Tag: Rise of the Robots

Must-read: Martin Ford: “How Unprepared We Are for the Robot Revolution”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Martin Ford: How Unprepared We Are for the Robot Revolution: “Machines are rapidly taking on ever more challenging cognitive tasks…

…encroaching on the fundamental capability that sets humans apart as a species: our ability to make complex decisions, to solve problems — and, most importantly, to learn…. In the coming decades, machine learning is likely to be the primary driving force behind a Cambrian explosion of applications…. The near-term future is likely to be transformed not by general purpose robots or AI systems but rather a nearly limitless number of specialised applications… ultimately consuming nearly any kind of work that is on some level routine and predictable….

Low-wage service sector jobs in areas such as fast food and retail… are certain to be heavily affected. Even more important will be all the white-collar occupations that involve relatively routine information analysis and manipulation. As these ‘good’ jobs, often held by university graduates, begin to evaporate, faith in evermore education and training as the common solution to technological disruption of the job market seems likely to also erode. All of this portends a social, economic and political disruption for which we are completely unprepared…. If we fail to have a meaningful public conversation about what robotics and artificial intelligence mean for the future, and develop workable ways in which to adapt our economy and society, then far greater, and more frightening, volatility is sure to soon arrive.

Must-read: Duncan Weldon: “Fear of the robots is founded in the messy reality of labour”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Duncan Weldon: Fear of the robots is founded in the messy reality of labour: “Dystopian visions of a future in which machines sweep millions of people out of work…

…are as old as technological change itself. What is missing from today’s debate about the march of the robots is an appreciation of the crucial role of labour bargaining power. When labour bargaining is weak, the Luddite fear of mechanisation is worth taking more seriously…. The best argument for being relaxed about this process is the long sweep of economic history itself…. But looking at the big picture risks missing important details….

To understand how the labour market reacts to labour-saving technology, economists tend to look at two related effects: the displacement effect and the compensation effect. The interaction of these processes determines how long a painful short run will last…. Labour market interactions are rarely the bloodless interplay of supply and demand lines on a graph. They are instead conditioned by the social and political context…. If labour’s bargaining position is weak, as it is currently, then the danger is that the higher productivity from new technologies will not sufficiently be captured in swift wage growth. Instead, it could flow to the owners of the technology…. Avoiding that unhappy outcome means recognising now that wage growth plays a crucial role in helping an economy through technological transitions and that labour bargaining power is a big part of it…

Must-read: Henry Farrell: “Facebook’s Algorithms Are Not Your Friend”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Ordinarily, buyers and sellers in a marketplace have a partial harmony of interests. All want to make a win-win deal. But all also want to, conditional on the deal being made, reduce the amount of surplus received by their counterparty by as much as they can. The interest vectors have a positive dot product. But they are not aligned.

However, when what is being sold is not the service to the user but rather the user’s eyeballs to an advertiser who may want to inform the user and may want to distort the user’s cognition and worsen his or her judgment, even the partial harmony of interest goes up for grabs. And now Henry Farrell is annoyed at Alex Tabarrok’s transfer of what was originally a valid intuition outside of its proper sphere:

Henry Farrell: Facebook’s Algorithms Are Not Your Friend: “Alex’s more fundamental claim–like very many of Alex’s claims…

…rests on the magic of markets and consumer sovereignty. Hence all of the stuff about billions of dollars ‘making its algorithm more and more attuned to our wants and needs’ and so on. But we know that the algorithm isn’t supposed to be attuned to our wants and needs. It’s supposed to be attuned to Facebook’s wants and needs, which are in fact rather different. Facebook’s profit model doesn’t involve selling commercial services to its consumers, but rather selling its consumers to commercial services. This surely gives it some incentive to make its website attractive (so that people come to it) and sticky (so that they keep on using it). But it also provides it with incentives to keep its actual customers happy–the businesses who use it to advertise…

Must-read: Dietz Vollrath: “Beating a Dead Robotic Horse”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Dietz Vollrath: Beating a Dead Robotic Horse: “People are not horses, they are apes…

…And apes are intelligent, creative, and social. The last one is very important, because it means we have a built-in demand for being around other people. A demand that we routinely pay to have supplied. We will always find ways to pay other people to interact with us. The horse agument, though, is a form of strong robo-pessimism. When I go after it, it makes it seem as if I have a real distinct difference from someone like Richard, a weak robo-pessimist. I don’t. I think I am a weak robo-optimist…

Must-read: David Deming: “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: David Deming: The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market: “While computers perform cognitive tasks of rapidly increasing complexity…

…simple human interaction has proven difficult to automate…. [Thus] the labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Since 1980, jobs with high social skill requirements have experienced greater relative growth throughout the wage distribution. Moreover, employment and wage growth has been strongest in jobs that require high levels of both cognitive skill and social skill…. A model of team production… [in which] social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and trade more efficiently… generat[ing] predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I test and confirm using data from the NLSY79. The female advantage in social skills may have played some role in the narrowing of gender gaps in labor market outcomes since 1980.

Must-Read: Willem Buiter: Transferring Robot Incomes to the People

Posted on by Brad DeLong
Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger poses for photographers at a preview of the film ‘Terminator: Genisys’. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

Must-Read: The distribution of wealth; the distribution of income; the distribution of utility–and, possibly, the distribution of eudaimonia, of lives worth living if we reject the hardline Benthamite pushpin-as-good-as-poetry position. For example, Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson (2010) convincingly paint a picture in which (a) pre-industrial inequality in wealth is very large, (b) pre-industrial inequality in income is moderate, and (c) pre-industrial inequality in utility is very large indeed. I think that this is a large part of what Willem Buiter is groping towards:

Willem Buiter: Transferring Robot Incomes to the People: “I’m more an optimist on technological change than some…

…who argue that the low-hanging fruit on the Tree of Knowledge has all been plucked. That we’ve done fire, we’ve done the wheel, we’ve done horsepower, and, you know, coal, electricity, chemicals, and all we have now is the tail-end of the boring ICT revolution, robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology, that is just a big yawn. I think this is completely wrong….

We haven’t begun to scratch the surface yet of many of the applications of ICT, robotics, artificial intelligence, and everything that goes with it, is going to create huge social, political problems. But in terms of wealth creation, you know, it’s the ultimate thing if you do this right. If you get the distributional aspects right, and don’t turn the world into an economy where the owners of capital and a few winner-take-all entrepreneurs are with all the money and the rest starve, I think technical progress is not the issue….

It’s always true that existing jobs are wiped out in a hundred years, but it’s going to go much faster now, in twenty years time, maybe half the existing jobs in the service sector, the white collar jobs, are going to be gone. Because the scope for automation is actually greater, probably, in cerebral work than in physical work. It’s very hard to get robots to walk properly. It’s much easier to make them think really fast. So I think this is going to be the real challenge. You know, unless we blow ourselves up in religious extremism…. This is going to be the real challenge we have to face, avoid the Piketty nightmare, although he got his analysis wrong…

Must-Read: Duncan Weldon: Are the Robots Taking Enough Jobs?

Posted on by Brad DeLong
Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger poses for photographers at a preview of the film ‘Terminator: Genisys’. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

Must-Read: Human smiles and human truly creative thought look to remain economically valuable. So learn how to smile!

Duncan Weldon: Are the Robots Taking Enough Jobs?: “Andy Haldane has warned that new technologies could replace up to 15 million British jobs…

…Ignazio Visco, trod much the same ground. Both policymakers are taking the threat of computerisation… seriously…. Historically… waves of new technology have created as many jobs as they have destroyed…. This time might be different, the next wave of labour-saving technology looks to be replacing human brains, rather than human brawn, and the impact could be far more wide-reaching. And, even if this time isn’t different… adjustments… in the past led to a generation or more of economic pain…

Must-Read: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: Labor in the Second Machine Age

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: Labor in the Second Machine Age: “In 1983, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief brought the debate into sharp relief…

…through a clever comparison of humans and horses. For many decades, horse labor appeared impervious to technological change. Even as the telegraph supplanted the Pony Express and railroads replaced the stagecoach and the Conestoga wagon, the U.S. equine population grew seemingly without end, increasing sixfold between 1840 and 1900 to more than 21 million horses and mules…. But then, with the introduction and spread of the internal combustion engine, the trend rapidly reversed. As engines found their way into automobiles in the city and tractors in the countryside, horses became largely irrelevant. By 1960, the United States counted just three million horses…. Once the right technology came along, most horses were doomed as labor. Is a similar tipping point possible for human labor?…

For Leontief, the answer was yes…. But… Leontief missed a number of important differences…. We humans are a deeply social species, and the desire for human connection carries over to our economic lives… human interaction is central to the economic transaction, not incidental to it…. Recent technological progress, while moving surprisingly fast, is still not on track to allow robots and artificial intelligence to do everything better than humans can within the next few years…. A quote attributed to a 1965 NASA report: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”…

The story doesn’t end there, however. Having valuable labor to offer is not the only way to remain economically important; having capital to invest or spend also ensures continued relevance. A critical difference between people and horses is that humans can own capital, whereas horses cannot…. The challenge here is that capital ownership appears to have always been highly uneven and has become increasingly skewed recently…. People, unlike horses, can choose to prevent themselves from becoming economically irrelevant…. It’s not unreasonable to expect people to vote for policies that will help them avoid the economic fate of the horse…

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: TensorFlow and Monetizing Intellectual Property

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: TensorFlow and Monetizing Intellectual Property: “Ten years ago Bill Gates suggested that open source software…

…was the province of “modern-day sort of communists” whose views on intellectual property were hopelessly outdated…. “We’ve had the best intellectual property system…. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.” Gates’ perspective was understandable…. Microsoft is still a big company… but an even bigger company today is Alphabet…. Its Google subsidiary announced it was open-sourcing TensorFlow, its formerly proprietary machine learning system…. Machine learning is super important to Google…. At a superficial level, this doesn’t make sense: if machine learning is core to Google’s future, then what is the point of giving it away?…

There’s a parallel to be drawn to my piece last week about Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing. The fundamental nature of the Internet makes monetizing infinitely reproducible intellectual property akin to selling ice to an Eskimo: it can be done, but it better be some really darn incredible ice, and even then the market is limited. A far more attainable and sustainable strategy is to instead focus on monetizing complements to said intellectual property, resulting in an outcome where everyone wins: intellectual property consumers, intellectual property copiers, and above all intellectual property creators.”

Must-Read: Olivia Goldhill: “Robot Helpers”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: It is all in the framing: is the human the robot’s assistant, or the robot’s boss? Does the human merely help the robot by helping in all the edge cases? Or does the robot handle routine matters leaving the human free to spend more time exercising their judgment? It can go either way, depending on the details, in which is the devil…

Olivia Goldhill: “Robot Helpers”: “As AIs take on a growing role in the workplace, a new role is opening up for humans…

…The robot’s assistant…. AI trainers who work as ‘robot’s helpers’ already exist at… Facebook, virtual assistant start-up Clara Labs, and Interactions, a company that builds AI to handle customer service calls…. AI trainers are helping a new digital assistant called M, which works as a concierge service to make reservations, order delivery, and send reminders through Facebook messenger. The product is being trialled in San Francisco, and a host of humans work to make sure that M’s recommendations are solid and that tables have been booked at the right restaurant. ‘We’ve invented a new kind of job,’ Facebook spokesman Ari Entin told the New Scientist. Though an AI personal assistant might be able to handle most requests, it’s handy to have a human around to decipher confusing wording, check for accuracy, and—in the case of Interactions, which takes instructions by voice—make sense of mumbled comments. In short, humans can help when the robot isn’t sure…