Yeah, the last 100 years have sucked since the tractor was invented and I've been unable to find farm jobs.

You just beautifully summarized the "Lump of Work fallacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Yes, technology changes/improvements causes transitions in the job market but as it turns out, human needs are endless and new jobs are created for displaced workers.

[T]here was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.

-- Greg Clark, A Farewell to Alms

The "Lump of Work fallacy" does seem to be a fallacy. However, that didn't help the horse. Why is that? The invention of "Artificial General Muscles" in the form of the internal combustion engine was a better-than-perfect replacement for all forms of horse labour. We should expect artificial general intelligence technology to do much the same to humans. There is no law in economics that prevents human wages from declining below subsistence. And a perfect substitute for human labour that requires no wages and is more intelligent would certainly vastly lower the value of human labour.

The problem of excess workers will probably be solved the same way it was for horses - they'll be refashioned as cannon fodder for wars, much as horses were in WW1.

Yeah, and it's too bad horses don't exist anymore.

Oh wait. They are fine. They're just not used as constant slave labor all the time anymore, much like human labor.

Those that weren't turned to dogfood. I'm fairly certain we have a considerably reduced population of horses

So what? We don't need as many. It doesn't make life any worse (in fact, probably better) for the ones we have now. Those pre-industrial-revolution horses would have been dead by now of old age if not turned into dog food.

That's the whole point of the parent argument. What do we do with people who's work output we don't need anymore?

We don't do anything. We'll have to take care of them, which is where things like a basic income help. It won't happen all at once instantly, and it's not like our only option is to grind them into soylent green. Horses may get turned into food, but that's because they're horses and not people. We eat animals, so it's not very compelling to say "oh no, we ate all the horses or turned them into glue". Who cares. The point is there are horses now and there will probably continue to be horses. Many of them with a life of mostly leisure and good care instead of being worked to death. Sounds good to me.

As long as we're all clear that you're arguing for a significantly reduced human population, I guess I don't have anything to add. I'm pessimistic that the transition between our current populous life of toil and this idyllic future will be peaceful or pleasant.

microwave lasagne - i.e. Findus beef lasagne containing 100% horse meat (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21375594) perhaps due to cheaper horse price due to European banning horse-drawn carts on roads (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578965/Horses-lef...)

Globally yes, locally no. It is not reasonable to discount the fears of a to-be-displaced factory worker in Michigan because their loss is offset by new service industry jobs in New York, even though the net economic effect may be positive. For real examples, laid-off shipbuilders in Liverpool and coal miners in Wales are still largely out of work even while the UK economy has grown since those mass industrial transitions.

Taken to a limit, a sector-wide displacement could have quite severe repercussions for a society. Imagine for example a majority of truck drivers* losing their jobs once self-driving cargo vehicles become available. Assuming they'll be adopted rapidly (for their advantages in safety, fleet efficiency, and reduced transit time due to continuous operation) and the change is quite sudden. Those truckers are now an immediate, acute problem for the country: unemployed, not spending, not earning, heavily invested in training and experience for a now non-existent job, and not (in aggregate) well-suited for other work. They are also a large, angry, nationwide group - a pre-fabricated voting block - ripe for political exploitation.

*I picked this example based on that map of common occupations that was floating round here a few months ago. By far the most popular job by state was "truck driver", so this is potentially a real issue.

"You just beautifully summarized the "Lump of Work fallacy""

The fallacy claims that the number of jobs is a zero-sum game. I'm not saying this at all. While more jobs will be created, because automation is happening at such an exponential rate, there won't be enough jobs replaced.

I have feeling when we do have AI, many of these economic principals will need to be re-written.

More from this article:

"Whereas some argue that immigrants displace domestic workers, others believe this to be a fallacy, arguing that such a view relies on a belief that the number of jobs in the economy is fixed, whereas in reality immigration increases the size of the economy, thus creating more jobs"

Immigration may increase the size of the economy, but if they are hired at let's say 30% of an American working at the same rate, it essentially dilutes the market. Americans now have to compete with someone making much less than them, which will mean a huge pay cut.

With AI, it will mean competing with algorithms/hardware that can probably be purchased for even less than the cost of a worker.

The end game for this will be a class of people owning all of this AI hardware, the poor, and a much smaller middle class of people in-between that have the skills to work on the AI hardware.

What happens to all of the people that aren't educated or don't have the skills in this new economy when all of the jobs they could do to make money have been replaced by AI?

> What happens to all of the people that aren't educated or don't have the skills in this new economy

What happens now to people who have no education or skills relevant to the economy? AI won't make this new problem, it's something we already deal with.

"AI won't make this new problem, it's something we already deal with."

Right now, they can get a minimum wage job and survive. My point is that AI could completely replace these and the only way you will be able to get a job is to have some form of education or skill.

>will be able to get a job is to have some form of education or skill.

AI tends not to work like that. High-skill jobs tend to be easier for machine-learning than low-tech jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

At that point, would humans really require jobs? And will the value of money still be the same?

This is a complex issue, and like on most complex issues, there is no simple answer.

The general idea that technology deprecates people is true. It is also true that there is an escape valve in new needs, requiring new jobs, that allows for us to shift occupations and remain employed.

However, there is no law that states that the escape valve will always work, nor that it can work at high rates of job displacement.

Moreover, there are signs of low aggregate demand in developed economies. These signs are appearing now even in developing economies. This means that money is not percolating down into the hands of people, who can't then spend and create demand. There is a huge number of factors at play here (see the note about being a complex problem). Higher worker efficiency causing higher unemployment rates is one such factor. It can't be dismissed outright.

We may be witnessing Marx being right (albeit ahead of its time).

Is it reasonable to compare a situation in which a general AI can do virtually any job a human can and way better to the invention of a tractor?

Yes, because "tractors" shifted the U.S. job mix from being 32% agriculturally related to just 2%. A gallon of gasoline is estimated to have ~600 man hours in it.

Again, automation isn't new, it just seems like it is because we're living it now.

There's a difference between shifting labor around between sectors (e.g. moving agriculture jobs into manufacturing or new industries) and a situation in which, almost instantaneously, every job that a human can do can be outdone by an AI. I think it would be naive to think the advent of superintelligent AI is comparable to relatively incremental advances of the industrial era.

This argument is back at the lump labor fallacy.

With agricultural automation, the 30% change was filled mostly with new service jobs, not labor jobs. The same goes with A.I. automation - suddenly service jobs that were not possible before become possible. Jobs are not a zero-sum game.

But any new job that is created can be done by the superintelligent AI, and better than humans. Even if somehow a million new service jobs are created, those jobs can be done better by an AI. So where does that leave humans? There would be no place for human labor if we cared about efficiency.

Edit: I see superintelligent AI as not mere automation, but in effect creating an infinite supply of new labor. Humans are diluted out.

Again, the types of jobs unlocked are not possible by A.I. because those are already filled. You're making the same zero sum fallacy.

Also, the idea that this super intelligent A.I. can do everything is almost a god of the gaps fallacy. There are still many things that humans can do that a computer cannot.

Thanks for engaging. I'm not trying to argue for the sake of argument, I'm honestly still stuck on this point. It seems like you have a different understanding of what a super intelligent AI is. To me, that is when there is an AI with all the intellectual faculties of a human except with much faster processing speed and greatly enhanced memory. In this case, there would be nothing a human can do that cannot be done by such an AI (assuming you give some AIs a humanoid robot body). Perhaps the AI could help improve the human species so that we "catch up" to the AI in intellect. I don't see how this is anything like the God of the gaps fallacy, I'm not claiming AI created the universe or any other such claims.

It will be different this time. (I know they probably said that all the other times...)

It will be different because automation has never before been able to fulfill all human niches. Automating one job just freed up people to work in other jobs. In particular, automating physical labor freed people up to work in cognitive tasks.

This time it's the entire human niche that will (eventually) be automated - all cognitive tasks as well as all physical ones. That's the difference and why extrapolating from the past doesn't work for AGI.

Actually, Marx was saying the exact same thing about machinery unemploying people that HN is saying every now and then(I don't have a firm opinion on the matter, I just found it amusing to read the same argument made 150 years ago; Marx actually credited a whole slew of other economists with making this argument.)

The quote (from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price...):

"...one might infer, as Adam Smith, in whose days modern industry was still in its infancy, did infer, that the accelerated accumulation of capital must turn the balance in favour of the working man, by securing a growing demand for his labour. From this same standpoint many contemporary writers have wondered that English capital having grown in that last twenty years so much quicker than English population, wages should not have been more enhanced. But simultaneously with the progress of accumulation there takes place a progressive change in the composition of capital. That part of the aggregate capital which consists of fixed capital, machinery, raw materials, means of production in all possible forms, progressively increases as compared with the other part of capital, which is laid out in wages or in the purchase of labour. This law has been stated in a more or less accurate manner by Mr. Barton, Ricardo, Sismondi, Professor Richard Jones, Professor Ramsey, Cherbuilliez, and others."

(I personally am not a huge fan of Marx's writings, mainly because of the strong contempt for humanity that I feel emanating from them... incidentally I've recently stumbled upon this one, though.)

A scary analogy in favor of this argument is, a horse cannot economically perform almost any job today, hence most were slaughtered though few were kept for amusement. That happened after horses had a very good run where every improvement in technology increased "horse employment." If a machine exist to outperform a human in any conceivable job, it's not very different (and then you get to the discussion of the political options.)

A counterargument is that up until now this argument was wrong many times, and that we're very far from an AGI, or even from machines beating humans at every possible task.

The difference this time is that real AI will be able to automate all human jobs because it will be able to endlessly create better tools via robots. When the tractor was invented, it wasn't able to drive itself, the combine, the trains, and the grain processing facilities.

Precisely.

"If the Luddite fallacy were true we would all be out of work because productivity has been increasing for two centuries"

But that’s exactly the situation, isn’t it?

More and more people are unemployed every day, while more and more workers get replaced.

The social welfare system in Germany started in the late 1800s when industrialization and internal combustion engines started to replace people.

Nowadays a country can be considered to have a "good" job market when only 5 to 10 percent are unemployed, while other countries, even in the first world, are at up-to 25%.

This all also extremely depresses wages, because the workers are competing against each other on the job market.

Nope - the unemployment rate is dropping. Currently it's half what it was in 2010, and is almost at the pre-recession levels.

Again, if you look at automation over the centuries, it doesn't destroy jobs, it leads to people switching jobs.

There is also this other dimension that at some point things will get automated to a point where work will be optional for humans. Times will be very good right before the robots take over.

That only works if the products made by the machines are actually available to the population.

If the machines are privately owned, and you have to pay for the products, you’ll have to work again, too.

At that point maybe we should consider having a UN Charta that tries to make sure the nordic model is applied on a global scale before we allow fully automated systems to replaces whole industries.

And times will be fantastic after they take over.

Or at least that could be the case. It's called post scarcity, and it should be something we strive for.

The counter that you made relies on transitions in the job market. That requires people learning new skills on large scales. But what if most people can't learn to do the new tasks as quickly as the top few can learn to automate them?

The only reason humans have had nothing to fear from machines so far is because of their brains. What happens when those are no longer a differentiator?

Technology has always obsoleted jobs[0]. However, humans are unceasingly creative and find new things to do once tedious tasks are automated.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#His...

We also invent imaginary problems to solve, which is rather frustrating. For example, the supremely complicated tax code in the USA would be infeasible without modern computer automation.

What about the people who aren't so creative?

Sure, the best of us will be fine, but that's always been the case. What about the ones who are struggling to remain relevant today? They'll get left behind unless something's done-- I'm not sure that retraining will be enough, not that there's any political movement in that direction.

Those who are more creative will create ways for the less creative to contribute. It's not like the tech sector is made up entirely of creative geniuses, or even entirely of engineers, there's plenty of other jobs built around those creative endeavors that require varying skillsets.

Any bureaucracy seems like a move in that direction.

Its not just about finding new things to do. Huge areas of jobs are about to be obsoleted and there won't immediately be vacancies that offer pay for those left out. For example: when self driving auto technology replaces delivery trucks, what will the truck drivers be doing?

You are probably overestimating the speed at which these new technologies destroy jobs. It's not like today someone invents a self driving rig, tomorrow every single truck driver is out of business. Adoption won't be so fast.

It'll be a while before anyone is going to trust a load of valuable goods with an AI. There are security/theft issues, edgecase AI failure issues, loading unloading, etc.

We've seen entire industries leave the USA. Probably within your lifetime.

That said this can have devastating effects on economies. A lot of cities in the rust belt have felt this impact.

But the opposite can happen. One of the huge reasons US companies offshore production is because of labor costs. If you reduce the man-hours / product, it makes sense to open back up domestically.

I agree that in the short term there are things society will have to do to help people who's skills are being obsoleted, but in the long run I'm not afraid of humanity running out of stuff to do.

It's exactly this short term that's the problem. Long-term we'll all be merry and living in cloud cities on Venus. If we get there. If enough people suddenly find themselves obsolete, our civilization may not survive short-term.

We can sell insurance to each other.

Can you please point to the section where this evidence is provided?

Last paragraph in the wikipedia section:

"Research by the Oxford Martin School showed that employees engaged in "tasks following well-defined procedures that can easily be performed by sophisticated algorithms" are at risk of displacement. The study, published in 2013, shows that automation can affect both skilled and unskilled work and both high and low-paying occupations; however, low-paid physical occupations are most at risk.[7] However, according to a study published in McKinsey Quarterly[63] in 2015 the impact of computerization in most cases is not replacement of employees but automation of portions of the tasks they perform"

Oxford or McKinsey Quarterly, which source do you prefer?

Hopefully to the point where work is optional and everyone has a great standard of living because machines will do most things for us.

I have hopes for a more utopian future versus one where most are homeless because their jobs get replaced. The transition will be painful.

There's also the mentality of clinging to jobs because it's needed for livelihood. Wanting to keep jobs that will bring 0 value to society. Think about all the crappy toys we make that's thrown out after a month or two. Who would want to work these jobs except if it's needed to sustain a decent quality of life outside of work?

I don't get statements like yours. If we were following this path and not moving forward being afraid of obsolete jobs that new tech brings us - we wouLed be stuck in the past. Lots of people said the same when the assembly lines were introduced, lots of people lost their jobs because now it required less people to build the same thing, however assembly lines created lots of other higher skilled positions and now most of the assembly line process is done by robots (which were also dramatized by people with similar to yours opinion) and it also created a lot of higher skilled jobs to build those robots and maintain them. The same will happen with AI, it will create a higher skilled job market which will benefit a community in a long term. Being afraid of changes will always get us stuck in the past.

Changes are good. But as the skill requirement keeps rising, more and more people will find themselves unemployable in principle. Sure, it may be a transitional period, but what are you going to do if suddenly half of your extended family will depend on your income?

Well, let me lay out the plan for you that Zuckerberg et al have in mind. 1. Create AI 2. Purge 80 - 90% of humanity in a WW 3. Live as kings of the planet indefinitely (since AI will have figured out a way to stop aging in humans by then). Personally, I have no problem with this plan even if it means my death, and that feeling is confirmed every time I turn I read the news.

>>> the point of near-human levels of learning

Argh, these days, AI is like NoSQL a few years ago. The magical buzzword taken to an extreme level.

When do you think it will happen, the point at which AI will overtake most of the jobs done by humans? By the time it happens, the society will change significantly. Significantly enough so that it's probably pointless to guess. Will the society adapt to the change? Well, it has adapted more or less successfully to the changes so far.

Even when it happens, there will always be human factor. Humans are social, they need interaction with other humans.

We should probably slow down with all the 'AI will take everything away!' drama (which makes nice headlines which contributed significantly to this buzz, thanks a lot). We should remind ourselves, that we don't even have self-driving cars in mainstream (or, in software terms, 'production').

We are talking about a massive leap here, required in both society to accept the change and the technology to make it feasible beyond cool demos. By the time this happens, who knows. Maybe half of the humanity will go extinct because of WW3?

I get the hacker mentality, that we should try to change the world and everything. But sometimes, it's good to stop for a moment and do a reality check.

More likely he is referring to the idea that AI is on the verge of destroying humanity itself. For instance:

http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bi...

Which makes sense. The opinion of everyone I know that has actually worked with machine learning and state-of-the-art AI (as in, written code, ran experiments, etc.) is that the idea of today's AI suddenly waking up and taking over the world is utterly ridiculous, or at least not something we should be afraid of for the foreseeable future.

People who worry about dangers of AI understand that too. However, figuring out how to make a safe AI may be much harder than building a powerful enough AI in the first place, therefore they argue it's worth to start working on AI safety now.

Frankly the use of the word "intelligence" to describe advanced pattern recognition algorithms is pretty laughable. Nobody is even close to anything the involves actual thinking / learning. I think your day jobs are safe.

Yeah, I'd like to hear more AI people (or anyone really) talk about practical solutions. AI will not enslave us or give us utopia; we will have enslaved ourselves with cameras and phone lines long before an AI has a chance to. Or utopia.

Large swaths of the population unemployable though... That's a real issue.

A living wage is the only good solution I can think of. Alternatively, pay people to dig and fill holes, but it's expensive and kind of pointless to make up unskilled jobs for people to do.

I do wonder how much a living wage would cost in the US though. Shift some money from defense? There's a good job for AI: balance a budget based on pre-defined policy goals.

> Large swaths of the population unemployable though... That's a real issue.

IMO the one job that is most threatened by future progress in AI is the job of software developer.

As for the menial jobs, of course nobody cares whether a human or a machine mows your grass. But I do think that most people would rather be nursed by human being than a robot. I think there will be a big increase in care-giving jobs, which would be wonderful because the world is in dire need of care-givers.

Do you suggest that current forms of technology be limited to create more jobs artificially or should only future advances in technology be limited? I don't see the difference really.

Good. Then we can focus on creating jobs that are fulfilling and creative instead of repetitive and replaceable.

>>I can't imagine how many jobs will be replaced when AI gets to the point of near-human levels of learning.

Let me tell you there is no point in resisting the inevitable. In fact if anything preparing for it makes it easier when it actually happens.

What will the AI be doing at that time? Won't it it be cooking food and taking care of the health of people? The rise of technology does lead to increased concentration of wealth, but that doesn't mean the rest of us will be starving.

AI doesn't need to be good to replace billions of jobs. All it needs to know is how to navigate around and manipulate objects in the real world.

In other words, that frees up thousands and thousands of man hours that can now be devoted to figuring out how to teach a machine common sense.

The same could be said about money as well. If AI could impact us in ways we cannot see right now, money is definitely one of them.

I'm less concerned about AI "taking our jobs" (see the other comments on lump of labor fallacy, etc) than what happens if we cure all disease, which is the only thing keeping population in check. How many humans can Earth support? What happens when we run out of resources? Will the ability for humans to live much longer help us colonize space? I hope so.

That said, it would be really nice to cure diseases that are particularly painful or kill young people (cancer, etc).

"What happens" is, the only reason 99% of humans are allowed to exist in the first place is because they were a good source of labor/taxes for the ruling class. Guess what happens the 99% no longer have anything worthwhile to offer?

> it will make many jobs obsolete and they will not be replaced at a fast enough rate.

Why won't they?

>However, when AI gets good enough, it will make capitalism obsolete

ftfy