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What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?
Everyone’s been talking a lot about both the downsizing of the federal government, and the rapid improvement of LLM technology, such that the fake jobs are being cut at the same instant that more jobs are becoming to some degree fake. I don’t necessarily think that the US government should be a bastion of fake jobs, especially Culture War ones, but at the same time I wonder if there’s any end game people like Musk are working toward.
As far as I can tell:
Blue collar jobs are still largely intact. There’s about the same need as there ever was for tradesmen, handymen, construction workers, waste disposal, and so on. Most of the automation in those fields came from vehicles a century ago, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to leverage things like prefab construction all that much more. I personally like the new “3-D printed” extrusion style of architecture, but it doesn’t look like it actually saves all that much labor.
Pink collar: Childcare takes about the same amount of labor per child, but there are fewer children. Nursing is in demand, but surely healthcare can only take up so much of the economy. Surely? Retail continues to move online, and we continue to descend into slouchy sweatpants, parachute pants, and the oversized, androgynous look. I would personally like it if some of the excess labor went into actually fitted clothing, but haven’t seen any signs of this. Cleaning services seem to have more demand than supply, with an equilibrium of fewer things getting cleaned regularly than in the past, while continuing to be low in pay and prestige, so I’m anticipating more dirt, but little investment into fixing it.
Demand for performance based work seems to be going down. It’s just as good to listen to or watch a recording of the best person in a field than a live performance by someone less skilled. But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
Middle class office work, knowledge work, words, paperwork, emails: seems about to implode? How much of the economy is this? Google suggests about 12%. That seems like a lot, but nothing close to the 90% of farm work that was automated throughout the 21st Century. This article was interesting, about the role of jobs like secretary, typist, and admin assistant in the 20th Century. I tried working as an assistant to an admin assistant a decade or so ago, and was physically filing paperwork, which even then was pretty outdated.
The larger problem seems to be status. What kinds of work should the middle class do, if not clerk and word adjacent things? There seems to be near infinite demand for service sorts of work – can we have an economy where the machines and a few others do all the civilizationally load bearing work, while everyone else walks each other’s dogs and picks up each other’s food? My father thinks that there’s less slack in many of these jobs than when he was younger. I’m not sure if that’s true in general, or how to test it.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with a future where most people are doing and buying service work. The current trend of women all raising each other’s children and caring for each other’s elderly parents seems to not be working out very well, though.
The only real solution I'm aware of is some form of Universal Basic Income. In other words, if the economy explodes as human cognitive and physical labor is automated, then governments tax it and redistribute it.
This will likely prove unpopular with the people and entities being taxed on their newfound wealth, and it remains to be seen whether governments/democracies will listen to their anxious and unemployed populace over entrenched interests who now hold most of the money and power.
I don't think the likelihood of this happening is high enough for me to relax and take it for granted.
Even if UBI was a thing, that doesn't necessarily mean that inequality wouldn't be. The future uber-wealthy might well be the descendants of those who already had existing wealth, or at least shares in FAANG. I'd take this as acceptable if it meant I wouldn't starve to death.
Blue-collar work won't be safe for long either. We're seeing robotics finally take flight, there are commercial robo-taxis on the road, and cheap robo-dogs and even humanoids on the market. The software smarts are improving rapidly, and so is the hardware. Humans are going to end up squeezed every which way.
There are no reassuring answers or easy solutions, but at least hope isn't lost that we'll come out of this unemployed yet rich beyond our wildest dreams. It only takes a trivial share of the light cone to make billionaires of us all, assuming the current ones will deign to share.
UBI would be a new inflationary pressure, as it directly increases the money supply. Our Federal Reserve would need to to interpret that as another tool along with interest rates - if they were to employ it effectively.
(I'm not sure how things work across the pond.)
Government A: takes in $1B in taxes and distributes it out in UBI.
Government B: takes in $1B in taxes and distributes it out in welfare.
What is the difference between these two in terms of inflationary pressures?
(If you consistently print money to be able to give out more money than you take in you'll likely get inflation, of course.)
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Why do we need UBI? If AI ends up being as cheap, efficient, and transformative as people want to claim, it should drive down the price of all goods to near 0.
I think what's more likely to happen is AI compute is going to be an effective currency replacement. Rather than using fiat dollars, it will be based off of the amount of AI runtime it takes to complete a task for the given runtime/ energy calculations of any given workload. Assuming AI can replace all jobs and produce a quality of life better than any human machination can contrive, then the human inputs for the production of goods and services should be 0.
a) it could drive down the price of all goods that do not intrinsically require human labor to near zero.
b) [thing A which limits to 0] / [thing B which limits to 0] does not necessarily limit to 0.
c) if 99/100 necessities limit down to near zero... the funny thing about necessities is that they are necessary. All of them, not just a subset thereof.
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The value of goods is not based solely on labor -- that's Marxism. The value of goods is based on scarcity, which cannot be alleviated by AI (even with advanced robotic labor) for two reasons:
We live in a physical universe with physical limitations, on a single molten rock with limited, albeit abundant, natural resources. The price of the phone in your pocket is based in part on the physical materials used to assemble it, and any use of those has an opportunity cost. The glass in your iPhone can't be used in someone else's Android. So both the raw materials and the assembled goods have an inherent value because they are scarce and alienable.
Human consumption has a huge status component. Even if AI-powered robotics could produce any and all goods, human labor and artistry will still remain valuable, perhaps even moreso, because of its scarcity. Inevitably there will be profit to be made in appealing to conspicuous consumption, and so profit there will be.
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The income of most humans in such a scenario would also be nearly zero. Cognitive and physical labor would be entirely devalued.*
I'd expect anyone with even a modest amount invested would see it soar, and even savings would elevated in terms of purchasing power.
The question is whether this will be enough.
*Even the absolute minimal human existence requires about a hundred watts of power and raw biological feedstock. You can't lower your wages lower than this without dying, and every dollar that could be spent on food and shelter would be much better spent elsewhere. A comfortable existence would be significantly more expensive. I think in a worst-case scenario, humans would be killed outright, slightly less worse but awful would be us being outcompeted and left to die by an uncaring ASI, in less bad scenarios marginalized and unable to meaningfully engage in agency.
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UBI I think has too many problems to work.
First of all, it’s dependent on getting the money in the first place, and it’s probably pretty trivial to renounce citizenship and bugger off to a tax haven today, and given that “owning AI” doesn’t require you to be in the country at all, there’s nothing tying the guy who owns the company to the country the AI is in.
Second, keeping the UBI within reasonable limits is impossible. There will be millions of voters with hands out to collect UBI, and maybe 100 people paying for it. When the chance comes to vote on benefits and taxing the owners to pay, the only vote that keeps the politician in power is “raise the payout!” Eventually this becomes unsustainable as you tax 95% of the income of tge three people doing anything productive to pay the millions who aren’t.
Third, a population controlled by dependence on government handouts to survive is not free. You can get people to do anything you want if the alternative is “lol no money for you”. And this will be 99% of the population. That’s not something to get into lightly.
Say what you want about Andrew Yang, but his idea to tie UBI to a VAT might work. It doesn't matter where the wealthy are, if they want to buy or sell in the American market it pays into the system.
It’s plausible, assuming that you’re talking about physical objects. It gets a bit strange to talk about buying and selling in America when the product is a game that lives on a server in Maldives or something. I’m not even sure how VAT work on drop shipping outfits or things sold to Americans just outside American territory (I.e ships in international waters don’t have to deal with sales taxes).
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Maybe. VATs get tricky for items never sold.
If I spend most of my resources on researching and building a shiny and state-of-the-art automated widget-making system (that I will never sell) such that I am able to make & sell widgets dirt-cheap, how much VAT does a widget add?
Answer: far less than before I built said system.
This sort of thing pops up a lot in tech - fabs, VLSI chips, and software development all often fit this pattern where most of the cost is internal and as such somewhat nebulous.
As you build your shiny, state of the art system you are purchasing items from other businesses and those items will be taxed.
If you're just saying that, "As things get less expensive, VAT will decrease," then yes, that's true, but so will the amount of UBI needed to maintain a standard of living.
This is missing the point, meaning I probably need to elaborate. Let me give an example of what I mean:
VAT: 10%, to put a number out of a hat.
Cost of the one-off ASIC's raw materials? $10k.
Cost of the one-off ASIC's R&D? $10M.
Total amount of VAT if the ASIC was sold at 'true' price? $1,002k
Total amount of VAT if the ASIC was kept internal-only? $2k
The former is true assuming a fixed demand. The latter is true only for items which are required to maintain a standard of living.
I trust given this information you can spy the immediate counterexample to your assertion that fulfills the former but not the latter.
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This may sound silly, but presuming we get superintelligent-but-completely-domesticated AI, a government could possibly just tax the AI itself. In this scenario, a government asks an AI to pay some tax based on the money it's earned from serving and working for people. Granted, this requires the AI to actually have meaningful access to the relevant pursestrings.
Yeah, if the AI is doing stuff inside the country, that's like "establishing a business presence". Then, you can just tax whichever entity to your heart's delight.
This highlights one of my favorite contradictions about the "AI will result in everyone starving because there are no jobs" doomerism. To make it work, you need some weird, strong separation between the AI-haves and the AI-have-nots. They're, like, totally isolated, and no trade is possible, because the AI-have-nots are supposedly worthless or something. Thus, why the AI-haves are supposedly buggering off to some island tax haven or something. But then, if there's literally no trade happening between these two groups, one has to ask, "Why wouldn't there be trade within the group of the AI-have-nots?" The only answer I can think of is that pretty much the vast majority of their wants and desires are already being fulfilled by some other mechanism. But that, of course, leaves us decidedly not in an "all the AI-have-nots are starving to death or something" situation.
Te AI is in Bahamas, it’s making decisions for a business in the USA. Who gets the tax money?
As for the AI have nots starving, this is how history has tended to work for most of human history. When a worker has no useful skills he gets laid off permanently, and either subsists on a dole or goes hungry. The Industrial Revolution was also a time of great poverty with thousands reduced to living in tiny tenement housing. The Victorian Era had people living underground as it was illegal to be homeless.
What’s unprecedented here is the sheer scale of the problem. There’s no reason to think that a government can permanently and sustainably put three quarters of the population on welfare and still function. Nor do I find it plausible that millions of people with no prospects of useful employment are going to thrive. We have historical examples of people in that situation, and none of them have produced Utopian societies. Indian reservations are impoverished shit holes compared to the surrounding communities. So are ghettos. Rome created a huge underclass full of dysfunctional families with her dole. Turning all of America into a giant reservation where everyone lives on the dole is not going to create a flourishing society that creates hippy art. It’s going to create. Poverty and corruption and dysfunction.
If the US wants that tax money? The US clearly and obviously can do this right now (and in many ways, they do), without an AI involved.
For many of the periods you're talking about, the vast majority of the population was actually doing subsistence farming. Obviously, this was not a nice life, especially given their level of tech, with even extremely rudimentary advances still on the horizon. They were much more at the mercy of things like weather patterns. While going off to work the land had downsides, it was an alternative. If a bunch of folks basically had to go off and do that, they could again trade with one another, coming from a baseline of ideas/tech that they could generate in-community that is significantly higher than what was possible at those times.
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I think this scenario is a lower tech version of the paperclip maximizer: the AI haves simply don't value the well being of the have nots, and take up all the resources, desirable land, etc with their superior technology. In the extreme case think something like: these N acres could produce wheat for 100000 people, or they can be used to pasture grass-fed, free-range, spa lifestyle cows to produce one weekly meal of 10 aristocrats.
This seems very very unlikely, but not impossible, looking forward 30 years feels like a crapshoot right now!
This is the part where they're operating in your country, and so you can do stuff like taxing them. Unless it's also like the paperclip maximizer in that we assume that any attempt whatsoever to do things like that results in them just casually killing you. My point is that then you have a different problem. You have a, "AI-haves killing people problem," not a, "AI-have-nots just starve because they're unable to produce/consume sustenance-level calories (or stuff worth sustenance-level calories).
Similar if it's, like, China who gets AGI/ASI and they start conquering and to conquer in order to take up all the resources, desirable land, etc. You don't have a "AI-have-nots just starve" problem. You have an AI warfare-and-killing-people problem.
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That's basically the gist. The rich own all the resources just like they do now, but as the AI becomes more and more capable, the rest of people can't even offer their labor in return for resources because they can't compete.
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