Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

If automation will truly do all jobs, then by definition we have human-level AI. As labour supply enormously limits economic growth, we would have economic growth that is unimaginably large in this scenario. Imagine how quickly a startup could scale if they could clone their best engineer. Now imagine that applied to the economy as a whole. We would get economic doubling times on the order of months. If we truly get automation as flexible as any human, economic growth would be truly insane. Even mild redistribution would be effective in such a scenerio.

Absent human-level AI, there will remain tasks that only humans can do. Hence we will have jobs.

But truly, if we do get human-level AI, it seems to me we will have bigger problems than unemployment. I hate to get all Nick Bostrom, but it really does seem like the objective functions of the machines would be all that matters in this scenerio. As it is their objective functions, not laws, that would decide our fate. Either human-level AI is far off, in which case technological unemployment is not a worry, or it is not in which case technological unemployment is the least of our worries.

I think a point to consider is that for jobs for "tasks only humans can do", the precise job/opportunity for employment may not exist, but I agree that some opportunity will be created that utilizes that human skill that hasn't been displaced yet. This lag between human-replaced and human-finds-job could be problematic to the structure of society (also, consider the current human-job-search). A UBI here could be a shim (also, government welfare/unemployment support) to help support society during the lag - a buffer against the unknown which can help with the necessities (imagine having to find a job and deal with the prospect or being homeless because your were replaced and couldn't pay rent, that will exacerbate the problem.)

The number of human jobs will shrink over time as the machines approach human intelligence.

Fewer jobs with more people seeking them will drive wages down.

So the last gasp of human labor will look like a few excessively educated, qualified and well-connected people competing fiercely for the few remaining low-paying (but still paying!) jobs. The rest live on government benefits or rely on the charity of the trillionaires.

Those with pre-existing capital use it on automated businesses to multiply their fortunes. (And I bet they'll also automate personal security, a necessity when a trillionaire can still be killed by any of the other 10 billion humans. That's how you get private armies.)

You say that as long as there are tasks that only humans can do, "we will have jobs". True, but if and when only highly qualified/specialized jobs (doctors, researchers, engineers, etc.) need humans, most of the population will not have a realistic chance to get a job.

In my experience automating tasks many highly educated workers are easier to replace than low-skill workers. Many a university grad has been made redundant by a Python script; 0 plumbers have. AI people have a term for this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

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