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AI is not in the state to do a completely automated economy yet, many tasks still have to be done (or at least directed by) humans. Thus freeing humans up from busywork is still an important gain in our current situation even if eventually this will be become redundant as well.
People shouldn’t be conflating LLM’s with AI, the way they’re imagining the future. I remain firmly convinced that the utility of LLM’s will stay relegated to that of a glorified (and occasionally useful) autocomplete at worst, and at best a work assistant. Some of the recent updates to Gemini that I’ve played with have definitely sharpened their understanding to provide accurate answers to what I’m asking it; the only problem being that they were nothing like the answers it had previously given before; meaning it’s essentially given me every answer under the sun.
It’s a cool “toy” to prompt a human driven research project or to chase down answers to problems, but even when correct information is provided, you still have to vet and validate the veracity of it.
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People have gigantically been freed up from busywork in the office versus what things were like 30-40 years ago. Aside from an expansion of internet pornography, what exactly has been accomplished? New busywork was found, actually manufacturing things was offshored and Western economies have largely trended towards overfinancialized circlejerks where nothing actually happens.
I think it was the economist Ha-Joon Chang that argued the washing machine was more revolutionary than the Internet was, basically for reasons along this train of thought.
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There's tons of stuff that has improved. Things that you want bigger are bigger like cars, TVs and homes. Things we want smaller are smaller like medical devices, computers and cameras. They're all typically much higher quality too. Those medical devices are saving more lives, those cameras take better pictures, those cars are less likely to kill you in a crash.
Stuff is generally cheaper now (per hours of work needed) and more accessible like how 2024 was the first year ever that >50% of Americans took at least one flight. And they did it without having to hire someone to handle bookings for them. Email/texting/etc allows for instant (and automatically stored!) correspondence with anyone I want, meaning we don't have to wait weeks to communicate back and forth. You can listen to almost any song ever recorded, watch basically any show ever made. I can keep track of my financials without having to keep meticulous and detailed records and receipts of where I went and what I spent.
Modern manufacturing is bigger!. Jobs are down because automation and robots are more efficient than people, but we make more now locally than we used to.
Global manufacturing has actually gone down though (for the reasons you alluded to). That’s not actually the gain people think it is however, because there’s a trade off between resilience and efficiency; especially as technological demands increase in industries like automotive.
I know satellite farming in agribusiness is one example where efficiency is really proving itself to cut down on waste and the poor industry practices of old, but not all industries are benefitting from efficiency. The social system hasn’t yet managed to adapt to rapid technological progress. Especially the government.
Case in point. A little more than a year ago I had to call the IRS to retrieve a document related to my father’s old tax return. It involved me having to send in information about myself and a few other things and they’re still requiring people to fax in paperwork to some random office, wait 2-3 days, with no direct callback number to the agent you’re talking to, to then get a single document physically mailed to me. It’s not like I could just, oh I don’t know, email them a passworded attachment of what they asked for and check it right there over the phone.
Manufacturing is down in two ways. Number of jobs, and share of GDP. But output is much higher. It's down as a share of GDP because other parts of the economy in services and software grew even faster. In part thanks to the automation of factories and farms, which cleared up human labor to go into other fields. People no longer have to work out mowing the fields and picking crops or putting cars together in the assembly line, so they are now free to go do other work and that work has exploded in productivity.
Great example of how governments, without the competitive pressure to improve and outdated (sometimes even conflicting) regulations that lawmakers are too uncaring to address are unable to update themselves in the same way that private corporations generally can.
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Unfortunately, busywork is also subject to Jevon's Paradox.
Building a fully automated economy is going to require conscious effort to build systems that reduce/eliminate human participation. Otherwise the meatbags will just keep making more work for each other.
Exactly. The average office drone today has far greater capabilities than the one of the 1960s who didn't have internet or a computer and needed a manual mail room to be contacted. How much have they done with this?
Economists have been making this point for a while now. The efficiency gains here haven’t meant a labor drawdown resulted in time shaving activities for workers, it’s been 2x, 3x, 4x the extractive productivity to produce larger profits.
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IIRC there is a good amount of data suggesting that engineering teams have shrunk substantially in the last few generations: with computers (spreadsheets, CFD/FEM, digital control systems) product development from bridges to aircraft is at least abstractly more productive. Gone are the days of big rooms of draftsmen, in are a couple of CAD technicians (and they're better about answering "will it fit?" questions), and the parts themselves are getting optimized and closer-packed. Compare a car engine bay from the 60s to today, where there is almost no free space left (does make maintenance a pain sometimes, though), and efficiency is hugely up.
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Isn't that loosely true of everything following from division of labor? We get more out of farmland when we ascend the technology ladder and start building cars and tractors, not when we maximize the number of field hands.
There seems to be some assumption of "big AI central planning", when adapting existing (market) distributed consensus mechanisms is a possible, and maybe even more plausible, route. Maybe we need hundreds of agents (previously human) compiling The Beige Book regularly and distributing it, not a single Five Year Plan from a hallucinating AI.
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I don't think jevons paradox should be seen as unfortunate so long as the new usage is productive in some form. Efficiency is a key aspect of growing the pot and getting us all bigger portions.
Like this sounds good to me. New jobs getting created to meet previously underserved demands means more total demands being fulfilled and presumably better overall lives.
Jevons Paradox isn’t something you want to deal with, with crises like climate change looming on the horizon. When solving that you have to go to public policy, not to tech (1, 2). The problem with greater efficiency is that the effective production and precision of inputs isn’t necessarily the most optimal one when it increases fragility. That was the whole point Taleb was making when he wrote Antifragile a number of years ago. I’m all for efficiency and all that, but it doesn’t mean it’s without some massive drawbacks.
Externalities in consumption can actually be a problem, but that can be addressed in other ways such as carbon taxes.
I think there needs to be a line drawn between efficiency from cutting unnecessary things, and efficiency from removing all redundancies and backups.
If someone is making a sandwich and between every step they clap their hands for no reason, stopping them from doing that is objectively an improvement. But having another jar of peanut butter in the pantry you bought because you're running low and might need more for this sandwich is just long run efficiency, even if short term it might not be necessary.
I’ll refer you here to the episode that had “thermodynamics” in the title, if you’re interested to hear about the issues with a carbon tax.
And this is where the balance is. You saw it in the policy sphere as well after COVID struck, where people saw just how fragile shipping and supply lines were. I don’t know how many people were paying attention but within Biden’s cabinet, people were talking about the necessity of a large scale program of re-industrialization in the US; because of it.
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