Economics of automation
When do the robots come for my job?
September 20, 2021 — January 21, 2025
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What does innovation in automation mean for the economy as it pertains to people?
Soundtrack: Machines work, by B(iftek) (video clip).
Daron Acemoglu has written much on the economics of modern automation recently(Acemoglu et al. 2020; Acemoglu and Restrepo 2018, 2020).
Many others have been thinking about this for a long time. It is tricky. What even is the role of manufacturing in the economy? How much does automation affect dematerialized economies? How about at the singularity?
Erusian and Doug Summers-Stay, Will Automation Lead To Economic Crisis?
tl;dr: Until the pace of automation increases faster than new jobs can be created, AI shouldn’t be expected to cause mass unemployment or anything like that. When AI can pick up a new job as quickly and cheaply as a person can, then the economy will break (but everything else will break too, because that would be the Singularity).
As usual, Scott Alexander’s opinion might not be definitive but it does point to some interesting stuff: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted To Know.
1 Incoming
What you really mean when you claim to support “UBI for job automation”: Part 1 — EA Forum
Ten Hard Problems in and around AI
We finally published our big 90-page intro to AI. Its likely effects, from ten perspectives, ten camps. The whole gamut: ML, scientific applications, social applications, access, safety and alignment, economics, AI ethics, governance, and classical philosophy of life.