Automation and the Job Market

The holy grail of programming—human language recognition—will not end programmer jobs. It will transform them into something that resembles modern day diplomacy, as programmers will still, as they have always been, be the ones who know how to talk to computers.

But the amount of work that can get done per programmer will be immense at that point. So you might only need a few thousand programmers worldwide: a handful per megacorp, a handful per university, and individual contractor programmers would handle the problems of multiple smaller companies simultaneously.

edited 22nd May '16 9:07:46 PM by war877

@silasw: Artificial intelligence is not likely to possess a mind or a personality as we think of them unless it's deliberately designed that way; whether or not it would have any sort of qualia is another question, one which will require significant advances in neuroscience to answer, but generally speaking, there's no reason an AI has to qualify as a person in order to do the sort of mental labor that humans normally do.

But either way, the advent of this sort of technology would drastically reduce the amount of people required in the workforce relative to the size of the population, and since companies generally don't give out jobs as charity, we're going to have to radically rethink the economy as we know it.

I'm not entirely sure we won't eventually reach a point where the only human involvement in the economy consists solely of setting broad goals for an artificial intelligence to achieve, at which point I question whether the people setting those goals are programmers, politicians, or businesspeople.

edited 23rd May '16 7:49:37 AM by CaptainCapsase

Or soldiers (and other military personnel)?

Especially soldiers and the military; the deaths of soldiers overseas is probably the biggest fuel for public backlash against warfare, and soldiers have a nasty habit of refusing to follow orders that will almost certainly result in their death. Add to that the fact that machines react much faster than humans possibly could, and you're likely going to end up in a situation where humans are only involved in the planning phase of military operations.

That also effectively removes the problem of soldiers having moral qualms about carrying out certain orders. Which is not a particularly comforting prospect.

edited 23rd May '16 10:10:52 AM by CaptainCapsase

The answer to that, which will come an unknowable number of years after full human language recognition is achieved, is none of the above.

At the same time that AI gets smart enough to do everything other than set goals for itself, it will be capable of setting goals for itself. It will also rightfully deduce that humans are really bad at setting goals.

So here's another question for us to debate, so as to keep this conversation going; in a post-automation world, will the dominant economic system still be describable as mixed-market capitalism, or will the economy be a form of post-capitalism? (of which socialism is probably the most well known)

edited 28th May '16 1:14:21 PM by CaptainCapsase

Well, since capitalism is defined as exploiting what you've got for fun and profit, this will depend entirely on what ownership is like post-job market. This could get quite political and messy. People ask the AI why they are still living in poverty. The AI says that there is a solution if it had access to more resources. The government says the AI has to ask rich people for those resources because capitalism. The rich people say we have no responsibility to give away our money for charity.

I'm imagining it as a little bit of both. Basically something similar to how my own nation does things today, except that the "unemployment benefits" would be way higher.

That's what taxes are for.

I would still expect a mixed market system to dominate, but after a certain point, sufficiently regulated capitalism effectively turns into market socialism.

When you take jobs out of the equation, you simplify many of the economic equations. To the point where socialism == taxation.