The Guardian today writes about the possibility that AI will eventually take over nearly all jobs:
Elon Musk’s suggestion to Rishi Sunak that society could reach a point where “no job is needed” and “you can do a job if you want a job … but the AI will do everything” revives a debate on the issue of how we work that has long been discussed.
....One significant body of research in 2019, led by Brendan Burchell, professor in social sciences and a former president of Magdalene College, Cambridge, established that eight hours of paid employment a week was optimal in terms of benefit in mental health, and that no extra benefit was subsequently accrued.
....A world without work “is a terrible idea of what society would look like for all sorts of reasons, as well as people’s mental health”, he said.
The labour market, as a way of distributing money around the economy, would have to be transformed, as would the education system, “to teach people how to fill their days, by writing poetry or going fishing or whatever, instead of going to the factory or the office”, Burchell continued.
It's possible that a world with no work is a terrible idea. But then, a world with atomic weapons is a terrible idea. A world with climate change is a terrible idea. A world with pandemics is a terrible idea.
None of that matters. AI will eventually take over practically all labor whether we like it or not. Instead of moaning about it, the only thing we should be doing is planning for it. Because we will indeed need to figure out a whole new way of distributing money around the economy.
The end of work, in every practical sense of the word, is coming. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in 50. In the grand scheme of things that's a difference barely worth noting. Does anyone care today about predictions in 1900 of precisely when cars would take over the roads? Maybe 1910, maybe 1930. Did it really matter who was right?
If "work" virtually disappears in the United States, hundreds of millions would starve on the streets. With no income comes no housing. No food. No clothing or opportunities for education, or recreation.
It isn't as if the US will ever tax the "haves" -- the folks who own the AIs of Production, so as to provide a minimum of support for everyone displaced. Plus, if the country remains stupefied by its entertainment and drug fixations, there won't be a revolution, violent or otherwise.
Seriously, I hope I'm being too pessimistic.
“If "work" virtually disappears in the United States, hundreds of millions would starve on the streets.”
This is highly unlikely to unfold in precisely this way. I’m sure hundreds of millions will become poor, but actual starving would lead to some of our “Second Amendment people” just raiding the homes of the owners of production for food and money. While ACAB, cops and the military aren’t all going to gun down starving white people to keep them from overrunning the mansions.
Though, AI will have replaced the cops and the military, and might not be so fastidious.
You are being too pessimistic. The end of work necessarily means the end of capitalism. There is presently a large minority of the American population that is ready to accept that, and it won't take too much of a shift to turn them into a majority. Indeed, there's reason to think that the Reagan era is coming to an end on its own and the population is ready to move back toward a New Deal/Great Society approach. Pendulums swing.
I agree with everything you said, and I am even more pessimistic than you.
A stratified society seems likely (even more so than already exists).
The wealthy, a small "middle" class that supports them (technocrats, professionals, law enforcement and private protection, servants, "clergy"), and masses of impoverished people. Basically the same trend that "first world" has already been seeing for a few decades - less middle class, declining conditions for working class, and more of the despairing masses. A return to pre-industrial human standards of wealth distribution.
Neo-feudalism, now with technological enhanced enforcement to supplement the physical enforcement.
The only "good" that could possibly come from it would be the environmental benefits of a massive reduction in human population. But experience shows that impoverished folks world wide seem to reproduce at even greater numbers despite their subsistence lifestyles and shortened and brutal lives.
And Yes - in surveillance based authoritarian societies, revolution seems quite unlikely.
"Basically the same trend that "first world" has already been seeing for a few decades - less middle class, declining conditions for working class, and more of the despairing masses." is non-factual. If you substitute "United States" for "first world" the statement becomes factual. If you examine into why this is so, you will find the solution to the problem.
It will be calamitous.
AI will be deployed using invested capital. The proviers of that capital will expect to use AI to replace wage-earning humans. Those replaced will have no claim on the output produced using AI.
Displaced workers will then need a way to survive--and to *consume* the output of an AI powered economy. Without consumption, there's no purpose for production. Can government tax the AI-powered economy and distribute the proceeds? That seems to be a pointless closed loop: Take *some* of the proceeds of AI production to finance *all* AI production?
It seems like private ownership of the means of production can't survive AI.
If it comes to that, the claim will and should be "we may not be fancy expensive AI but we can throw this rope around your neck and the other end around this lamppost."
Well, yeah.
I guess the nut of it is that AI doesn't eat, wear clothes, buy movie tickets, or go on vacation. If humans don't have money to consume these things, there's no point in having AI produce them. And if all of the things produced are provided for consumption for free, there's no incentive to produce them.
Our entire economy is predicated not on the exchange of money, but the exchange of *work*. Money only serves as a store of value for work not yet claimed. No work, no money.No money, no work.
Exactly. How does that even work?
Best analysis so far. No consumption —> no production —> no profits —> no capitalists
there will always be jobs as human prey on elon musk's private island
Dress for the job you want
This is why I show up to work with improvised mud camouflage and a pointy stick
People have been predicting the end of work for ages. Eighty years ago you had economists rosily predicting that productivity gains would mean everyone only works ten hours a week. George Jetson called Mr. Spacely a slave driver for making him press that button once a week.
It's never happened.
Also, given how absolutely shitty machine learning is, with no sign of it ever getting above certain thresholds it would need in order to effectively replace a lot of people, color me skeptical. People keep waxing lyrical over "if ChatGPT is this good now imagine what it'll be like in ten years!" and I keep thinking "ChatGPT represents an ungodly amount of resources poured into making a worse search engine."
The Guardian "writes about the possibility" is correct: there is nothing in the article or in reality as to how this would even happen.
Humans have been offloading physical work to machines for centuries, and we are absolutely zero percent closer to "not working" than we were at the start of those centuries.
Analytically, Kevin is conflating essentially computing power (which has also not eliminated "work") to an argument that is too broad.
Humans have not had to do long multiplication of large numbers in decades. That is an astonishing achievement. It has no effect on the elimination of "work" though.
I suppose the Star Trek like idea is (a) at some point (we are already at that point, but whatever) machines will be able to build machines, and (b) a humanoid like robot will be able to do all tasks that a human could do.
What I think is missing is that most of work, with the exception of brute physical labor - is deciding what to do next. Next minute, next hour, next week.
Moreover, I never see an explanation of how this is supposed to evolve in the first world capitalist economy. I think it was mentioned in a comment but the entire upper capitalist class depends on the spending of the lower class and poor.
A set up where no one has money to spend on stuff has been tried, and found wanting.
Ok - so we can close the borders. We don’t need more workers after all!
Definitely not a cybersecurity issue! The AI bots are learning how to steal your money. Yeah - let’s get rid of cash too.
New York
CNN
—
Multiple US banks have been hit by deposit delays on Friday caused by an error at a payment processing network, according to the Federal Reserve.
Bank of America alerted customers that their deposits may be delayed due to a problem impacting multiple banks. A Chase spokesperson confirmed to CNN that some of its customers’ direct deposits haven’t updated.
Customers at Bank of America, Chase, US Bank, Truist and Wells Fargo have complained of issues on Friday morning,
This should be fun.
AI-generated pornographic images of female students at a New Jersey high school were circulated by male classmates, sparking parent uproar and a police investigation, according a report.
Students at Westfield High School — located in Westfield, a town about 25 miles west of Manhattan where the average household income is $259,377, according to Forbes — told the Wall Street Journal that one or more classmates used an online AI-backed tool to create the racy images and then shared them with peers.
Some predictions from the 1930s,
The Television Newspaper,
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c647bc99b7d150fe925ea5c/1689297917753-YV0Q2O8ZJPLVMCK3EWBC/Marion_Progress_Thu__Mar_29__1934_%281%29.jpg
The future of lunch,
https://i.imgur.com/PttgjVi.jpg
I seem to recall Keynes claiming the workday would shrink, too. So Kevin is in good company, if he can kick Musk out.
It will not happen. Your cultural superiors are terrified of the idea of a body of people with time on their hands. The end.
What is much more likely is a societal collapse, followed by an ecological correction that solves climate change and rising housing prices, and busts the industrial base back to the early 1900s with some weird additions.
And then Pete Theil and the other vampires crawl out of their spider holes and declare themselves Kings of the Wasteland shortly before being slaughtered by their praetorians because they have nothing left to lose.
(This is also my answer to, "What is the great filter?")
"It will not happen. Your cultural superiors are terrified of the idea of a body of people with time on their hands. The end."
Yup. Same reason why there's the whole return to office narrative being pushed or helped along by, among others, Kevin. We can't have regular people with too much time on their hands. Whether it's fear of them becoming aware of their lot in life (and that it doesn't have to be that way) or simple greed that they're not creating enough wealth for their betters, those with the economic power simply can't abide the idea of us proles not working ourselves to death.
Work time has shrunk/is shrinking, but not necessarily by shortening the work day. There are quite a few jobs that are down to 35 hours a week, but the main trend over the past several decades seems to have been to reduce the number of days worked by increasing the amount of paid holidays. The US lags far behind Europe in that respect, but even in the US the average amount of paid holidays is increasing.
AI may take over the paid work I do, but I doubt it will lessen my unpaid work. Still have plenty of laundry, dishes, and toilet scrubbing to do.
I have a wash machine and a dishwasher, which is to say that dishes and laundry involve MUCH less work than they did a century ago. General purpose household robots like the Jetsons' Rosie are a few decades off yet, but they will come, thereby entirely putting an end to housekeeping work.
This is one of those subjects where KD is supremely confident of something that seems like mostly balderdash (one of the benefits of knowing you'll never have to say "it turns out I was wrong"). I just don't see any economy willingly destroying 99% of itself in this manner. If nobody has any income, nobody can buy all the stuff a theoretically-non-garbage AI can produce, and the top 1% can only consume so much.
"Deal with it" is a good sign that the author is not exactly engaged in a dialogue.
The answer obviously is that a connection to the economy other than through work is required. Rich people KNOW that the one need that all businesses have in common is the need for customers. Without customers, you don't have a business. When it comes right down to it, the rich people will take steps to preserve the customer base.
Where have we ever seen that when it might disaffect their hording?
The answer to that I think would be to nationalize AI systems.
If they and their use are public property there would be a fee or a license payment that could go right to social security.
You need to think bigger. All economic systems up to now have had as their central function the allocation of scarce goods and services. The end of work also means the end of scarcity for anything that is produced. (Real estate is not produced, and consequently will remain in limited supply.) What this means is that we need an economic system entirely different than anything that has existed up to now. Science fiction writers have speculated about what that might look like, and to my eye some of those speculations seem plausible.
A completely robotized economy that just provides stuff is probably a long way off and we'll need an intermediate stage for at least a few generations.
I’m guessing the end of work will occur in “1984”. Oh, wait a minute
I love how Kevin says "deal with it" as if any of us will have a say in how things go down, versus the couple hundred billionaire capitalists who determine everything.
I've said it before, my fear isn't that AI is going to get better than me and replace me or that it will go insane and take over the world. My fear/expectation is that a few corporations are going to vastly overstate or overestimate the capabilities of AI so they can lay off millions of workers and pocket all the money themselves so they can retreat to their well-apportioned play-bunkers before the environmental and/or social apocalypse happens.
So, minimum living wage is ~$100/hr? I could live with that.
We might be interested in predictions of when cars would take over the skies.
It is all well and good to shout that "The sky is falling!" The question is what do you do?
Can AI fix my plumbing issue? If yes, then bring it on because its impossible to find a plumber these days. Yeesh.
jvoe : It is also nearly impossible to find a competent and accessible primary care physician. And since PCP's diagnoses are wrong 80-90% of the time, AI is likely to be an improvement.
I think there would be more available Dr.s if AI first does the paperwork. That would free them up considerably.
They taught me how to work,
But they can't teach me how to shirk correctly.
As you see,
Science once again robs us of our jobs.
They've put a micro-chip in my place,
I hide behind screen of aggression nowadays,
It's just a way of saving some face.
So now I'm permanently drunk,
Like the rest of the race with,
Leisure.
-Andy Partridge, XTC
this seems like a weirdly speculative idea to present as a given. the possibility that AI will never reach the level where it can replace the majority of human work is not 100%, and in the next 50 years i don't even think it's 50%. but it's sure as hell not a sure thing.