This NYT article about the Pope’s comments on AI and the labor market got me thinking. To summarize my position, I’m not fully convinced that AI will lead to mass unemployment (based on history), but that if you consider the most extreme scenarios (complete collapse of demand for human labor), that the result looks rather grim (loss of agency). My initial reaction was to the following quote from the Pope: the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs. The pursuit of profits has always sacrificed jobs, and it has always created more jobs than it destroyed. We have no record of a technological disruption that has led to a complete collapse of human labor—ever. “…if this happened, and AI really were to put millions of people out of work, it would be unprecedented in human history. Never have new technologies spread fast enough to make large numbers of people unemployed for a long time.” - The Economist But let’s engage (below) with the possibility that this time is different —that AI will systematically replace humans and NOT create new jobs. Another subtext to the above quote from the Pope is that maybe we shouldn’t actually pursue AI. Rather than asking, “should we use AI to replace humans?” you have to ask a different question—“are there incentives to do it?” The answer to the latter question is, yes, for many reasons, primarily because free markets pursue profits. A second reason is that the world is in an international technological arms race (e.g., between the US and China). If you think we can just ban AI, or prevent companies from applying AI to certain processes, then think again. Banning AI will be like banning alcohol during Prohibition—there’s just too much incentive to use it. So let’s stay with the idea that this time is different (job losses, no new job creation) AND that AI is here to stay (we can’t ban it). Then we have to consider how to respond. Here’s another quote from the Pope: A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity. This notion of a guarantee is baffling for two reasons. The first is that, no one at Anthropic or one of these frontier labs is guaranteed a job—they work for it. The second is that, it brings to mind the idea that something other than the market should be guaranteeing jobs. And this is my major contention with these discussions. If you don’t let the market determine economic activity, then you are faced with the following very challenging questions. What jobs should be guaranteed? What should those jobs earn? Who gets to decide? Why is that the right decision? These questions may have no satisfying , objective , fair , or just answer when individual humans try to answer them. Capitalism’s objective is quite clear—maximize profits. Free markets determine how much food gets produced (and in turn how many people the planet can support), how many jobs get created, what people earn for those jobs, etc. There’s no individual human judgement of how many people we should support, what jobs people should have, how much people should earn, etc. because the market determines it through an infinitude of micro-signals. So some of my major contentions with these discussions about AI and the labor market are that they sidestep some thorny issues: that it will be hard to ban AI and that if there truly is widespread job disruption, it’s not at all clear how we’re going to determine a good allocation of resources (jobs, incomes, etc.), who gets to decide, why we’re deciding that, etc. Where I think I agree with the pope is that humans lose market-mediated agency when demand for human labor goes away. Currently, a high-agency individual at least feels like they have upward or downward mobility made available by free markets. I think many of us won’t know what to do with ourselves to find meaning without demand for human labor. What do we as humans (individually and collectively) optimize for if free markets go away? TLDR AI is likely here to stay, despite implicit or explicit calls (see first quote) for bans or limitations on it. In the event of near complete collapse of demand for human labor, we lose the guiding force of free markets in deciding how to allocate resources, which align with important moral intuitions (e.g., rewarding contribution). Without the market to guide the allocation of resources, humans face the morally fraught challenge of deciding how to allocate resources. Humans are likely to lose agency (market-driven agency) as a result. Individuals will have to seek agency and/or meaning in non-monetary pursuits (e.g., religion, volunteering, etc.), which may feel foreign to many. submitted by /u/FickleShare9406
Originally posted by u/FickleShare9406 on r/ArtificialInteligence
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