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January 12 - January 17, 2021
In the twenty-first century, technological progress will solve one problem, the question of how to make the pie large enough for everyone to live on. But, as we have seen, it will replace it with three others: the problems of inequality, power, and purpose.
These problems will require us to engage with some of the most difficult questions we can ask—about what the state should and should not do, about the nature of our obligations to our fellow human beings, about what it means to live a meaningful life. But these are, in the final analysis, far more attractive difficulties to grapple with than the one that haunted our ancestors for centuries—how to create enough for everyone to live on in the first place.
in almost every decade since 1920, it is possible to find a piece in the New York Times engaging in some way with the threat of technological unemployment.20
Throughout history, there have always been two distinct forces at play: the substituting force, which harmed workers, but also the helpful complementing force, which did the opposite.
what matters is the nature of the tasks themselves, not whether the worker performing them is “skilled” or not
“parametric design.”
Another machine can tell whether a person is lying in court with about 90 percent accuracy
Whivh person? What about bias against black people and other POC because of lack of data or wrong data to learn from
Labeling tasks according to how humans do them encourages us to mistakenly think that machines could only do them in the same way.
thinking about whether or not it is efficient to use a machine to automate a task, what matters is not only how productive that machine is relative to the human alternative, but also how expensive it is relative to the human alternative. If labor is very cheap in a particular place, it may not make economic sense to use a pricey machine, even if that machine turns out to be very productive indeed.
even the most innocuous technologies can still attract cultural conservatism with a similar effect.
Osnt this conservatism warranted in the case of ai given it points to systemic inégalité
it seems, many of the male workers are attached to an identity that is rooted in a particular sort of role—its social status, the nature of the work, the type of people that tend to do it—and are willing to stay unemployed in order to protect that identity.26
some people, facing the mismatches of skills, identity, and place, might simply give up on the job hunt and drop out of the labor market altogether.
we should be cautious about focusing exclusively on the unemployment rate, and keep an eye on the participation rate as well. The
We can think of this kind of scenario, in which there are actually too few jobs to go around, as “structural” technological unemployment.
why assume that these tasks will always be ones that human beings are best placed to do? As task encroachment continues, will it not become sensible to allocate more of the complex new tasks to machines instead?
There is no forest that lets human beings retreat into perfect solitude and self-sufficiency, nor has there ever been. All human societies, small and large, simple and complex, poor and affluent, have had to figure out how best to share their unevenly allocated prosperity with one another. Over
Inequality is what happens when some people have capital that is far less valuable than that of others; technological unemployment is what happens when some have no capital worth anything in the market at all—certainly no human capital of worth, and likely no traditional capital, either.
The fact that inequality levels are so different among countries, even when countries share similar levels of development, highlights the important roles that national policies and institutions play in shaping inequality.”
this is exactly what is happening with Native Americans, as long-standing community members find themselves getting expelled from their tribes by corrupt tribal leaders.
Soure??
Many technologies that will be household names in the future probably have not yet been invented.
How do i stay ware of trend
36
Are you fucking kidding me
While we impose tight constraints on the economic power of these companies, they are free to choose much of their own noneconomic behavior as they move onto this new political turf. We let them both set their own boundaries and police those boundaries.
do we really trust Big Tech to restrain themselves, to not take advantage of the political power that accompanies their economic success? And even if they wanted to act to constrain their political power, are they actually capable of doing it? These companies may have the deep technical expertise needed to build these new systems, but that is a very different capability from the moral sensibility required to reflect on the political problems that they create.
In a world with less work, we will face a problem that has little to do with economics at all: how to find meaning in life when a major source of it disappears.
At times, work does seem to get its meaning not from the positive thought that having a job is something to celebrate, but from the opposite, negative idea—that to be without a job is worthy of shame.
“In Praise of Idleness.”
live in a “society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”
but if this work is done for noneconomic ends, in pursuit of purpose rather than productivity, then economic worries about “efficiency” are a mistake.
When considering a future with less paid work, it is far more illuminating to think simply about free time. Some may want to spend some of that time doing things that look a lot like “leisure” today; others may incline toward more structured and directed roles, in the spirit of “work” in the past.
We can only find meaning in what we actually do—and freed up to spend our lives differently, we will find meaning elsewhere instead.
The problem is not simply how to live, but how to live well. We will be forced to consider what it really means to live a meaningful life.
