Wages and labor demand have been declining for decades due to automation. Automation creates new job titles, but in aggregate, it creates a net loss of jobs. This is a new economic paradigm.
Thanks for writing. Great article as usual. Doomers are either clickbaters or their victims. Im not an economist but its obvious that if automation can replace jobs which leads to exponential profits then of course those jobs will be cut. Robots are already replacing jobs everywhere.
Not only low wage jobs but people who make $500k as surgeons and specialists. Millions of people will not have to be cogs in the wheel. Human brains do not exist to be cogs. Finally, technology will allow all the cog life to go away. There will be unbelievable productivity. Trillions of dollars and tens of millions of displaced workers obviously means a completely different economic and perhaps political system.
The average person cannot wrap their heads around this and think there will just be millions of people hanging out on the stoop once the jobs are gone. That's just mypoic. Thats applying 2030 technology to 2025 economics. Everything will change.
Will there be cybercrime? Sure. Machines dont commit crimes, though. People do. When they build a destructive agent, there will also be a shield. AI is justnantool, even at the goal of AGI level of computing.
Thank you for all your insights, Dave. Some people already get it. Some people will soon get it. Some never will.
Thanks, Dave. I'm glad your audience is growing. More people need to hear about this.
On a side note, one concern I have with the term "doomer" is that the label seems to signal "off the rails" and therefore one is either off the rails or not... yet the implications of your research here are that we are in for all kinds of trouble at least in the short/medium term... and therefore if psychologically one either is or is not a doomer, the vibe seems to be that doomers are AI Debbie Downers and everyone else is not.
Whereas, even people who are optimistic about AI long-term are often very concerned about the coming disruptions, including the breaking of the social contract. I suppose it's a nuance/ sound bite problem. I think most people are thinking they're hearing from two camps: "AI means everything will be terrible/kill us all" or "AI means everything will be great/save us all." They don't feel they have the bandwidth to sort it out or pay much attention unless and until it affects them directly. Alas nuance does not drive engagement. So it goes.
Thanks for the excellent essay, Dave. I've been pushing these issues for years, citing, in example, the reports "Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets" by Daren Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, "Labour Losing to Capital: What Explains the Declining Labour Share?" (OECD Publishing) and, of course, the book we all owe to, "The Second Machine Age", by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, but this document provides more recent and solid evidence for the structural decline of labor, which is going to accelerate as anthropomorphic robotics and agentic AI make strides into the labor maket, just as many other disruptive trends.
It's pretty clear though that the pie (global economy) is growing and not fixed...
with that being said I agree that
a) labor is not affected / benefitted proportionally (counter question: but why should it?)
b) technology does not always increase job demand (counter question: why should it act equal?)
In my personal opinion there will be a shift, both in what "value" is and how it is created/transferred and this will result in people doing entirely different things and also a renaissance of somewhat digitized jobs / traditional professions.
To answer a) it should because labor is the necessary precondition for the kind of capital accumulation that makes the development and deployment of these technologies even possible. It required the crippling of labor unions that the article details to neutralize the possibility of meaningful resistance to depriving labor of the gains in productivity that were bought using the profits that workers created. Without powerful institutions of worker self advocacy, the kind of utopian futures that technologists try to sell where large swathes of humans are freed from the burdens of work in a way that doesn’t involve mass immiseration and death will simply never come to pass.
Gracias
Interesting read.
I like that you use "advanced capitalism" in place of the usual horrendous "late stage capitalism"
This is a very insightful and meticulous piece. Thanks for another Shapiro 💎
Cheers
Thanks for writing. Great article as usual. Doomers are either clickbaters or their victims. Im not an economist but its obvious that if automation can replace jobs which leads to exponential profits then of course those jobs will be cut. Robots are already replacing jobs everywhere.
Not only low wage jobs but people who make $500k as surgeons and specialists. Millions of people will not have to be cogs in the wheel. Human brains do not exist to be cogs. Finally, technology will allow all the cog life to go away. There will be unbelievable productivity. Trillions of dollars and tens of millions of displaced workers obviously means a completely different economic and perhaps political system.
The average person cannot wrap their heads around this and think there will just be millions of people hanging out on the stoop once the jobs are gone. That's just mypoic. Thats applying 2030 technology to 2025 economics. Everything will change.
Will there be cybercrime? Sure. Machines dont commit crimes, though. People do. When they build a destructive agent, there will also be a shield. AI is justnantool, even at the goal of AGI level of computing.
Thank you for all your insights, Dave. Some people already get it. Some people will soon get it. Some never will.
Thanks, Dave. I'm glad your audience is growing. More people need to hear about this.
On a side note, one concern I have with the term "doomer" is that the label seems to signal "off the rails" and therefore one is either off the rails or not... yet the implications of your research here are that we are in for all kinds of trouble at least in the short/medium term... and therefore if psychologically one either is or is not a doomer, the vibe seems to be that doomers are AI Debbie Downers and everyone else is not.
Whereas, even people who are optimistic about AI long-term are often very concerned about the coming disruptions, including the breaking of the social contract. I suppose it's a nuance/ sound bite problem. I think most people are thinking they're hearing from two camps: "AI means everything will be terrible/kill us all" or "AI means everything will be great/save us all." They don't feel they have the bandwidth to sort it out or pay much attention unless and until it affects them directly. Alas nuance does not drive engagement. So it goes.
Thanks for the excellent essay, Dave. I've been pushing these issues for years, citing, in example, the reports "Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets" by Daren Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, "Labour Losing to Capital: What Explains the Declining Labour Share?" (OECD Publishing) and, of course, the book we all owe to, "The Second Machine Age", by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, but this document provides more recent and solid evidence for the structural decline of labor, which is going to accelerate as anthropomorphic robotics and agentic AI make strides into the labor maket, just as many other disruptive trends.
Great research, Dave !
It's pretty clear though that the pie (global economy) is growing and not fixed...
with that being said I agree that
a) labor is not affected / benefitted proportionally (counter question: but why should it?)
b) technology does not always increase job demand (counter question: why should it act equal?)
In my personal opinion there will be a shift, both in what "value" is and how it is created/transferred and this will result in people doing entirely different things and also a renaissance of somewhat digitized jobs / traditional professions.
To answer a) it should because labor is the necessary precondition for the kind of capital accumulation that makes the development and deployment of these technologies even possible. It required the crippling of labor unions that the article details to neutralize the possibility of meaningful resistance to depriving labor of the gains in productivity that were bought using the profits that workers created. Without powerful institutions of worker self advocacy, the kind of utopian futures that technologists try to sell where large swathes of humans are freed from the burdens of work in a way that doesn’t involve mass immiseration and death will simply never come to pass.
I agree with that assessment...