Must-Read: Noah Smith: Don’t Be So Sure the Big Tech Breakthroughs Are Behind Us

Must-Read: I have never thought that this graph is fair. “College tuition and fees” have skyrocketed in significant part because government subsidies have been withdrawn. (This withdrawal is, I think, a huge mistake.) Medical care costs have exploded because (a) our medical system is uniquely inefficient and (b) medicine today does so much more. Rich people at least would rather have today’s medicine at today’s nominal cost than 1960 medicine at its nominal cost–suggesting that from some points of view medical cost inflation has been negative:

Noah Smith: Don’t Be So Sure the Big Tech Breakthroughs Are Behind Us: “Timothy B. Lee used to be one of the most ardent techno-optimists. But he’s had a bit of a conversion…

…Lee now broadly suggests that the inventions of tomorrow won’t be as world-changing as those of yesteryear…. There are a number of industries–with health care and education being the most important–where there’s an inherent limit on how much value information technology can add. Because in these industries, the main thing you’re buying is relationships to other human beings, and those can’t be automated…. Manufactured goods have mostly fallen in price, while college and health care have soared. He reasons that these are difficult industries for technology to disrupt, since they rely so much on human-to-human interaction….

[But] there’s a case to be made for continued techno-optimism…. There are a vast number of other goods that also use huge amounts of time and resources to create… intermediate goods… parts and components, but also all the back-office services…. Technology that makes these things cheaper will make the business world more efficient, just like cheaper steel makes manufacturing cars more efficient…. A lot of effort right now is being poured into machine learning and artificial intelligence….

Technology is fundamentally about saving labor, and most of the labor in the typical white-collar work-day consists of thinking. Just as factory tools and vehicles saved physical labor in the Industrial Revolution, smart machines will save more and more mental labor in the Information Revolution…. Of course, there’s also a second possibility–the possibility that many humans might become redundant…. This is the rise-of-the-robots scenario that lots of people are worried about, but it doesn’t have to be a scary thing, if society changes accordingly…