From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Sep 01 2003 - 03:05:39 MDT
On Sunday 31 August 2003 23:37, Reason wrote:
> I'm prepared to go out on a limb and say that automation (basically
> increased efficiency, the same work done by fewer people) will never result
> in a state in which there *can't* be job creation in new industries or in
> old industries invigorated by said automation.
That seems illogical. Automation without AI made certain forms of fairly
manual repetitive tasks be uneconomical if done by humans. Computation
greatly increased the number of tasks that humans are not competitive in.
Increasing AI in our automation may well eventually produce AI that is more
intellectually capable than any human being. At that time I would expect
most tasks to be assigned to non human labor. The only exclusions would be
certain types of service jobs. And there will be only so much demand for
those, almost certainly not enough to employ everyone.
>
> I don't see any difference between the coming automation and the process of
> automation that's been happening since the industrial revolution got
> underway. A failure to imagine new industries and whole new areas of
> productive human labor open to people displaced by robots (indeed,
> *enabled* by the use of those robots) doesn't mean those things don't
> exist. Just like the same failure to figure out what all those farm
> laborers in 1900 would be doing as they were replaced by farm automation,
> and all those household domestics would be doing as they were replaced by
> household
> automation...things seem to be just fine as a result of those enormous
> gains in automation (making 99% or so of those previous workers redundant),
> and we're all better off for it. If you asked the man on the street in 1900
> what the millions of farm workers would be doing with themselves, I doubt
> you'd have got a good answer.
>
What is missing here is that the pace and extent of technological change and
thus the range of automation is greatly increased. So an analogy to the turn
of the last century is not particularly appropriate. We on this list most
seem to believe that the day will come when humans are outcompeted by
automation including AI on a very large range of tasks. It stands to reason
that the remaining set of tasks will not forever be sufficient to provide
employment for all of them, even assuming perfect retraining.
Now it is certainly a very open question what, if anything, should be done in
such an eventuality. It is also an open question to what extent we are
already experiencing this effect.
- samantha
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