Apr 10, 2023·edited Apr 10, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
When Ford made cars cheaper to make, that meant more, better-paying car jobs, not fewer. Why? Because back then, lots more people wanted cars than could afford them.
I distrust any "AI economics" that doesn't look at demand elasticity. If it's a service that people would like to have a lot more of, then AI should not reduce but increase employment and wages.
Most people not named Buffett or Musk would like a lot more on-call therapy, personal medicine, secretarial help, legal expertise, custom programming, and favorite genre fiction than they currently get. If AI partially automates those industries, it ought to mean not less but more worker dollars, and likely more and better (if different) jobs.
Which workers? Good question, the winners could easily be different than the current workers. But it should still be a workers' win, unlike the 80s or 90s.
Could AI *fully* automate those and other industries, laying off everybody? Sure; just look at what happened to all America's horses after cars got cheap. But when you're talking "humans, as economically useful as horses," that's no longer a story about scarcity and economics. Full automation of cognitive work would be a society whose big problem for a generation wasn't scarcity allocation by economics, but wealth allocation by politics.
So if it's partial automation, we should look at elasticity and see how many jobs will benefit, not just suffer.
And if it's full automation, humans-as-horses for medical and legal and writing and programming? Well, we should admit that's such a different future that it should be an argument about pensions or UBI, not about "keeping good jobs."
"Full automation of cognitive work would be a society whose big problem for a generation wasn't scarcity allocation by economics, but wealth allocation by politics."
This is a wonderful point that gets missed frequently. The problem isn't AI rendering humans "as useful as horses". That's going to happen to some extent. The problem is 1) how to distribute the financial and productive windfall that AI / robotics will create "fairly", and 2) how to decouple meaning (telos) from economic utility, mostly for men.
The first of these is a political problem: what is "fair" distribution in a society in which most human needs can be met without human labor. That's a hard one, to be clear, but solvable, and hopefully without resorting to any of the more extreme -isms of the Left or Right.
The second is basically a spiritual problem, and will likely drive some kind of religious revival (maybe Christian, maybe Aristotelian, maybe something else) lest we all become like the pampered people in the movie Wall-E.
I appreciated this perspective so much! I was rereading Bertrand Russel’s In Praise of Idleness the other day - I remember that being the first time I read a ‘modern’ writer speaking about the value of leisure in the context of our society’s erroneous focus on the virtue of labor, and I wanted to revisit it for fun.
Assuming AI delivers on its promise, I hope that we are smart enough to shift a sense of worth and value system away from labor and consumption as you mention- and I wonder how this will converge with the movement to address global warming by shifting/reducing consumption. I’ve read a few opinion pieces in the last few months (in major newspapers) about over-consumption as it relates to global warming, and how we are going to have to re-think how we define success (ie time-rich and how we spend our time vs money-rich and how we spend our money.)
I’ll keep my eyes peeled for signs this is happening. If Gen Z is any tell, at the very least we’re taking the first step of devaluing climbing the ladder simply because it’s there for the climbing. That isn’t to say they don’t aspire for growth at work- it just seems like they equally value growth through experiences outside of work more than my (older) Millennial peers did at that age.
I believe proponents of the weird marriage of of techno-environmentalism, with its millions of solar panels and electric cars and house-sized batteries and electronic CO2 scrubbers, have largely abandoned any actual pursuit of ending global warming. This is a Machine solution to a Machine created problem. And considering the power needs of an AI / robotic future, our power consumption will increase not decrease.
Does Gen Z actually have a desire to "live with less"? Or do they just want a high standard of living without having to work? (I'd like that too -- whicih is why the AI/robotic future is interesting.) But to achieve that, our power and resource consumption will continue increasing, particularly as the other 80% of the world's people rise to our standard of living, which is the only fair outcome lest we be seen as "pulling up the ladder behind us." We still want a bunch of "stuff". We just want robots to make it for us.
in that sense, I don't see AI / robotics as an environmental solution. I believe that solution will come as it always has: the discovery of a new energy source. Nuclear fission could tide us over for a long while. I believe the next source will be nuclear fusion, but the joke about fusion power -- "it's 10 years away... and always will be" -- has certainly been born out in my lifetime, so perhaps I'm wrong.
There do appear to be lots of things converging in the 21st century: robotics, chemical fertilizers, AI, declining birthrates, energy technology... these could easily conspire to produce a less populated but energy (and productivity) denser world in the next couple of centuries. They could also result in global warfare as we fight over increasingly scarce resources, but I try to be an optimist. (The most optimistic scenario for me is that the Lord returns and "rolls up the world like a scroll", but no one knows when that will happen, so I choose to plan for long-term human flourishing.)
I think this enthusiasm for AI eventually substituting for all human labor misses the point that it would also substitute for all of the activities we think of as uniquely meaningful & fun. It’s not just the “male laborer” with a Protestant work ethic drilled into him whose sense of self-worth is at stake here: all of our science, culture & the arts – the “higher endeavors” that AI proponents have long billed as finally becoming crafts of the masses – will similarly be automated away such that the best-case scenario (barring any apocalypses) sees us reduced to animals in a zoo, WALL-E style. Yet part of what makes these activities valuable is the shared experience of purposeful pursuit & connection with real people and the world; if AI ends up doing everything better than humans, culture ceases to be a participatory process and we become fully passive consumers separated from one another. Why pay for this Substack when NoahGPT could give me similar insights in a way personally tailored to me & for much cheaper? In such a scenario, AI would ultimately crush, not lift up, the human spirit.
"if AI ends up doing everything better than humans, culture ceases to be a participatory process and we become fully passive consumers separated from one another"
the idea that culture is an intrinsically productive instead of consumptive process is quote perceptive, but I think that's a very big if.
The core of industrialism, whatever mix of state worker or capitalist owned, is the separation of ourselves as producers from ourselves as consumers, mediated by the magic of money or slightly less magical free state services. with the division of labour we progressively produce less and less of what we consume - moving from food (the industrialisation then automation of agriculture) to goods ( the industrialisation then automation of manufacturing) then services (industrialisation then automation). So we end up producing nothing we consume- our music, cleanliness, cooking, child care - think Louis XVI for all -. Except nearly everybody works - in some fragment of our lives. Nails, toes, knees, sushi, child psychology, car navigation, punditry. Whether new jobs come into being and existing jobs are augmented or gradually substituted by generalAi/ automation - as Noah elegantly put it substituting 50% of all jobs or augmenting 50% of my job - is too binary when it could be both. The lump of labour fallacy is not a law of economics for all time, it’s a useful insight about past errors of analysis. It’s tricky to measure but if productivity increases consistently outstrip GDP increases, then we know more substitution than augmentation is taking place. That has not happened in the past, as productivity gains have driven GDP gains big enough for both per capita and labour force size gains. but the past is not necessarily a robust indicator for the impact of AI on productivity, GDP and the size of the labour force. Whether the people of the rich and middle income world use GDP growth to free our time to spend less time producing for other people and consuming what others have produced, to decarbonise and live more, the other sorts of growth, of our gardens and friendships, singing in choirs and dancing ceilidhs, more swimming in the sea and rivers and wandering about more, or more time delivering food and massages, Amazon parcels of air fryers and, fresheners, and then more time on our arses watching computer generated box sets, or shagging sex bots - that’s our political and cultural challenge. Whether we find a way to democratise our economies and free ourselves from the division of production and consumption in the most meaningful aspects of our lives.
I think the problem I’m pointing to here has less to do with the division between production and consumption itself and more with the potential of AI to outdo us in areas where we consider our “production” to be uniquely meaningful. The original utopian vision of automation reducing drudgery and freeing everyone up to contribute & create in ways they find truly meaningful is not quite the same as the vision of a society of pure leisure, where no human can hope to compete with AI in any meaningfully productive way. It’s perhaps Star Trek vs. The Expanse, where in the latter most humans are just superfluously subsisting on UBI, not reciprocally involved with the world as in Star Trek. Maybe Trek always glossed too easily over the Pandora’s box that new technologies open up, seeing as many of the most confident techno-evangelists are also committed eugenicists, a practice explicitly shunned in the rosy high-tech utopia of Star Trek.
It certainly appears to be an evergreen problem of modern civilization; or as Charlie Chaplin famously said in his dictator speech: “We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost...”
Maybe we *don’t* need ever more & better things; maybe there is some true wisdom in just being content with what one has. It’s not about being anti-technology per se, in the vein of the Unabomber et al; it’s just about neither fetishizing technology & growth.
There is an interesting paper by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018) that does look at modeling that. Basically a new technology can have 3 effects - displacement, productivity and reinstatement. Displacement is the replacing of jobs, productivity is when the new technology makes certain things much cheaper so we want to do more of it leading to increased hiring, and reinstatement is the long run creation of new tasks.
Displacement in the long run results in the job polarization we have been witnessing. If the AI is 'brilliant' then productivity will dominate (for example, ATMs actually increased the hiring of bank 'tellers').
Precisely, we already use the term "Human Resources" as if humans were some sort of commodity. The AI revolution will certainly further dehumanize labor and replace it with a better value proposition for corporations. For human labor to compete head on with automation is a losing proposition.
Having spent a 40 year career in factory automation, I am always amazed at how shallow the jobs-versus-automation arguments are. Why not this: "We can only have more and better things if we automate..." So it's really just a choice. Stay the same or improve.
The precise components inside of our appliances and automobiles - whether internal combustion or EV - could not be manufactured to the precision and volume required for their performance without the automation of machine tools and robots. Do we want these things or not? This isn't just limited to "touch" labor. Many of the products we appreciate could not exist if they were designed by hand. The circuitry inside a microchip would not exist were it not for the design and modeling tools that assist engineers to iterate such complex alternatives. Not to mention that automation makes dangerous jobs safer.
Every form of automation ever invented just amplified the know-how of humans to do more and better things. I would love to see a study on the impact of removing the automation already in place to the benefit of labor!
There may be reasons to consider the social impacts of AI, just like there is for genetic cloning, just like there was for bringing moon rocks back to earth. But job loss isn't one of them.
The current generation of ChatGPT could probably replace most of our politicians with negligible side effects. Not sure if that's a sign of AI's maturing ability, or just REALLY low hanging fruit.
We don't want "more and better things". We want the ability to have a house, food on the table, money to raise the kids, and to have a job to buy things, including those more and better things. More and better things alone is BS.
Level 2 of Maslowe's hierarchy is "security of employment", so Nick's concerns about that are hardly off-base. The funny thing about the hierarchy is that most of the things on it aren't actually purchasable at any price. Once your basic needs are taken care of (level 1 and part of 2), having a meaningful life isn't about lots of more and better stuff.
If the things that matter most aren't really economic -- GDP and happiness are only loosely correlated -- it makes sense for advanced societies to ask what role govt has in creating the conditions for citizens to move up Maslowe's list. Past a certain point, a continued focus on economic growth is myopic, particularly if such growth forces your citizens into precarious employment or sacrifices your moral order. Such actions are actually harmful to human well being. In modern America, this logic would justify both a strong labor protections in the economic realm and a codified moral order of some kind in the social realm. Laissez-faire has limits in both areas.
I'm not arguing against AI. I've coded a machine learning systems for fun and I teach robotics, so I think a society that could fulfill most human needs and wants with minimal human labor would be an amazing thing. But it would also present some novel problems which economics (my actual degree field) is uniquely unqualified to solve.
I would generally agree with you. The incessant focus on the "labor force participation rate" post-COVID is a great example of the problem. The fact that millions of Americans (mostly moms but not entirely) have decided not to rejoin the commercial labor pool is treated at a catastrophe by our ruling class. Why? Because only paid labor counts. It's a perfect example of measuring what's easy to measure (GDP) instead of what actually matters (life satisfaction).
As you suggest, some of the per-capita-GDP bump of the last 50 years is almost certainly an echo of women joining the labor force in large numbers. Female commercial employment is doubly beneficial on paper: mom is suddenly "working" and the family has increased their consumption by now paying for child care -- win, win for the bean counters. Often not so positive for the kids though, but they don't show up in the economic stats until 20 years later.
But this new AI, isn’t the same as previous AI. A human level intelligence, or greater, can in fact replace most humans. That it hasn’t already doesn’t mean it won’t. Certainly it could replace lots of office work - plumbers, not so much.
It turns out that basically all the excuses made for persistent unemployment during the 2010s from automation to skills gap to video games were just distracting from insufficiently expansionary monetary policy, who would’ve guessed that.
I’d love to see your take on NGDP targeting as from the limited amount I’ve seen it looks promising but I haven’t been exposed to any critiques.
I was fortunate to get a taste of "robots take your job" while entering the infrastructure planning & engineering industry. One software patch in 1998 turned an hours-long task into a simple click of a box. I was of course relieved, but from then on, always aware that I needed to demonstrate value. It was clear much of transportation analysis could be done by software, but there would always be a need for a human to connect dots and interpret mobility.
In my industry, the people most worried about tech advancements are the ones content to just do-a-job rather than show-value.
Good point about what "automation" really means. No to mention the method of subjective labelling whether job is to be automated. I think it would be better to have scale from 0 to 1 rather than a binary label.
But what is most important is the lack of studies that show how many jobs, of what quality will be created by automation. I wonder why research focuses on destruction part, not creation of jobs. Ultimately what matters is the net effect. It seems the reports are missing this. Why? Is it harder to estimate creation vs destruction? Or maybe destruction is hotter topic that guarantees more interest in study?
The Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018) paper covered on my substack does go into job creation from automating tasks. It depends heavily on how good the AI is - is it 'brilliant' - it would lead to job creating, if it is 'so-so' in the short run there will be job displacement that leads to job polarization. In the long run, new jobs/tasks would be created that grows the employment.
I'm not sure what planet you were on in the 1970s and 1980s, but automation nearly destroyed the Midwest. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were lots of well paying jobs. A decade or two later, the factories were obsolete and the newer ones required a lot fewer workers thanks to automation. Only a small fraction of those well paid workers ever got a job that paid as well. Most of them took a big pay cut and the communities collapsed. Those areas are still in terrible shape.
This happened with dock workers on the coasts as well. Containerization automated ship loading and unloading. Well paid dock work vanished. Places with strong unions made deals that cushioned the blow for a while, but those jobs are gone, automated out of existence. Waterfront communities still have not recovered, and those that have don't provide particularly good jobs.
The shift to services / knowledge work has stiffened cognitive competition in the American labor market. Will AI make that worse, requiring humans to have even more smarts in order to compete for a dwindling number of jobs? I suspect not, and there is a historical precedent for that optimism.
Prior to the industrial revolution, your economic utility and your physical prowess were correlated. In the 1700's, being a short, nerdy, man made life very hard. However this man is the biggest beneficiary of the steam engine. For the first time, you don't have to be physically strong to be productive. You have to be mentally alert to manage the machine, but the machine itself does the physical labor. Steam shovels absolutely did throw ditch-diggers out of work, but they also provided employment opportunities for men who weren't strong enough to dig ditches. I don't have any studies to back up this intuition, but I suspect many of the economic benefits of the industrial revolution landed on the nerdy, with most of the costs were born by the strong and previously productive.
What lessons for our current resolution? In our economy today, who are the equivalent of physically weak, 17th century nerds? Today, smart people have lots of opportunities, but the cognitively challenged, not so much. Could AI provide an answer to that? Just as steam created opportunities for the physically weaker to be productive, wouldn't AI create opportunities for the cognitively weaker today?
There's a guy that's not a particularly great writer or a particularly great illustrator, but he produces a saleable children's book with the help of AI text and art. To be fair, Ammaar Reshi is certainly no dummy -- using these tools today requires cognitive skills. But that won't always be the case. The first cars required detailed familiarity with their mechanics; your modern car can be driven thousands of miles without you giving its internals a second thought. The same will happen with AI tools, and when it does, the cognitively challenged will have all kinds of opportunities they are currently locked out of. What the steam engine did for physical ability, AI will do for cognitive ability.
Based on the industrial revolution model, I suspect the costs of AI will fall on those who are at the top of the cognitive (and economic) heap. In the industrial revolution, the physically strong were unable to maintain their place against the new technology, largely because they were not politically powerful. I already see evidence that the professional-managerial-class (bureaucrats, middle managers, HR flunkies, business analysts, lawyers) is building a backlash against AI, since it stands to hurt them the most. Considering the political power of the PMC as a group, it remains to be seen if they will be able to achieve what the Luddites could not: limit the new technological development to keep their place at the top of the food chain. The recent "halt AI now!" movement led by Musk and other tech folks may well be less altruistic than it appears.
The relative value of humans would shift. The jobs that would soar in value when purely intellectual work can be replaced by AI will be generalist ones that require idiosyncratic interaction with the physical world as well as people skills. Something like nursing. Or bartending. Arguably sales. Actually, managing and entrepreneurship as well. While AI could help, I doubt people will trust final decisions where they put their signature on the line completely to AI.
Good points. In planning for the future, focus your kids on high-touch, human-interaction positions that can use machine learning systems but not e replaced. Of course, how well will those positions will be paid if you have 10-20% structural excess labor (from having been replaced with algorithms)? Again, the early industrial revolution is a good, and not particularly cheery, guide to that question.
Ergo more income redistribution if you'll always have excess labor (I'm not very sure you'll have excess labor, though, though you will have more inequality).
My feeling is that conservatives are going to have to get OK with significant redistribution of some kind. While this is a political challenge, I consider is quite solvable.
The spiritual challenge of decoupling economic usefulness from your sense of life purpose will be harder, particularly for men. Our current problems in this vein have bequeathed us 100K opioid deaths annually. Imagine if 20-30% (or more) of the population is just permanently unnecessary. Restoring their income in easy compared to restoring meaning to their lives. The latter is the domain of churches not governments.
Well, “religion”/philosophy/social groups, not necessarily churches, and I put religion in quotes because you just really need something that gives your life meaning as part of a greater whole. For some, a D&D group could work. For others, a musical band.
Also, it turns out that the opioid crisis wasn’t really caused by despair but rather simple access to opioids (which is why opioid deaths among black Americans are now going up but didn’t in the first wave of opioid deaths).
Depends how automation is implemented and used. And that depends on whether workers have any say in the implementation -- all very difficult to navigate well and humanely for all concerned, both labor and management.
I hear you but, then how do you explain the 180 staff writers who were all fired in January at Buzzfeed which stated they would use ChatGPT to write their articles going forward, and have just a few editors to review those articles? Do you not think other companies will surely follow? No one offered those writers job placement, or re-skilling, and there were no jobs created in that process. A few editors got to keep their jobs. Corporations will always find a way to reduce overhead and people are usually first to go. How do you explain Walmart who just announced last week that 65% of its stores will be serviced by automation over the next three years and at the same time as that announcement, they laid off 2,000 employees? There were no jobs created or training provided. Those people are unemployed. If these are not clear, present day, real-world, examples of job displacement from AI/Automation then I don't know what is. When large companies everywhere start doing this, it's a problem. And they will. Because that's what corporations do. They decrease costs and increase profits. A surefire way to do that is with technology like AI and automation. Why wouldn't they do it is the question. Many of these people being fired cannot just go get trained for new technical jobs of the future. There are not enough tech workers for the jobs we have now, which at some point in the past were the jobs of the future. If people didn't choose to train for them then, why would they do it now? I say this not from a place of hating corporations. I've managed multiple businesses. It is what it is. Increase profits, decrease costs. Human workers are always in the line of fire when managing that. If a technology exists that can facilitate that, corporations will do it. Corporations won't keep employees out of the goodness of their hearts. It is what it is and we should prepare for it with comprehensive policy, educational opportunities, and some way to ensure people have the means to survive when displaced. (Some have suggested UBI for that but I haven't researched it enough to know if it'd actually work.)
When Walmart lays off 2,000 people, that is probably less than the actual number of people they hire every week.
Has Walmart claimed that automating a store involves eliminating employment at that store? Or does it involve reducing employment at that store while opening a new store in an underserved location? Or something else?
The Buzzfeed example is potentially more significant - but even there, it’s one company trying this and we will see how they fare compared to others. And notably, this is *Buzzfeed*, and I wouldn’t be too saddened to learn that humans are back out of the “which spice girl are you” quiz business, just like 15 years ago. It would be more of an issue if actual reporting is being cut.
I don't know how many ppl Walmart hires but, I do know they have the highest number of employees on public assistance (welfare). So that's a problem in and of itself. As far as Buzzfeed, I agree. I don't care if Buzzfeed ceases to exist, I don't read it, but those were real people who are now unemployed due to ChatGPT. And many more companies are following suite. Looking for technology to automate. There was an IT Specialist who automated his job filing digital evidence at a law firm (with a $90k salary) and apparently hasn't been caught yet. And there was a Programmer in San Fransisco making $95k who automated his job and got away with it for 6 years (!) before being caught and fired? Companies are see this and realize they can do it too, thus eliminating the need for people. In 2020, MSN fired dozens of journalists and editors and replaced them with AI. Microsoft is going big on AI. Since 2020, Northern California has replaced all 185 toll operators with robots/AI.
ResumeBuilder conducted a survey of 1000 business leaders in U.S. who said "When asked if ChatGPT will lead to any workers being laid off by the end of 2023, 33 per cent of business leaders who have already adopted the technology say “definitely” while 26 per cent say “probably”. And companies are already reaping the rewards: 99% of employers using ChatGPT say they’ve saved money. Forty-eight per cent have saved more than $50,000, while 11% have saved over $100,000."
It's happening everywhere, we just aren't hearing about it. People are not announcing it. It's not an imaginary doomsday scenario. Everyone wants the tech. I'm a govt contractor, I see the gov putting out whole RFIs for this stuff. They can't get enough of it.
Numbers are what matter here. The kinds of cases you mention are the reason why people are interested in the question, but they don’t show anything about whether the net result is a gain or loss of employment.
There is an interesting modelling approach done by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018) which I covered here last week (https://nominalnews.substack.com/p/chatgpt-jobs-ai-tech). Basically, the new AI/Automation will replace certain tasks. If the technology is 'brilliant' it is likely to lead to hiring more of the people that it will replace. An example of this was the ATM - when ATMs were created, it made opening bank branches much cheaper. However, with more bank branches, you needed more bank 'tellers' who instead of doing what the ATM did, aided with loan origination or other financial products.
If the new technology is 'so-so' then some people will be displaced. This will only be offset in the long-run with the creation of new jobs/tasks.
The issue with the Buzzfeed articles is what does Buzzfeed want. Does it want to just create a lot of content or does it want to create interesting content, If the former, then that job is similar to the stock articles that talk about some technicals of the stock. If the latter, and we assume that the ability of ChatGPT to write new articles is a big money/time saver, then you could hire journalists to actually go discover interesting things to report on.
Until about 1980, productivity growth translated into shorter standard hours of work. That changed, not (at least not directly) because technology changed but because the balance of power in workplaces changed. That's turning around a bit, but obviously we need continued productivity growth to make shorter hours sustainable.
Working hours and conditions aren't determined by individual bargains between workers and employers. Particular professions, like law and (hospital-based) medicine have organizational structures that demand ultra-long hours of work. But historically, that's varied a lot, and some professions have had a lot of leisure (as with "bankers hours").
All the more ammunition in the argument for universal basic income. There are enough resources for everyone, the problem is our concept of equitable distribution is toxic. It's not that people do not want to work, it's not even that our species has the means to make working optional, it's that we have created a culture afflicted by all the wrong values and many pointless fears. Like the fair of AI. I'm much more afraid of the current Congress, which is full of dishonest shitbirds.
Actually, we're not at that stage yet. The richest 1% of Americans gained $6.5T in wealth in 2021.
That's a big number!
But even that's a little less than $20K/American. Which is hard to survive on in the US. And that's if you confiscate _all_ the created wealth of the top 1%, which obviously would have a negative impact on future wealth creation. And 2021 was a good year. Some years, they lose trillions, in which case, how do you feed/clothe/house everyone?
People have to realize that we are still definitely not in a post-scarcity world.
I agree. But isn't the better question what does AI-driven automation enable? There is a piece in the NYT this morning about AI displacing law jobs. The right question is do we need massive relative cost cuts in producing more lawsuits, legal briefs, etc?
From the education sector: the elimination of jobs grading 3-page essays on the major themes of The Great Gatsby should have happened decades ago, which would have also eliminated the jobs of those who wrote them for pay. There will be new better jobs in higher ed but not "writing prompts." Ensuring factuality might be one.
Although prime age employment rates are on the rise, the growing disparity caused by the decoupling of labor and capital returns induced by AI could have negative effects on labor force participation rates among prime age adults. This trend is evident even as employment rates continue to increase or remains near “historical lows”. Essentially these innovations could have deflationary effects on wages. Increased economic return does not equate to increased consumer spending power, as the last 50 or so years have demonstrated. A further decoupling could be apocalyptic.
The correct way to worry about this is that a given change in technology reduces the market wages for a large number of kinds of people. That's what happened with the technologies that made globalization possible. More winners than losers (or at least the winnings were larger than the losses) but there were losers. With LLM's or AGI in general, there could be more losers or fewer.
When Ford made cars cheaper to make, that meant more, better-paying car jobs, not fewer. Why? Because back then, lots more people wanted cars than could afford them.
I distrust any "AI economics" that doesn't look at demand elasticity. If it's a service that people would like to have a lot more of, then AI should not reduce but increase employment and wages.
Most people not named Buffett or Musk would like a lot more on-call therapy, personal medicine, secretarial help, legal expertise, custom programming, and favorite genre fiction than they currently get. If AI partially automates those industries, it ought to mean not less but more worker dollars, and likely more and better (if different) jobs.
Which workers? Good question, the winners could easily be different than the current workers. But it should still be a workers' win, unlike the 80s or 90s.
Could AI *fully* automate those and other industries, laying off everybody? Sure; just look at what happened to all America's horses after cars got cheap. But when you're talking "humans, as economically useful as horses," that's no longer a story about scarcity and economics. Full automation of cognitive work would be a society whose big problem for a generation wasn't scarcity allocation by economics, but wealth allocation by politics.
So if it's partial automation, we should look at elasticity and see how many jobs will benefit, not just suffer.
And if it's full automation, humans-as-horses for medical and legal and writing and programming? Well, we should admit that's such a different future that it should be an argument about pensions or UBI, not about "keeping good jobs."
"Full automation of cognitive work would be a society whose big problem for a generation wasn't scarcity allocation by economics, but wealth allocation by politics."
This is a wonderful point that gets missed frequently. The problem isn't AI rendering humans "as useful as horses". That's going to happen to some extent. The problem is 1) how to distribute the financial and productive windfall that AI / robotics will create "fairly", and 2) how to decouple meaning (telos) from economic utility, mostly for men.
The first of these is a political problem: what is "fair" distribution in a society in which most human needs can be met without human labor. That's a hard one, to be clear, but solvable, and hopefully without resorting to any of the more extreme -isms of the Left or Right.
The second is basically a spiritual problem, and will likely drive some kind of religious revival (maybe Christian, maybe Aristotelian, maybe something else) lest we all become like the pampered people in the movie Wall-E.
I appreciated this perspective so much! I was rereading Bertrand Russel’s In Praise of Idleness the other day - I remember that being the first time I read a ‘modern’ writer speaking about the value of leisure in the context of our society’s erroneous focus on the virtue of labor, and I wanted to revisit it for fun.
Assuming AI delivers on its promise, I hope that we are smart enough to shift a sense of worth and value system away from labor and consumption as you mention- and I wonder how this will converge with the movement to address global warming by shifting/reducing consumption. I’ve read a few opinion pieces in the last few months (in major newspapers) about over-consumption as it relates to global warming, and how we are going to have to re-think how we define success (ie time-rich and how we spend our time vs money-rich and how we spend our money.)
I’ll keep my eyes peeled for signs this is happening. If Gen Z is any tell, at the very least we’re taking the first step of devaluing climbing the ladder simply because it’s there for the climbing. That isn’t to say they don’t aspire for growth at work- it just seems like they equally value growth through experiences outside of work more than my (older) Millennial peers did at that age.
I believe proponents of the weird marriage of of techno-environmentalism, with its millions of solar panels and electric cars and house-sized batteries and electronic CO2 scrubbers, have largely abandoned any actual pursuit of ending global warming. This is a Machine solution to a Machine created problem. And considering the power needs of an AI / robotic future, our power consumption will increase not decrease.
Does Gen Z actually have a desire to "live with less"? Or do they just want a high standard of living without having to work? (I'd like that too -- whicih is why the AI/robotic future is interesting.) But to achieve that, our power and resource consumption will continue increasing, particularly as the other 80% of the world's people rise to our standard of living, which is the only fair outcome lest we be seen as "pulling up the ladder behind us." We still want a bunch of "stuff". We just want robots to make it for us.
in that sense, I don't see AI / robotics as an environmental solution. I believe that solution will come as it always has: the discovery of a new energy source. Nuclear fission could tide us over for a long while. I believe the next source will be nuclear fusion, but the joke about fusion power -- "it's 10 years away... and always will be" -- has certainly been born out in my lifetime, so perhaps I'm wrong.
There do appear to be lots of things converging in the 21st century: robotics, chemical fertilizers, AI, declining birthrates, energy technology... these could easily conspire to produce a less populated but energy (and productivity) denser world in the next couple of centuries. They could also result in global warfare as we fight over increasingly scarce resources, but I try to be an optimist. (The most optimistic scenario for me is that the Lord returns and "rolls up the world like a scroll", but no one knows when that will happen, so I choose to plan for long-term human flourishing.)
I think this enthusiasm for AI eventually substituting for all human labor misses the point that it would also substitute for all of the activities we think of as uniquely meaningful & fun. It’s not just the “male laborer” with a Protestant work ethic drilled into him whose sense of self-worth is at stake here: all of our science, culture & the arts – the “higher endeavors” that AI proponents have long billed as finally becoming crafts of the masses – will similarly be automated away such that the best-case scenario (barring any apocalypses) sees us reduced to animals in a zoo, WALL-E style. Yet part of what makes these activities valuable is the shared experience of purposeful pursuit & connection with real people and the world; if AI ends up doing everything better than humans, culture ceases to be a participatory process and we become fully passive consumers separated from one another. Why pay for this Substack when NoahGPT could give me similar insights in a way personally tailored to me & for much cheaper? In such a scenario, AI would ultimately crush, not lift up, the human spirit.
This comment on Reddit lays out the issue in more depth: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/uqaoxq/sneerclubs_opinion_on_the_actual_risk_from_ai/i8z7kq2/?context=3
"if AI ends up doing everything better than humans, culture ceases to be a participatory process and we become fully passive consumers separated from one another"
the idea that culture is an intrinsically productive instead of consumptive process is quote perceptive, but I think that's a very big if.
The core of industrialism, whatever mix of state worker or capitalist owned, is the separation of ourselves as producers from ourselves as consumers, mediated by the magic of money or slightly less magical free state services. with the division of labour we progressively produce less and less of what we consume - moving from food (the industrialisation then automation of agriculture) to goods ( the industrialisation then automation of manufacturing) then services (industrialisation then automation). So we end up producing nothing we consume- our music, cleanliness, cooking, child care - think Louis XVI for all -. Except nearly everybody works - in some fragment of our lives. Nails, toes, knees, sushi, child psychology, car navigation, punditry. Whether new jobs come into being and existing jobs are augmented or gradually substituted by generalAi/ automation - as Noah elegantly put it substituting 50% of all jobs or augmenting 50% of my job - is too binary when it could be both. The lump of labour fallacy is not a law of economics for all time, it’s a useful insight about past errors of analysis. It’s tricky to measure but if productivity increases consistently outstrip GDP increases, then we know more substitution than augmentation is taking place. That has not happened in the past, as productivity gains have driven GDP gains big enough for both per capita and labour force size gains. but the past is not necessarily a robust indicator for the impact of AI on productivity, GDP and the size of the labour force. Whether the people of the rich and middle income world use GDP growth to free our time to spend less time producing for other people and consuming what others have produced, to decarbonise and live more, the other sorts of growth, of our gardens and friendships, singing in choirs and dancing ceilidhs, more swimming in the sea and rivers and wandering about more, or more time delivering food and massages, Amazon parcels of air fryers and, fresheners, and then more time on our arses watching computer generated box sets, or shagging sex bots - that’s our political and cultural challenge. Whether we find a way to democratise our economies and free ourselves from the division of production and consumption in the most meaningful aspects of our lives.
I think the problem I’m pointing to here has less to do with the division between production and consumption itself and more with the potential of AI to outdo us in areas where we consider our “production” to be uniquely meaningful. The original utopian vision of automation reducing drudgery and freeing everyone up to contribute & create in ways they find truly meaningful is not quite the same as the vision of a society of pure leisure, where no human can hope to compete with AI in any meaningfully productive way. It’s perhaps Star Trek vs. The Expanse, where in the latter most humans are just superfluously subsisting on UBI, not reciprocally involved with the world as in Star Trek. Maybe Trek always glossed too easily over the Pandora’s box that new technologies open up, seeing as many of the most confident techno-evangelists are also committed eugenicists, a practice explicitly shunned in the rosy high-tech utopia of Star Trek.
It certainly appears to be an evergreen problem of modern civilization; or as Charlie Chaplin famously said in his dictator speech: “We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost...”
Maybe we *don’t* need ever more & better things; maybe there is some true wisdom in just being content with what one has. It’s not about being anti-technology per se, in the vein of the Unabomber et al; it’s just about neither fetishizing technology & growth.
There is an interesting paper by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018) that does look at modeling that. Basically a new technology can have 3 effects - displacement, productivity and reinstatement. Displacement is the replacing of jobs, productivity is when the new technology makes certain things much cheaper so we want to do more of it leading to increased hiring, and reinstatement is the long run creation of new tasks.
Displacement in the long run results in the job polarization we have been witnessing. If the AI is 'brilliant' then productivity will dominate (for example, ATMs actually increased the hiring of bank 'tellers').
I cover more of this here - https://nominalnews.substack.com/p/chatgpt-jobs-ai-tech
Yep, talked about it here too!
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/generative-ai-autocomplete-for-everything
Actually, tellers increased because of bank deregulation. There had been no bank deregulation, tellers would have gone down. Pueyo covers that.
Precisely, we already use the term "Human Resources" as if humans were some sort of commodity. The AI revolution will certainly further dehumanize labor and replace it with a better value proposition for corporations. For human labor to compete head on with automation is a losing proposition.
Having spent a 40 year career in factory automation, I am always amazed at how shallow the jobs-versus-automation arguments are. Why not this: "We can only have more and better things if we automate..." So it's really just a choice. Stay the same or improve.
The precise components inside of our appliances and automobiles - whether internal combustion or EV - could not be manufactured to the precision and volume required for their performance without the automation of machine tools and robots. Do we want these things or not? This isn't just limited to "touch" labor. Many of the products we appreciate could not exist if they were designed by hand. The circuitry inside a microchip would not exist were it not for the design and modeling tools that assist engineers to iterate such complex alternatives. Not to mention that automation makes dangerous jobs safer.
Every form of automation ever invented just amplified the know-how of humans to do more and better things. I would love to see a study on the impact of removing the automation already in place to the benefit of labor!
There may be reasons to consider the social impacts of AI, just like there is for genetic cloning, just like there was for bringing moon rocks back to earth. But job loss isn't one of them.
Forgot to say, though, that the topic makes for great navel-gazing by economists, politicians, and pundits. Would that automation could replace them!
The current generation of ChatGPT could probably replace most of our politicians with negligible side effects. Not sure if that's a sign of AI's maturing ability, or just REALLY low hanging fruit.
We don't want "more and better things". We want the ability to have a house, food on the table, money to raise the kids, and to have a job to buy things, including those more and better things. More and better things alone is BS.
I think you're for a social contract that ensures Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is prioritized.
Level 2 of Maslowe's hierarchy is "security of employment", so Nick's concerns about that are hardly off-base. The funny thing about the hierarchy is that most of the things on it aren't actually purchasable at any price. Once your basic needs are taken care of (level 1 and part of 2), having a meaningful life isn't about lots of more and better stuff.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
If the things that matter most aren't really economic -- GDP and happiness are only loosely correlated -- it makes sense for advanced societies to ask what role govt has in creating the conditions for citizens to move up Maslowe's list. Past a certain point, a continued focus on economic growth is myopic, particularly if such growth forces your citizens into precarious employment or sacrifices your moral order. Such actions are actually harmful to human well being. In modern America, this logic would justify both a strong labor protections in the economic realm and a codified moral order of some kind in the social realm. Laissez-faire has limits in both areas.
I'm not arguing against AI. I've coded a machine learning systems for fun and I teach robotics, so I think a society that could fulfill most human needs and wants with minimal human labor would be an amazing thing. But it would also present some novel problems which economics (my actual degree field) is uniquely unqualified to solve.
I’d love to hear your reaction to this post: https://open.substack.com/pub/joelelorentzen/p/work-work-work-work-work?r=1p5p1m&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I would generally agree with you. The incessant focus on the "labor force participation rate" post-COVID is a great example of the problem. The fact that millions of Americans (mostly moms but not entirely) have decided not to rejoin the commercial labor pool is treated at a catastrophe by our ruling class. Why? Because only paid labor counts. It's a perfect example of measuring what's easy to measure (GDP) instead of what actually matters (life satisfaction).
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-per-capita
As you suggest, some of the per-capita-GDP bump of the last 50 years is almost certainly an echo of women joining the labor force in large numbers. Female commercial employment is doubly beneficial on paper: mom is suddenly "working" and the family has increased their consumption by now paying for child care -- win, win for the bean counters. Often not so positive for the kids though, but they don't show up in the economic stats until 20 years later.
On your larger question about motivation for work, you would like this 10 minute animation ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc) on exactly that subject.
Thanks! It’s nice that know that others are examining these issues. Don’t see much of it on MSM...
Well thought out. I have no disagreement with any of this.
But this new AI, isn’t the same as previous AI. A human level intelligence, or greater, can in fact replace most humans. That it hasn’t already doesn’t mean it won’t. Certainly it could replace lots of office work - plumbers, not so much.
It turns out that basically all the excuses made for persistent unemployment during the 2010s from automation to skills gap to video games were just distracting from insufficiently expansionary monetary policy, who would’ve guessed that.
I’d love to see your take on NGDP targeting as from the limited amount I’ve seen it looks promising but I haven’t been exposed to any critiques.
I'll write about that at some point! It's been pretty out of the news lately.
Sounds good
I was fortunate to get a taste of "robots take your job" while entering the infrastructure planning & engineering industry. One software patch in 1998 turned an hours-long task into a simple click of a box. I was of course relieved, but from then on, always aware that I needed to demonstrate value. It was clear much of transportation analysis could be done by software, but there would always be a need for a human to connect dots and interpret mobility.
In my industry, the people most worried about tech advancements are the ones content to just do-a-job rather than show-value.
Good point about what "automation" really means. No to mention the method of subjective labelling whether job is to be automated. I think it would be better to have scale from 0 to 1 rather than a binary label.
But what is most important is the lack of studies that show how many jobs, of what quality will be created by automation. I wonder why research focuses on destruction part, not creation of jobs. Ultimately what matters is the net effect. It seems the reports are missing this. Why? Is it harder to estimate creation vs destruction? Or maybe destruction is hotter topic that guarantees more interest in study?
Creation is about the thing we don’t yet have and thus know less about. Destruction is about the thing we already have and thus know more about.
The Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018) paper covered on my substack does go into job creation from automating tasks. It depends heavily on how good the AI is - is it 'brilliant' - it would lead to job creating, if it is 'so-so' in the short run there will be job displacement that leads to job polarization. In the long run, new jobs/tasks would be created that grows the employment.
It's Henry Hazlett's broken window fallacy all over again. The destruction is sudden and obvious. The creation is slower and hidden.
Excellent writing Noah! 100% 👍🏾
I'm not sure what planet you were on in the 1970s and 1980s, but automation nearly destroyed the Midwest. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were lots of well paying jobs. A decade or two later, the factories were obsolete and the newer ones required a lot fewer workers thanks to automation. Only a small fraction of those well paid workers ever got a job that paid as well. Most of them took a big pay cut and the communities collapsed. Those areas are still in terrible shape.
This happened with dock workers on the coasts as well. Containerization automated ship loading and unloading. Well paid dock work vanished. Places with strong unions made deals that cushioned the blow for a while, but those jobs are gone, automated out of existence. Waterfront communities still have not recovered, and those that have don't provide particularly good jobs.
"There set out, slowly, for a Different World,
At four, on winter mornings, different legs ...
You can't break eggs without making an omelette
- That's what they tell the eggs."
- Randall Jarrell
The shift to services / knowledge work has stiffened cognitive competition in the American labor market. Will AI make that worse, requiring humans to have even more smarts in order to compete for a dwindling number of jobs? I suspect not, and there is a historical precedent for that optimism.
Prior to the industrial revolution, your economic utility and your physical prowess were correlated. In the 1700's, being a short, nerdy, man made life very hard. However this man is the biggest beneficiary of the steam engine. For the first time, you don't have to be physically strong to be productive. You have to be mentally alert to manage the machine, but the machine itself does the physical labor. Steam shovels absolutely did throw ditch-diggers out of work, but they also provided employment opportunities for men who weren't strong enough to dig ditches. I don't have any studies to back up this intuition, but I suspect many of the economic benefits of the industrial revolution landed on the nerdy, with most of the costs were born by the strong and previously productive.
What lessons for our current resolution? In our economy today, who are the equivalent of physically weak, 17th century nerds? Today, smart people have lots of opportunities, but the cognitively challenged, not so much. Could AI provide an answer to that? Just as steam created opportunities for the physically weaker to be productive, wouldn't AI create opportunities for the cognitively weaker today?
https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-midjourney-ai-write-illustrate-childrens-book-one-weekend-alice-2023-1
There's a guy that's not a particularly great writer or a particularly great illustrator, but he produces a saleable children's book with the help of AI text and art. To be fair, Ammaar Reshi is certainly no dummy -- using these tools today requires cognitive skills. But that won't always be the case. The first cars required detailed familiarity with their mechanics; your modern car can be driven thousands of miles without you giving its internals a second thought. The same will happen with AI tools, and when it does, the cognitively challenged will have all kinds of opportunities they are currently locked out of. What the steam engine did for physical ability, AI will do for cognitive ability.
Based on the industrial revolution model, I suspect the costs of AI will fall on those who are at the top of the cognitive (and economic) heap. In the industrial revolution, the physically strong were unable to maintain their place against the new technology, largely because they were not politically powerful. I already see evidence that the professional-managerial-class (bureaucrats, middle managers, HR flunkies, business analysts, lawyers) is building a backlash against AI, since it stands to hurt them the most. Considering the political power of the PMC as a group, it remains to be seen if they will be able to achieve what the Luddites could not: limit the new technological development to keep their place at the top of the food chain. The recent "halt AI now!" movement led by Musk and other tech folks may well be less altruistic than it appears.
The relative value of humans would shift. The jobs that would soar in value when purely intellectual work can be replaced by AI will be generalist ones that require idiosyncratic interaction with the physical world as well as people skills. Something like nursing. Or bartending. Arguably sales. Actually, managing and entrepreneurship as well. While AI could help, I doubt people will trust final decisions where they put their signature on the line completely to AI.
Good points. In planning for the future, focus your kids on high-touch, human-interaction positions that can use machine learning systems but not e replaced. Of course, how well will those positions will be paid if you have 10-20% structural excess labor (from having been replaced with algorithms)? Again, the early industrial revolution is a good, and not particularly cheery, guide to that question.
Ergo more income redistribution if you'll always have excess labor (I'm not very sure you'll have excess labor, though, though you will have more inequality).
My feeling is that conservatives are going to have to get OK with significant redistribution of some kind. While this is a political challenge, I consider is quite solvable.
The spiritual challenge of decoupling economic usefulness from your sense of life purpose will be harder, particularly for men. Our current problems in this vein have bequeathed us 100K opioid deaths annually. Imagine if 20-30% (or more) of the population is just permanently unnecessary. Restoring their income in easy compared to restoring meaning to their lives. The latter is the domain of churches not governments.
Well, “religion”/philosophy/social groups, not necessarily churches, and I put religion in quotes because you just really need something that gives your life meaning as part of a greater whole. For some, a D&D group could work. For others, a musical band.
Also, it turns out that the opioid crisis wasn’t really caused by despair but rather simple access to opioids (which is why opioid deaths among black Americans are now going up but didn’t in the first wave of opioid deaths).
Depends how automation is implemented and used. And that depends on whether workers have any say in the implementation -- all very difficult to navigate well and humanely for all concerned, both labor and management.
I hear you but, then how do you explain the 180 staff writers who were all fired in January at Buzzfeed which stated they would use ChatGPT to write their articles going forward, and have just a few editors to review those articles? Do you not think other companies will surely follow? No one offered those writers job placement, or re-skilling, and there were no jobs created in that process. A few editors got to keep their jobs. Corporations will always find a way to reduce overhead and people are usually first to go. How do you explain Walmart who just announced last week that 65% of its stores will be serviced by automation over the next three years and at the same time as that announcement, they laid off 2,000 employees? There were no jobs created or training provided. Those people are unemployed. If these are not clear, present day, real-world, examples of job displacement from AI/Automation then I don't know what is. When large companies everywhere start doing this, it's a problem. And they will. Because that's what corporations do. They decrease costs and increase profits. A surefire way to do that is with technology like AI and automation. Why wouldn't they do it is the question. Many of these people being fired cannot just go get trained for new technical jobs of the future. There are not enough tech workers for the jobs we have now, which at some point in the past were the jobs of the future. If people didn't choose to train for them then, why would they do it now? I say this not from a place of hating corporations. I've managed multiple businesses. It is what it is. Increase profits, decrease costs. Human workers are always in the line of fire when managing that. If a technology exists that can facilitate that, corporations will do it. Corporations won't keep employees out of the goodness of their hearts. It is what it is and we should prepare for it with comprehensive policy, educational opportunities, and some way to ensure people have the means to survive when displaced. (Some have suggested UBI for that but I haven't researched it enough to know if it'd actually work.)
When Walmart lays off 2,000 people, that is probably less than the actual number of people they hire every week.
Has Walmart claimed that automating a store involves eliminating employment at that store? Or does it involve reducing employment at that store while opening a new store in an underserved location? Or something else?
The Buzzfeed example is potentially more significant - but even there, it’s one company trying this and we will see how they fare compared to others. And notably, this is *Buzzfeed*, and I wouldn’t be too saddened to learn that humans are back out of the “which spice girl are you” quiz business, just like 15 years ago. It would be more of an issue if actual reporting is being cut.
I don't know how many ppl Walmart hires but, I do know they have the highest number of employees on public assistance (welfare). So that's a problem in and of itself. As far as Buzzfeed, I agree. I don't care if Buzzfeed ceases to exist, I don't read it, but those were real people who are now unemployed due to ChatGPT. And many more companies are following suite. Looking for technology to automate. There was an IT Specialist who automated his job filing digital evidence at a law firm (with a $90k salary) and apparently hasn't been caught yet. And there was a Programmer in San Fransisco making $95k who automated his job and got away with it for 6 years (!) before being caught and fired? Companies are see this and realize they can do it too, thus eliminating the need for people. In 2020, MSN fired dozens of journalists and editors and replaced them with AI. Microsoft is going big on AI. Since 2020, Northern California has replaced all 185 toll operators with robots/AI.
ResumeBuilder conducted a survey of 1000 business leaders in U.S. who said "When asked if ChatGPT will lead to any workers being laid off by the end of 2023, 33 per cent of business leaders who have already adopted the technology say “definitely” while 26 per cent say “probably”. And companies are already reaping the rewards: 99% of employers using ChatGPT say they’ve saved money. Forty-eight per cent have saved more than $50,000, while 11% have saved over $100,000."
It's happening everywhere, we just aren't hearing about it. People are not announcing it. It's not an imaginary doomsday scenario. Everyone wants the tech. I'm a govt contractor, I see the gov putting out whole RFIs for this stuff. They can't get enough of it.
Numbers are what matter here. The kinds of cases you mention are the reason why people are interested in the question, but they don’t show anything about whether the net result is a gain or loss of employment.
There is an interesting modelling approach done by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018) which I covered here last week (https://nominalnews.substack.com/p/chatgpt-jobs-ai-tech). Basically, the new AI/Automation will replace certain tasks. If the technology is 'brilliant' it is likely to lead to hiring more of the people that it will replace. An example of this was the ATM - when ATMs were created, it made opening bank branches much cheaper. However, with more bank branches, you needed more bank 'tellers' who instead of doing what the ATM did, aided with loan origination or other financial products.
If the new technology is 'so-so' then some people will be displaced. This will only be offset in the long-run with the creation of new jobs/tasks.
The issue with the Buzzfeed articles is what does Buzzfeed want. Does it want to just create a lot of content or does it want to create interesting content, If the former, then that job is similar to the stock articles that talk about some technicals of the stock. If the latter, and we assume that the ability of ChatGPT to write new articles is a big money/time saver, then you could hire journalists to actually go discover interesting things to report on.
Buzzfeeed made it's choice on what it wants.
Until about 1980, productivity growth translated into shorter standard hours of work. That changed, not (at least not directly) because technology changed but because the balance of power in workplaces changed. That's turning around a bit, but obviously we need continued productivity growth to make shorter hours sustainable.
Then why do high earning professionals work longer hours than low-paid wage earners?
Because it is not greed that drives our world but envy...
Working hours and conditions aren't determined by individual bargains between workers and employers. Particular professions, like law and (hospital-based) medicine have organizational structures that demand ultra-long hours of work. But historically, that's varied a lot, and some professions have had a lot of leisure (as with "bankers hours").
Out of curiosity why is that obvious?
All the more ammunition in the argument for universal basic income. There are enough resources for everyone, the problem is our concept of equitable distribution is toxic. It's not that people do not want to work, it's not even that our species has the means to make working optional, it's that we have created a culture afflicted by all the wrong values and many pointless fears. Like the fair of AI. I'm much more afraid of the current Congress, which is full of dishonest shitbirds.
Actually, we're not at that stage yet. The richest 1% of Americans gained $6.5T in wealth in 2021.
That's a big number!
But even that's a little less than $20K/American. Which is hard to survive on in the US. And that's if you confiscate _all_ the created wealth of the top 1%, which obviously would have a negative impact on future wealth creation. And 2021 was a good year. Some years, they lose trillions, in which case, how do you feed/clothe/house everyone?
People have to realize that we are still definitely not in a post-scarcity world.
I agree. But isn't the better question what does AI-driven automation enable? There is a piece in the NYT this morning about AI displacing law jobs. The right question is do we need massive relative cost cuts in producing more lawsuits, legal briefs, etc?
From the education sector: the elimination of jobs grading 3-page essays on the major themes of The Great Gatsby should have happened decades ago, which would have also eliminated the jobs of those who wrote them for pay. There will be new better jobs in higher ed but not "writing prompts." Ensuring factuality might be one.
Few would see that as a new better job.
Although prime age employment rates are on the rise, the growing disparity caused by the decoupling of labor and capital returns induced by AI could have negative effects on labor force participation rates among prime age adults. This trend is evident even as employment rates continue to increase or remains near “historical lows”. Essentially these innovations could have deflationary effects on wages. Increased economic return does not equate to increased consumer spending power, as the last 50 or so years have demonstrated. A further decoupling could be apocalyptic.
The correct way to worry about this is that a given change in technology reduces the market wages for a large number of kinds of people. That's what happened with the technologies that made globalization possible. More winners than losers (or at least the winnings were larger than the losses) but there were losers. With LLM's or AGI in general, there could be more losers or fewer.
I do not think we should claim to know.