Many brilliant people that I deeply admire are concerned that automation will put the bulk of the human population out of work, forever. Here’s Yuval Noah Harari, talking on Ezra Klein’s podcast, back in March:
"[M]ost people tend to overestimate human beings. In order to replace most humans, the AI won't have to do very spectacular things. Most of the things the political and economic system needs from human beings are actually quite simple. We earlier talked about driving a taxi or diagnosing a disease. This is something that AI will soon be able to do better than humans even without consciousness, even without having emotions or feelings or super intelligence. Most humans today do very specific things that an AI will soon be able to do better than us.
What we are talking about in the 21st century is the possibility that most humans will lose their economic and political value. They will become a kind of massive useless class — useless not from the viewpoint of their mother or of their children, useless from the viewpoint of the economic and military and political system. Once this happens, the system also loses the incentive to invest in human beings."
Ezra disagrees. Here’s the core of his rebuttal to Harari, from an August piece in Vox:
"[T]he Industrial Revolution, and subsequent technological revolutions, really do feel relevant. A hundred years ago, or 400 years ago, people did much more useful jobs — huge swaths of the human race, for instance, were directly involved in the production of food and the collection of water.
Compared with those ancestors, humans today are a massive useless class. What sort of job is “editor of an explanatory journalism web site” next to “farmer”? Would our ancestors value the work of psychologists or customer service representatives or wedding planners or computer coders?
But this, to me, is the story of labor markets in the past few hundred years: As technology drives people out of the most necessary jobs, we invent less necessary jobs that we nevertheless imbue with profound meaning and even economic value."
In this point-counterpoint, I’m with Ezra. I don’t think humanity will suffer widespread unemployment due to automation anytime soon, short of development of AGI. So long as there is anything at all humans can do that machines can’t, we’ll find a way to pay people for it.
But that doesn’t put me at ease. I still look at automation with a really deep sense of foreboding. We’re already at a point where if you’re just starting your career, you want to live in one of America’s iconic cities and regularly go to brunch, it really helps to work the technology industry. That’s only going to get worse. I’m afraid that in the foreseeable future, if you want to earn enough money to live wherever you want, you’re going to have to either work in support of one of a few large, algorithm and data-centric software platforms, or be a superstar in your field.
Working in home care or as Youtuber, two growing job categories that require qualities of care or creativity that won’t be automated anytime soon, won’t get you to a standard of living and cultural experience relative to society overall that we today refer to as “middle class.” Home care workers get paid very little. Even the Youtubers who earn enough ad revenue off their content to pay their bills can see their livelihood evaporate in an instant due to demonetization, a copyright dispute, or some other algorithmic pitfall that appeared out of nowhere.
For a vision of the future, look to the recent past of the media industry. The point is frequently made that it’s really hard to make a decent living in media unless you are talented, catch a huge break, and get hired by one of, charitably, the 20 most powerful organizations. It used to be that you could buy a house and participate in America’s common culture writing for a local paper. The destruction of geographic boundaries and the instant and infinite copying and distribution of the best-quality products have done in that fantasy for hundreds of thousands of aspiring scribes.
Now, who gets paid in media? People who work for platforms (Facebook) or superstars (the New York Times).
Sure, there are hundreds or thousands more “publications” that were enabled by the internet that you can write for. You’re reading one right now. How much money do you think this blog makes? You get one guess.
Media was the platforms first casualty because its product, comprised of nothing more than information in highly copyable formats, could have its production and consumption completely re-imagined around the wave of information technology that included Google, email, and the laptop.
But this kind of dramatic re-ordering around platforms and superstars will continue as data sensors in communication with algorithms reach from our desks into our pockets and soon, into our cars, homes, hospital bathrooms -- pretty much anywhere we can think of.
There will always be jobs for people to do. But instead of a relatively unified American economic experience, I think we’ll have something else. At the top will be platform owners, whose algorithms and stores of data will orchestrate economic transactions. Just below them will be engineers who directly support the platforms, the salesmen and marketers who bring them into your lives, the lawyers that represent them in court, the doctors that treat their illnesses, and the finance people who manage their portfolios. At roughly the same level, there will be content creators -- people who are in the top tier of talent in their fields. And then, there will be everyone else: taking what platforms given them, all on the platforms’ terms.
We can’t restrict platforms’ growth. And we can’t deny the many positive impacts they have had on lives in this country and outside of it. But there is no part of our lives that information technology won’t reach. As that transition continues to unfold, I can’t see an endpoint that isn’t a massively worse version of the low unemployment, highly income and wealth polarized society we have today.
That’s the threat of automation as I see it. I’m grateful for all the attention that the possibility of robots taking jobs is garnering in media and political circles of late. But the sooner we move beyond hand-wringing about potentially massive unemployment and start figuring how how we can have a reasonably equal society when economic power is concentrated in platforms, the better.