AI will not decrease long-run demand or supply for human labour

Joshua Vantard
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

AI will not decrease long-run demand or the supply for human labour. Nor is that my key concern regarding AI.

Though Jay Wacker’s response is incredibly detailed and insightful, I would rebut the negative sentiment of its TL:DR headline “20M-40M jobs are at peril in the US”. Jay’s answer is highly conditional, looking at statistics of the US workforce at present. Imagine if we were to look at statistics of job roles in the 19th century. Would many jobs such as weavers, avenators, bagmen or bodgers still exist? My masters thesis was on this topic. Firstly, let me clarify. In this answer I am speaking of Narrow A.I, not Strong A.I. By long-run employment, I mean over the course of decades, not years. The overarching theme is much deeper. We do not merely have to look at statistics in a limited contained time-series and context, to determine labour market supply and demand. We have to bridge anthropology, history, philosophy, meta-statistics and economics. We have to look at human nature and endeavour itself.

10–15m jobs are destroyed in the US every single year. 20m — 40m is minor over the course of decades.

In the US, up to 5 million jobs are created and destroyed every year as a net figure. Employment increases or falls tend to fall within 2% of the 250m US workforce. Even if we were to focus on short-run statistics, the concern regarding AI is therefore low.

We now have fewer blacksmiths and horse-cart drivers. Car mechanics and taxi-drivers replaced these. Adaption is good. There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about A.I. We are much further from any form of Strong A.I than the press choses to sensationalise, so let’s put that aside for now.

Innovation ought to be welcomed as long as its benefits are shared and its risks mitigated. New jobs will be created that we cannot yet imagine, due to AI.

If AI’s efficiency bonuses are well shared, new jobs need not even be created, since income will disperse itself across the system, through an unconditional living wage or through other forms of non-monetary benefit. That might not happen, so it is a big if.

Therefore irrelevant of this possibility, a whole new eco-system of labour around AI, or as a result of AI should pop up to replace previously lost jobs, whether through the incentive of capitalism, socialism or simply human vision and imagination. Who could have guessed we would now have ‘social media gurus’? Or even programmers before computers were invented?

Wants and imagination are infinite and there will always be something for people to do, irrelevant of the economic system that follows.

Perhaps there will be a labour supply shortage to achieve these acts of human imagination at first, but it will eventually catch up. You see, if we still have a capitalist system after the proliferation of A.I, we will still have industry competition and tasks to do to help firms compete for profit. If not, we will likely all become self-actualised and pursue acts of human imagination and exploration, given human happiness is not only a function of monetary gain. Human ingenuity and inventiveness is not the be underestimated.The condition is, that government, firms and wider society accept the need to move on and create different sorts of jobs. For example, in the North of England, UK, we have a lot of unemployed coal miners from the 1980s. They, government and firms have to put them back into action. We cannot blame it on them. It is how the entire system fits around them too. Do you know how many people it might take to build a city on Mars? Quite a lot. So that is but one example. I find Maslow’s hierarchy a good illustration of why we will always have something to do if we make the right trade-offs and sacrifices.

The fundamental worry is therefore not about jobs, but about whether or not systemic risks AI might create can be mitigated and whether or not its benefits will be shared.

Elon Musk supports Open AI and it is trying to solve this issue. Will AI make our economy and society too ‘fragile’? By ‘fragility’ I mean when a minor shock such as a small virus or car crash may lead to huge negative shock events, such as in the 2007 sub-prime crisis or 2010 flash crash. These are known as Black Swan events. Will that fragility become more volatile, given the increase of unknowns with our acceleration of technological advance? Will are inability to mitigate risk due to increasing complexity, lead to larger periods of stability followed by larger scale shock events? How long can we make a stable wave last?

In addition to this I would argue for the democratisation of technology and AI to more equally share its benefits. I will go into specifics on how this can be done in a further edit.

Technological artefacts that have this degree of risk have been around for decades.

For example, CDOs (credit debt obligations). It does not have to be A.I. The concern surrounding technology has always been around. Grandmas and grandpas complaining that their children will never learn to do math since they have calculators. What calculators have allowed us to do is spend more time focusing on organisational tasks that still involve logical, mathematical processes, but at a higher level. Can our grandmas and grandpas organise an excel spreadsheet? Probably not. The fundamental worry concerning risk due to complexity is not unique to AI. It displays itself across a range of artefacts, systems and eco-systems.

Now is not the time to be sticking to what will soon be described as the middle-ages.

Ultimately, if the US shies away from Narrow A.I it will be left behind by the likes of China and India especially. Now is the time to keep pushing forward whilst continuing to question how we can mitigate the risks we are creating. Ideally all nations will do this together, not as separate competing entities.

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