No obviously not. Lots of machines replace workers.
Why would taking scarce resources away from productive businesses and allocating to unproductive things be good for anyone other than government bureaucrats?
If full AGI dreams are achieved and 80% of jobs disappear, leading to mass unemployment, then we need to do something to support the huge numbers of people that no longer have any income. Taxes to support a UBI program seem one solution. Or maybe the labor market can shift to find opportunities for humans that AI can't replace and we'd avoid the mass unemployment.
But feels like we're a long way from that right now.
If you're so sure that new jobs will appear (and -- critical omission -- that they will be any good), surely you would be willing to ask the capital interests for whom these arguments are self-serving to put money where their mouth is and backstop a guarantee?
I suspect that the reason might be that the Industrial Revolution happened over 200 years ago. That provides a lot of time for 97% of jobs to progressively disappear without disrupting society too much (except for all the revolutions and world wars). That would be quite different than if AI caused any significant percentage of jobs to disappear in a much shorter period of time.
This analogy happens a lot, and it might be true, but it's not clear to me that they're comparable.
The Industrial Revolution mostly ate mechanical labor and created more 'thinking' and knowledge worker jobs closer to the top of the stack. AGI goes after the information / decision-making layer itself. And it's unclear how much remains once those are automated.
I consider the Industrial Revolution to still be ongoing, since jobs have constantly been automated away by technology for 250 years. Some like to split that time into separate eras. In that paradigm we're now in the Fifth Industrial Revolution (Industry 5.0).
Whatever you call it, jobs keep getting "stolen" by technology, and yet employment rates stay high and average living standard keeps rising.
I'm genuinely fascinated by how this keeps happening, decade after decade, and yet most people are convinced the opposite is happening. I'm old enough to remember this exact discussion from 50 years ago.
We all see and interact with jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, and many of us work those jobs. And yet... this knowledge is somehow compartmentalized away from future expectations.
If you want a theoretical framework for why this keeps happening, my thought is that unemployed humans are an unused resource. And capitalism is really good at finding ways to use those.
I have two ways to think of it, and both give similar numbers.
A: 250 years ago, 98% worked in farming. Today it's 2% (who produce more food!). Assume that the other 2% are at least twice as productive, and you get that 3% of the population now produces as much as 100% back then.
B: It's hard to directly estimate how much GDP per person has increased in 250 years. But the typical number economists get when trying is that it's 30x as big. Which means 3.3% of today's workforce produces as much (per person) as the whole workforce did back then.
Both A and B can be critiqued, but the precise numbers don't really matter for the argument.
According to the economic notion of value, which is unique among definitions of "value" in being wealth-weighted, enshrining "mega gainz in brokerage accounts" as the ultimate social good while shrugging its shoulders at the plight of the ahem low-weight individual.
Value isn’t something society measures or adds up by people’s bank balances; it’s just how much each individual personally wants something, and markets show this only through voluntary choices, not by declaring rich people’s gains more important than poor people’s lives.
If you have lots of money, you can spend lots of money. If you have no money, you can spend no money. Your demand is indeed wealth-weighted in the objective function of the market.
That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that rich people have most of the money and rich people care mostly about one thing: getting paid for being rich. That happens when assets go up.
Assets have a counterparty, so policy that pumps assets can do so by encouring genuine growth (difficult, unreliable) or by whacking the counterparty over the head (easy, reliable). Anti-consumer and anti-labor policy makes stocks go up, for example. NIMY policies make real-estate go up. Selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China makes bonds go up.
Once rich people get all of the money (US gini is 0.83, are we there yet?) the objective function of the entire system shifts away from satisfying the needs of people and towards whacking counterparties of assets over the head. It's an ugly thing to see, once you know how to see it.
> bofadeez
Your name and arguments are both young-libertarian coded so let me take a shot in the dark at a personal appeal: the reason why houses are so damn difficult for you to afford is that you are the counterparty.
Only if it’s not an electric car. Electric cars need to start paying somehow, too. I’m open to many options, especially including weight * miles driven or similar.
In most states electric cars are paying via registration surcharges. For me, it’s a lot more than I would have paid via WA state’s gas tax since I don’t drive much. Miles driven would work out better.
I mean this is how all welfare works, isn't it? If as a society we think it's important to reallocate some resources so that people can get food in bread lines, we generally do that.
Why would taking scarce resources away from productive businesses and allocating to unproductive things be good for anyone other than government bureaucrats?