This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.

Subscribe to the Grand Strategy Newsletter for regular updates on work in progress.

Discord Invitation

17th August 2014

Link

AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs →

This excellent article was brought to my attention by Siggi Becker. It lays out the key themes, the arguments that are being made now, and some informed opinion in an attempt to understand the impact of present automation trends continued into the future.

This issue is of some interest to me as I have blogged extensively about what is now called technological unemployment, including…

I have noted many times that automation and technological unemployment have been features of future studies from the Luddites through the 1970s. There were routine predictions of mass unemployment, as well more optimistic scenarios of 20 or even 10 hour work weeks, and societies re-structured around an economy of maximized abundance. (This is one of those spectacular failures of twentieth century futurism that has made contemporary futurists today more cautious and circumspect.) The economy shook off both the optimists and the pessimists, and muddled through – though it did, to be sure, create many new jobs in new industries.

The assumption is that this will happen again. It has become a commonplace among contemporary economists to point out (rightly) that in all previous technological disruptions to the economy, after a “temporary phase of maladjustment” (often causing significant human anguish that is not recorded in economic statistics) the economy always goes on to create more jobs in new industries. This is beyond dispute. 

What is up for dispute, however, is whether the next wave of technological unemployment brought about by AI and automation will be like every previous historical development. Induction tells us that the future will be like the past, but we also know from historical experience that unprecedented events do occur, and it is usually just when we are getting comfortable with a high level of inductive confirmation that we are blindsided by an unexpected and unpredicted development that upends every historical precedent. On this side of the equation, we must note that we have more computer power at our disposal now than ever before in history, that this computer power and its AI capabilities are steadily increasing, and that these trends may at some point pass an unprecedented threshold.

The correct question to ask, then, is not “Will automation displace jobs?” We know that it will do so. The correct question is, “Will newly automated sectors of the economy contribute to job creation in new industries and in other sectors?” This, if we are going to be honest, is unknown. Historical precedent suggests that that answer is “Yes,” but we cannot exclude a priori the possibility of a new phase in the development of industrial-technological civilization, however unlikely.

Tagged: AIartificial intelligenceautomationhistorical precedentinductiontechnological unemployment