This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don' think automation will have a net-destructive effect on jobs--that is, new jobs will replace old ones. But to go along with the hypothetical, probably a continuation of what we have now: more welfare spending, but also occasional on-time universal remittances like in 2020-2021, but it will not be a UBI.
Likely not because in a consumerist capitalist society elites derive their wealth from the lower classes. Who is clicking those Facebook, Google, or Instagram ads? There will be more business to business activity, bypassing the consumer altogether, such as Facebook selling ad space to NGOs and multinationals, Amazon selling cloud storage to big companies, Microsoft servers, etc.
There will always be some scarcity, such as social status or between the merely rich and ultra-wealthy.
The critical point is when the expected economic value of a typical human goes negative. That's when things start to go screwy, and I worry we're crossing that line soon.
Presently deriving wealth from large numbers of the lower classes is the most common route, but what if you could derive your wealth from large numbers of robots instead? Unless the aggregate poor can sell something to the aggregate not-poor, cash will flow away from the system until the population dies out.
This obviously concludes with Mongolian supremacy, since they have land to build with and fewer mouths to feed. Steppe Nomads at it again
I'm a little confused. Would you agree that the expected economic value of a typical human is positive today? That is, the average human produces more output over the course of their lives than they consume. It seems like requiring this go negative is predicting a large decrease in the average human's economic productivity. Why do you think humans are going to be much less economically in a future with more automation than they are today?
I agree that present-day EV is positive.
Humans take maintenance: food, water, medicine, education, entertainment. Even if you'll accept being a subsistence farmer in the wilderness, that costs land. I'm predicting that, post-automation, most humans will be unable to do enough useful work to pay for this upkeep. That is: anyone able to provide you with food or water or farmland, could get what they want more cheaply by paying for a robot. At that point it's economically efficient to do away with the human. That's what I'm worried about.
This confuses absolute advantage and comparative advantage. Suppose that there are two jobs, which I shall imaginatively call Job 1 and Job 2, plus two people, whom I shall imaginatively call Person A and Person B.
Suppose that Person A can be better at both Job 1 and Job 2, yet production is optimised by Person A doing the job with the lowest opportunity cost for them, and Person B doing the other job.
This is why e.g. there are cognitively loaded jobs that aren't done by the highest IQ people. Employing Terence Tao as my accountant would have advantages over employing some mere 130 IQ moron, but that doesn't make it economically viable. The same is true for an AI, even if that's a 2000 IQ AI.
Both you and @Gillitrut have cited comparative advantage. I don't think that saves us here. Comparative advantage means you need to be willing to do some job for less than the cost of operating a robot to do that job. In a high-automation world, that cost will be very cheap -- the robots are building robots. What I mean by "expected economic value of a typical human goes negative" is that the price someone would be willing to pay for a human to do that job is less than the price of the resources it takes to maintain a human life.
Imagine I'm Cyberpunk Genghis Khan. I have robots that produce everything of economic value to me, including art, food, and military might. I'm keeping Mongolia as a nature preserve, and some subsistence farmers are trying to live out in some forest. Why should I let them? They produce some valuable widget, but they need to be allowed to keep at least enough farmland to keep them alive. I could have my robots build that same widget while occupying half the space.
If they press their comparative advantage, they could produce widgets with one third the space they need to live, and then die because humans require upkeep and industrial automation can drive the value of labor below that upkeep cost.
This is a (common!) misunderstanding of comparative advantage. If humans could produce some good or do some job for a lower marginal cost than a robot then the humans don't just have a comparative advantage, they have an absolute advantage. A group (say humans) can have comparative advantage relative to some other group (say robots), even if the second group can produce everything more cheaply than the first group, as long as the second group cannot produce literally everything it needs.
I detect a tension between these two sections. On the one hand, robots are so cheap we can mass manufacture them to do any new labor as the need arises. On the other hand, robots are so rare and expensive that only the rich own and have access to them. If robots are so cheap, why can't the workers making widgets (or farming, or whatever) buy robots to do their own jobs instead and profit thereby? If robots are so expensive, how is it there are enough to fill literally every labor demand?
More options
Context Copy link
The subsistence farmers can farm and trade and build things among themselves as if the society with the robots around them didn't exist and they were living in 2022 (or 1900).
If the subsistence farmers have robots, they can use the robots to farm, and they're fine. The scenario only becomes a problem if the subsistence farmers don't have robots. But if they don't have robots, then, among themselves, humans farming and trading does have a comparative advantage over robots, and trading among themselves is as economical as it was in 2022.
If you're cyberpunk Genghis Khan, that's the same sort of problem as regular Genghis Khan. If the only thing keeping the peasants from being killed by you is whether trading with them is more economical than killing them, that's a scenario that can and has happened in the modern day.
There's a difference between "peasants die because they can't trade with rich people and the rich people kill them", and "peasants die because they can't trade with rich people, so they can't make enough money to eat". The latter scenario is the one that's in question; the former is as old as humanity.
More options
Context Copy link
No, it means that the opportunity cost of operating the robot for that job is higher than using it for some other job (maybe something that humans can't do) and the expected (economic) profit of paying you for the job is positive.
Let's go back to the simple example. Suppose that Person A is a robot. Hiring Person B over Person A for Job 2 means that the opportunity cost of using the robot for Job 2 is higher than the opportunity cost of hiring Person B over Person A for Job 1. Reducing the accounting cost of operating Person A to do Job 2 can change the rationality of using Person A for Job 2 over Job 1, but it doesn't change the comparative advantage of Person A for Job 1.
This is the same reason why high productivity countries like the US and Western Europe/Japan/etc. don't just produce everything. If I am the sole CEO of Nike and I can have my design team in Germany and my manufacturing team in Vietnam, even if my German team could do both better, it makes sense for me to invest in both countries. Insofar as I am using my German team to manufacture the clothing, I am not using them to design new apparel, production techniques etc., which is wasteful.
Or again, go back to the Terence Tao example. Suppose that he has an IQ of 300 rather than just 180 or whatever he has. Do you start hiring him to do your accounts now?
"Ah, but I'm talking about being able to produce lots of Terence Taos at a cheap cost." Ok then, but this increases society's capacity to pay more people to do work. And again, you could use those Tao clones to do your accounts... Or things that Tao can do and your accountant can't. Which is more rational?
What you need for automation to make humans redundant is a fall in the expected marginal productivity of labour to 0 or lower. That could happen! For example, jobs could become so cognitively complex than you'd need an IQ of 150 just to keep up. That's why, even today in the developed world, it's extremely hard to get a job if you have an IQ below 80.
On the other hand, automation often increases the marginal productivity of labour. People who can cannot write coherent sentences and cannot do long multiplication can do what were once cognitively loaded jobs, due to tech like Grammarly, calculators, word processors etc.
The sensible conclusion is that we don't know. The sensible practical inference is that we should prepare for both outcomes. However, to do the latter, we need to actually understand the problem: it would be something like excess complexity in the workplace, not cheap robots.
If you can spin up a new Terrence Tao clone for $0.05 per hour, then no human who is not more capable than Terrence Tao in some dimension can earn more than $0.05 per hour. I would create enough Terrence Taos do do all the mathematics I want, and then create some more to do my accounting. The opportunity cost is the cost of the hardware it would take to run such a model, and hardware costs are already falling exponentially even without AI electrical engineers.
Automation increases society's capacity to pay people for work, but not the economic need to do so. The robots are being built and maintained by robots. The "critical point" I describe comes when anything that a sub-120-IQ can do, can also be done by a robot for $0.05 per hour.
"A fall in the expected marginal productivity of labour to 0" is exactly what I'm talking about. Experientially, this looks like slowly raising the minimum IQ it takes to earn enough to survive until almost all people are excluded, and population massively shrinking as a direct result.
Increased labor productivity: advanced chess obituary. There comes a point where Human + AI is worse than AI alone. Rather, it's an anomaly when a human is able to meaningfully assist an AI to accomplish some task.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think two different positions are being equated here.
First is the question of whether humans will be productive enough to sustain their own existence, that is, whether humans will create value in excess of what they consume. This has been the case for probably all of human history and it's hard for me to comprehend what could happen to the human species that would cause a massive decrease in productivity such that we would be unable to sustain ourselves by subsistence farming.
Second is the question of whether it will be more efficient to automate various kinds of labor as compared to having humans doing them. That is, whether it will be cheaper in price per unit output to have a robot farm some patch of land (or whatever) as compared to having a human laborer do it.
The key point is that both these things can be true. It can be the case, simultaneously, that (1) humans who engage in subsistence farming are net-EV positive and (2) robots doing subsistence farming instead would have a higher EV.
As long as humans have a comparative advantage (equivalently, as long as automation is not costless) there will be things we can find for humans to do. And if automation is costless, then why wouldn't everyone use it to fully satisfy their desires?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Status goods. "hand made" is already used this way.
One obvious thing (though far from an utopian answer): prostitution. (and if people missed this, then then they missed also other things)
Odds are, if you can replace people doing physical labor, your tech level allows replacing prostitutes with cyborg prostitutes that are much prettier, cause no drama. never talk back and feel just as real.
But most people just don’t want to get into the Experience Machine.
Cyberwhores wouldn't be an experience machine, just better prostitutes.
More options
Context Copy link
Are you sure about that?
Well, maybe Zoomers are built different. She did say it had never happened before.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, the expected worth of having a child is negative right? Back in the good old days you would breed free labor for the farm, but now in the burbs kids are an enjoyable economic drain. Like a really, really expensive 18-year long movie ticket.
Or are you saying that the average person at least "makes up" for their cost in the growth and value they provide? And that maybe we're crossing that threshold?
If you're valuing things purely from the perspective of hedonistic pleasure, sure. Worth noting that you might be concerned with a future beyond your own lifespan...
More options
Context Copy link
Yep, that's what I mean. From the perspective of a country, humans are the economically most efficient way to get most things done. E.g. China can do interesting things with 1.4b, "GDP per capita" is still a meaningful metric.
Now, say we go through an automation foom. You can grow lots of crops and feed lots of people very cheaply -- but what do you get in return? Starving the masses is a bad idea because you want to preserve your labor force -- but your labor force is all robots now, so what does it matter? All else equal, a country with a small population will outcompete a country with a large population.
I don't like this, but I'm not sure what to do about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link