Did the Singularity Already Happen?

Ezra Klein writes:

Ezra Klein - Our depressing robot overlords: Paul Krugman writes, “the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.”... [T]he difference between what computers can do and what computers cannot do is not whether the job requires a college education, but whether doing the job can be broken into “routine and repetitive” tasks. Martin Ford, who has done some thinking on these issues, draws out the implications:

The key thing to understand here is that our definition of what constitutes a “routine and repetitive” job is changing.... As specialized artificial intelligence applications... get better, “routine and repetitive” may come to mean essentially anything that can be broken down into either intellectual or manual tasks that tend to get repeated.... [I]f 50% of a worker’s tasks can be automated, then employment in that area can fall by half. When you begin to think in these terms, it becomes fairly difficult to make a list of jobs that (1) employ large numbers of people and (2) are completely safe from automation.

The obvious set of questions this raises is “how will the economy adapt?” Krugman argues that “if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer -- we’ll have to go about building that society directly,” perhaps through things like unions and universal health care....

But I’d pose a different question: How will we adapt psychologically?... How do you keep morale up in an economy when more people are simply less necessary than they used to be?

That’s a harder question to answer than “how do you make sure everyone has access to medical care?” But for a substantial fraction of the population -- not a majority, but certainly millions and millions of people -- it’s an increasingly pressing one. People get trained for a job in their 20s, and then, in their 40s, that industry gets disrupted by technology, or sent to China, and even if some of those people find jobs again, they tend to be at a lower level -- a drop in status and perceived usefulness that’s psychologically devastating. This is a question for not only the future, but given the number of long-term unemployed in the economy right now, the present. And it’s not a question that we have any very good answers for.

We have gone from having 80% of our males working outside-the-home as farmers and farm laborers down to 2%. We have gone from having a world in which nearly every female past puberty spends her life effectively chained to her children, her kitchen, or her loom to one in which I cannot think of a house I have been in in a decade that had a loom. We have already gone through the great transformation by which the general business of life--growing and processing our food, building our shelter, weaving our clothes, and telling ourselves stories for information and entertainment--has been extroardinarily, comprehensively automated. And yet we have found things to do.

Consider the room that I am now in as I wait for my 12:00 noon PBM down here in Durant Hall. In half an hour there will be twenty people in the room. There will also be lunch for 20 (market value $200), 10 tables (market value $1000), 30 chairs (market value $1500), one projector (market value $1500), one carpet (market value $500), and one conference room (market value $200,000). Given amortization rates of 3 years for the projector, 25 years for the building, and 5 years for the tables, chairs, and carpet, and assuming the conference room is used 4 hours a day, the economic activity in the room for our hour-long meting will consist of:

$14.00 for the room
$1.00 for the tables, chairs, and carpet
$0.50 for the projector
$200 for the lunch--of which $20 is the farm gate price of the ingredients

Figure that the people making these things are earning an average of $10/hour, and we have 22 hours' worth of work that will be contributed to the process. We will add another 20 hours as we discuss Berkeley's gen Ed curriculum--or maybe you should value our tie at the $50/hour that the market values it, and say that we in the meeting are contributing 5/6 of the work. Count our preparation time, and something like 90% of the value of the meeting comes from what we professional academics do. And only 1% of the value is the food, clothing, and shelter--putting the 7% or so that is making the food tastier.

The creation of food, clothing, and shelter that would have taken up more than 70% of work value now--for this meeting at least--takes up less than 2%. But the overwhelming automation of the business of providing us with calories, warmth, and dryness has not left us short of things to do, and not feeling as though we have suffered status degradation.