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Is the rapid advancement in Machine Learning good or bad for society?
For the purposes of this comment, I will try to define good as "improving the quality of life for many people without decreasing the quality of life for another similarly sized group" an vice versa.
I enjoy trying to answer this question because the political discourse around it is too new to have widely accepted answers disseminated by the two American political parties being used to signify affiliation like many questions. However, any discussion of whether something is good or bad for society belongs in a Culture War threat because, even here on The Motte, most people will try to reduce every discussion to one along clear conservative/liberal lines because most people here are salty conservatives who were kicked out of reddit by liberals one way or another.
Now on to the question: Maybe the best way to discover if Machine learning is good or bad for society is to say what makes it essentially different from previous computing? The key difference in Machine Learning is that it changes computing from a process where you tell the computer what to do with data, and turns it into a process where you just tell the computer what you want it to be able to do. before machine learning, you would tell the computer specifically how to scan an image and decide if it is a picture of a dog. Whether the computer was good at identifying pictures of dogs relied on how good your instructions were. With machine learning, you give the computer millions of pictures of dogs and tell it to figure out how to determine if there's a dog in a picture.
So what can be essentialized from that difference? Well before Machine Learning, the owners of the biggest computers still had to be clever enough to use them to manipulate data properly, but with Machine Learning, the owners of the biggest computers can now simply specify a goal and get what they want. It seems therefore that Machine Learning will work as a tool for those with more capital to find ways to gain more capital. It will allow people with the money to create companies that can enhance the ability to make decisions purely based on profit potential, and remove the human element even more from the equation.
How about a few examples:
Recently a machine learning model was approved by the FDA to be used to identify cavities on X-rays. Eventually your dental insurance company will require a machine learning model to read your X-rays and report that you need a procedure in order for them to cover treatment from your dentist. The justification will be that the Machine Learning model is more accurate. It probably will be more accurate. Dentists will require subscriptions to a Machine Learning model to accept insurance, and perhaps dental treatment will become more expensive, but maybe not. It's hard to say for sure if this will be a bad or a good thing.
Machine learning models are getting very good at writing human text. This is currently reducing the value of human writers at a quick pace. Presumably with more advanced models, it will replace commercial human writing all together. Every current limitation of the leading natural language models will be removed in time, and they will become objectively superior to human writers. This also might be a good thing, or a bad thing. It's hard to say.
I think it's actually very hard to predict if Machine Learning will be good or bad for society. Certain industries might be disrupted, but the long term effects are hard to predict.
Over what time horizon?
I expect the deployment of machine learning to follow approximately the same path as every other labor saving technology humans have developed. In the short term it will be somewhat of a mixed bag. On the one hand we'll be able to produce the same/more goods at lower costs than before. On the other hand this savings will likely come with impact to the people and companies that used to produce those things. Over the long term I expect it will make people much better off.
I'd like to believe that, as it follows a well-established pattern. But honestly, what really happens if there's no more work left for people to do anymore? It seems that we'd have to really count on some redistribution of wealth, UBI, etc to ensure that the gains of the new automation doesn't just go to the owners of the automation (as much as I never thought I'd ever say that), or else people simply will not have the means to support themselves. Or if the job destruction is localized to just upper-class jobs, then everyone will have to get used to living like lower-class, and there may not even be enough lower-class jobs to go around. The carrying capacity of society would be drastically reduced in either situation.
In other words, what if
means the death of large swaths of society?
That would be awesome! People (mostly) don't work because work is awesome and they want to do it. People work because there are things we want and we need to work to get the things we want. No work left for people to do implies no wants that could be satisfied by human labor.
This paragraph seems in tension with the idea of lacking work for people to do, to me. If a bunch of people are left with unfulfilled wants, why isn't there work for people to do fulfilling those wants? This also seems to ignore the demand side of economics. You can be as greedy a producer of goods as you want but if no one can afford to buy your products you will not make any money selling them.
I think there's an equivocation between present wages and standard of living to post-AI wages and standard of living that I'm not confident would actually hold. Certain kinds of jobs have certain standards of living now because of the relative demand for them and people's capability to do them and the costs of satisfying certain preferences etc. In a world with massively expanded preference satisfaction capability (at least along some dimensions) I'm not sure working a "lower-class" job will entail having what we currently think of as a "lower-class" standard of living.
I'm a little unclear what the "carrying capacity of society" is and how it would be reduced if we had found a new way to generate a lot of wealth.
I'm not an economist, and I know very little about econ, so it's very possible that there is something major I'm missing.
This is the part of my hypothesis that's tripping me up. Could you walk me through it?
Basically, let's say that we do fundamentally believe in capitalism (because I do), that a person should have to pay for any good or service that he receives.
And let's say that there's a person who is dying of starvation, because he has no job, because AI does everything better and cheaper than he can. Therefore, no one wants to come to him to do these tasks, because they'd rather go to the owner of the AI. How does this person get the money he needs to get the food he needs?
There exist people today who, due to disabilities or other conditions, are unable to support themselves financially. They depend on the charity of others, and in richer countries they may also get tax-funded disability benefits. If the development of AI caused a significant number of people to become unemployable, there is no reason why we couldn't just include them in that category.
If the claim that "a person should have to pay for any good or service that he receives" is to be interpreted literally, then that's not "capitalism", that's some extreme form of libertarianism, verging on parody. That would make even charity immoral. Real-life libertarians believe, at most, that people should be free to do what they want with their money, including giving it to charity. Maybe Andrew Ryan of Bioshock believes that donating to the poor is bad because it keeps them alive even though they deserve to die, but I doubt you could find a real libertarian who believes that.
I, too, "believe in capitalism", that is, I believe that a free market with some (limited) state intervention is the optimal form of social organization from a utilitarian perspective in the current technological environment. I don't believe that there is a universal moral law that people have to work for everything. If robots take all the jobs, taxing the robots' owners to provide income to the newly-unemployed would clearly be the right decision from a utilitarian perspective.
When I say "a person should have to pay for any good or service that he receives", I don't believe it as a moral thing, for the most part. I don't think it's immoral if someone gets something through charity. But I also don't think people should count on charity. Partly this is out of my own fears. I would hate living a life in which I was entirely dependent on someone else's charity to stay alive, where I had no control over my own destiny, no ability to provide for myself. I'd be terrified of starving to death all the time!
Also, even if I don't think it's "immoral", I do at least have an aversion to people believing that it is incumbent upon other people to provide for you (let's say if you're older than 18 and able). I'm against most of the arguments saying it's immoral for people to be rich, or saying that it's perfectly fine to just take their wealth by force, or painting rich people as monsters. However, true AGI may be where I would have to draw the line on some of my beliefs, due to the sheer magnitude of people who could be put out of work by AGI. In that case, we may have to put capitalism aside and move to a new model that works better in a post-scarcity world.
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So, for this kind of situation to arise it needs to be the case that the marginal cost for providing this person the necessities of life is below the marginal value their labor can generate for others.
Notice there is nothing AI specific about this scenario. It can (and does) obtain in our society even without large scale AI deployment. We have various solutions to this problem that depend on a variety of factors. Sometimes people can do useful work and just need a supplement to bring it up to the level of survival (various forms of welfare). Sometimes people can't do useful work but society would still like them to continue living for one reason or another (the elderly, disabled, etc). The same kinds of solutions we already deploy to solve these problems (you mention some in your comment) would seem to be viable here.
It's also unclear to me how exactly AI will change the balance for a persons marginal value vs marginal cost. On the one hand the efficiency gains from AI mean that the marginal cost of provisioning the means of survival should fall. Whether directly due to the influence of AI or do to a reallocation of human labor towards other things. On the other hand it will raise the bar (in certain domains) for the marginal value one has to produce to be employed.
Partially this is why I think it will be a long term benefit but more mixed in the short term. There are frictions in labor markets and effects of specialization that can mean it is difficult to reallocate labor and effort efficiently in the short and medium term. But the resulting equilibrium will almost certainly be one with happier and wealthier people.
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