A certain error of logic here. We’re being told that we’ll not get richer from AI because AI will destroy jobs. But that’s the wrong way around. We’ll get richer from AI according to how many jobs AI destroys - the more destroyed the richer we shall collectively be.
The aim and purpose of all technological advance is to destroy jobs, after all.
Almost 8 million UK jobs could be lost to artificial intelligence in a “jobs apocalypse”, according to a report warning that women, younger workers and those on lower wages are at most risk from automation.
How excellent is the correct reaction.
In the worst-case scenario for the second wave of AI, 7.9m jobs could be displaced, the report said, with any gains for the economy from productivity improvements cancelled out with zero growth in GDP within three to five years.
They’re just not getting it in the slightest. Sure, we agree, transitions can be difficult. But the end state of AI destroying 7.9 million jobs will be that we’re all richer by 7.9 million jobs.
A very basic observation about humans is that desires are unlimited. So, if we have more human labour available to tackle more human desires then that’s good - more human desires can be sated by that more human labour.
This is how we got the NHS, universities, ballet and professional sports after all. Back three centuries 90% of us had to spend all of life standing around in muddy fields growing the crops that kept 100% of the population alive. Then someone invented the tractor (as a shorthand for the mechanisation of farming) and we ended up needing only 2% of the population on the land. 88% were then free to go work in the NHS, universities, ballet and professional sports. We are now richer - because of the tractor - by whatever value we put upon the NHS, universities, ballet and professional sports.
We can say the same thing about the Spinning Jenny - the great wealth was that abolition of hundreds and hundreds of hours a year per person of entirely female labour in handspinning - and the washing machine (again, a shorthand for the mechanisation of much domestic labour). Formerly exclusively female and household labour disappeared into the maw of the machines leading to the economic emancipation of women - a very grand increase in human wealth.
AI destroys jobs that are currently done by human labour. That frees up human labour to do other things, sate other human desires for things that can be solved by human labour. Who knows, we might eventually be able to get the NHS to work properly, universities to educate and British sports teams that win something now and again. Ballet, well….
Of course, it’s possible to postulate that human desires are not unlimited. In which case there are no more things to be done with excess human labour - therefore leisure will rise. Given the number of people telling us that working hours should fall - all that 4 day week stuff - this is also an increase in human wealth. On the useful grounds that an increase in leisure with a maintained consumption level is an increase in human wealth.
There is no possible outcome of all that work disappearing into the machines that makes humans worse off. No, really. As Bill Nordhaus has shown. Imagine that all the money from the AI goes to capital, that the tech bros gain all the gains. We end up with:
If capital productivity is rapidly rising (which is the same statement as the robots are eating all our jobs) then yes, it's true, the plutocrats who own the machines end up getting (or, more accurately, asymptotically approach getting) 100% of the output of the economy. But at the same time, and because of this process, wages go up in real terms at 200% a year.
Transitions, ah, yes, transitions. But the end state simply cannot be a bad one. So, let’s do it, right?