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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 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.
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.
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!
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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