates
money it has the effect of reducing the amount of government debt in
circulation (they have money, they don't need to issue bonds), which reduces
interest rates on bonds and forces would-be bond purchasers into buying some
other debt, which increases competition for lending and reduces interest rates
in other lending markets too.

~~~
witty_username
Interest rate subsidies help students and banks. Also, where's the money
coming from? From lenders, i.e. people's bank accounts.

> It transfers wealth from banks to the government to the benefit of taxpayers

No, it transfers money from lenders (like you and me who have bank accounts)
to borrowers. People own banks and lend money to banks. Banks don't have any
magical stash of money. If banks lose wealth, then I lose wealth (my bank
account earns less real interest).

> You're also assuming lenders have control over that given the way the
> government creating money affects interest rates. When the government
> creates money it has the effect of reducing the amount of government debt in
> circulation (they have money, they don't need to issue bonds), which reduces
> interest rates on bonds and forces would-be bond purchasers into buying some
> other debt, which increases competition for lending and reduces interest
> rates in other lending markets too.

Yes, the government will loan less, but interest rates will go up (right now
they're a low 2-3%) to adjust for the risk of inflation which cancels that
affect. Lenders have control over interest rates obviously; only they buy
bonds. Infact, if the inflation is a surprise, then lenders will be risk-
averse causing drastic increase in interest rates (they'll be thinking "what
if the government inflates money even more next time in a surprise?"). Lenders
like stability.

------
Analemma_
Eliezer really needs to learn how to stick to his areas of expertise. When he
talks about decision theory or the mathematical formalisms of AI it can be
spectacular; when he wades into economics or quantum mechanics it's frequently
embarrassing.

~~~
notahacker
As someone who is degree-qualified in the area of economics, I have to say I
prefer this facetious and reasonably well-informed takedown of bad pop
economics (and his HP fanfic!) to his utterly serious entertainment of
ridiculous ideas like Roko's Basilisk in the area of expertise he's dedicating
his life to...

(Rothbard's law: people tend to specialize in what they are _worst_ at [also
applied to Rothbard])

~~~
apsec112
Eliezer never took Roko's Basilisk seriously; unfortunately, there's a great
deal of misinformation about this online. Here's what happened:

"What I considered to be obvious common sense was that you did not spread
potential information hazards because it would be a crappy thing to do to
someone. The problem wasn't Roko's post itself, about CEV, being correct. That
thought never occurred to me for a fraction of a second. The problem was that
Roko's post seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards,
all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they
presented no potential benefit to anyone. They were pure infohazards. The only
thing they could possibly do was be detrimental to brains that represented
them, if one of the possible variants of the idea turned out to be repairable
of the obvious objections and defeaters. So I deleted it, because on my
worldview there was no reason not to. I did not want LessWrong.com to be a
place where people were exposed to potential infohazards because somebody like
me thought they were being clever about reasoning that they probably weren't
infohazards. On my view, the key fact about Roko's Basilisk wasn't that it was
plausible, or implausible, the key fact was just that shoving it in people's
faces seemed like a fundamentally crap thing to do because there was no
upside.

Again, I deleted that post not because I had decided that this thing probably
presented a real hazard, but because I was afraid some unknown variant of it
might, and because it seemed to me like the obvious General Procedure For
Handling Things That Might Be Infohazards said you shouldn't post them to the
Internet. If you look at the original SF story where the term "basilisk" was
coined, it's about a mind-erasing image and the.... trolls, I guess, though
the story predates modern trolling, who go around spraypainting the Basilisk
on walls, using computer guidance so they don't know themselves what the
Basilisk looks like, in hopes the Basilisk will erase some innocent mind, for
the lulz. These people are the villains of the story. The good guys, of
course, try to erase the Basilisk from the walls. Painting Basilisks on walls
is a crap thing to do. Since there was no upside to being exposed to Roko's
Basilisk, its probability of being true was irrelevant. And Roko himself had
thought this was a thing that might actually work. So I yelled at Roko for
violating basic sanity about infohazards for stupid reasons, and then deleted
the post. He, by his own lights, had violated the obvious code for the ethical
handling of infohazards, conditional on such things existing, and I was
indignant about this."
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_ba...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_basilisk/cjjbqqo/?context=3)

~~~
jonathankoren
I fail to see the misinformation. If he believes in "infohazards" and takes
his "timeless decision theory" seriously, then he took this seriously. In fact
he took it seriously enough to delete the thread. Nothing he said contradicts
these facts.

I'll say it. The guy is a quack. A quack in the robes mathematics rather than
medicine, but a quack all the same. No one in philosophy or in mathematics
takes these ideas seriously. He never puts these ideas up to peer review, but
rather sticks them on his blog where a bunch of people that think of
themselves as "smart" and "deep thinkers" read them and nod in agreement. Yet
in the end all of these are very _very_ fringe ideas with no evidence either
logically or physically to support them.

In the end, Roko's Basilisk, and these ideas of the some potentially
benevolent or malevolent AI that controls the the simulation in which we live
are indistinguishable from God and his ideas about them are indistinguishable
from the same flawed centuries old Pascal's Wager complete with the exact same
logical flaws pointed out centuries ago.

------
st3v3r
I think this ignores the most important question of all: Given the rises in
automation, how do we avoid adding up in a Hunger Games-esque future?

And before anyone says UBI: Do you honestly think that Paul Ryan, who is
planning on gutting Social Security and Medicare right this second, would go
along with that? UBI is going to be off the table for at least 20 years.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I think this ignores the most important question of all: Given the rises in
> automation, how do we avoid adding up in a Hunger Games-esque future?

Unconditional Basic Income, or something very similar.

> And before anyone says UBI: Do you honestly think that Paul Ryan, who is
> planning on gutting Social Security and Medicare right this second, would go
> along with that?

Probably not. Paul Ryan remaining in a position to exert decisive control over
policy and avoiding a dystopian future may well be mutually exclusive options.

> UBI is going to be off the table for at least 20 years.

Congressional and Presidential elections are much more frequent than that and
can result in sudden and dramatic reversal of policy direction, especially in
the face of widespread economic concerns.

Sufficient economic pain, historically and globally speaking, has also been
known to provoke large and fundamental political change outside of normal
electoral timelines and succession processes.

~~~
jonathankoren
>Congressional and Presidential elections are much more frequent than that and
can result in sudden and dramatic reversal of policy direction, especially in
the face of widespread economic concerns.

The frequency of elections is immaterial in the era of uber-gerrymandering and
population migration. Censuses are every 10 years.

------
george_ciobanu
It's more than just technology: anxiety went up substantially from a mix of

-social status awareness (Facebook and other social networks allow me to constantly compare myself to others)

-for older white Americans the world seems to be under a liberal assault: gay rights, genderless bathrooms, black lives matter, muslim immigrants, a black president, microaggressions etc. All these changes came in relatively rapid succession and the old guard felt it strongly. I'm a liberal man in NYC but I also feel stressed when talking with people: what if I accidentally say something inappropriate, am considered racist or sexist despite my best intentions, wtf is a microaggression etc. I'm for these changes but I think they came in too fast.

-world news are now delivered as they happen, way more effectively than in the past; it's well-known that reading news causes anxiety -the US Republicans deliberately misinformed and angered their constituency in their quest to fight Obama. They essentially subverted democracy by blindly resisting the other side and not engaging in any dialogue whatsoever. To justify their position and keep their constituency's support, they had to misinform and anger them.

The world is in a much better spot than ever before, but our awareness to
every problem around the globe has also heightened. We are also just
developing the right mechanisms to defend from information manipulation - fake
news, clickbait and super-biased reporting (on both sides) erode trust - it's
hard to know what is true and what not anymore, and some people don't even
try, they just react (see pizzagate).

I also disagree with the author - a lot of jobs disappeared and this time they
are not coming back in the form of other jobs. Through automation and
information technologies one person can do the work many many others used to
before. Revenue-per-employee increased dramatically because of this very
reason, in all areas from finance to tech and services. Many jobs that were be
doable with a high-school degree disappeared and they are not coming back.

[http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving-
assur...](http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving-assurance-
makes-your-facebook-use-problematic-uncontrolled-356646)

[http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-
middl...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-
is-losing-ground/)

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Gad, I wish social status would just die already.

To the extent that they are not bubbly[1], trades are still a solid way to
make money and don't require classroom training beyond high school. Sure, your
knees might be shot when you're... forty, but still...

[1] thinking oilfield here...

------
marcosdumay
Although the article has little evidence substantiating it, and many, many
argument flaws, I do think its main hypothesis is correct, and the current
unemployment is not caused mainly by automation.

If you look at the graphs at [0], productivity is falling, not increasing, as
is capital. It looks much more that the world is getting old-fashioned poor
than automation pushing people out of work.

EDIT: Forgot the link

0: [https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/11/17/there-are-two-
produ...](https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/11/17/there-are-two-productivity-
puzzles/)

------
blazespin
The jobs are coming back, sure, but they're all bullsh*t jobs. And more and
more we're all at the beck and call of computers. Seriously? Just so we can
say we have a job?

------
michaelchisari
There may be new jobs that come around, but new jobs require retraining. And
what if we automate those new jobs faster than people can be reasonably
expected to retrain for them?

------
ikeboy
Apparently LW got the hug of death.

[https://archive.fo/8ew3S](https://archive.fo/8ew3S) has an archive.

------
transfire
I would laugh, but I have a robot that does that for me now.

------
fleevy
The problem with the economy is Obamacare. Once that's gone, the jobs will
come pouring back. Easy

------
bikamonki
Anecdata: we are a 4 head-count startup. One of our heads is leaving soon. I
thought about the impact on operations and realized most of his tasks can be
automated and the rest we can absorb without overloading. Automation and AI
are surely a main factor in some jobs never coming back. High productivity
(also thanks to cheaper/better/faster IT-related services) is also a factor.

------
neonbat
space bat real talk. people will only be paid if they can give something
valuable in return. if people dont have something valuable to offer or they
have something of low value, they will not be hired or they will be hired for
very little. so if people cant get jobs or become chronically underemployed
the question is 'why dont people have anything valuable to offer?' there are
probably many reasons, education, technology substitution for human capital,
'automation' though i dont get accused of being a luddite (which i am not) or
sharing their fallacies (which i do not). automation will not take away
someones job irreplaceably until that automation is 'strong' enough to do lots
of stuff. its getting there and it may be contributing to our problems. but
its not a reason to panic, if less people can have jobs thats actually a very
good thing, we can spend time on other cool stuff. its a reason to restructure
our society a little. things that work often work for a period, very few
things/processes continue or work indefinitely in the universe. so we could
maybe rethink how our society distributes wealth, ownership, etc. how do we
get people in a position to offer something valuable? economists spouting
dogma and ignoring real problems is pretty dysfunctional. they teach this sort
of junk in schools too. its important to fall back on what we know but its
also important to re examine what we think we know. its important to think in
simple principles when reexamining. gorund-up. economists/many scientists dont
like doing that for more reasons that id like to get into here. it falls to
people with common sense frankly, which i find lacking on blogs like this.

