#8 Do Not Fear Automation
ChatGPT won’t cause permanent unemployment; it’ll empower us to do more, not less.
Around 3000 BCE, written language emerged for the first time in human history. The rise of city-states fostered an ever-growing economy (and vice versa), and people could no longer maintain transactional records solely in their minds. Economic progress could have halted unless someone found a way to solve the problem of our limited memory. And so writing was born–birthed as a solution to a problem, a pathway to progress.
There is much anxiety around automation, understandably so. In the modern economy, humans are employed to the extent that the job at hand requires manual labor, cognitive ability, or both. Since human labor comes at the cost of wages, employer demand for automating said labor is inevitable.
‘Computers’ used to be people who ran calculations with pen and paper. Then a device was invented that could perform the same tasks far more productively than its human counterparts ever could. Those individuals who had previously been valuable as workers found themselves unemployed. From their perspective, the invention of the modern computer was a negative. If they could have mandated their continual employment, they would have.
The same goes for the farmer, the milkman, and the elevator operator. Every employee has a financial interest in maintaining his job, whatever the cost to society. Imagine if the computers had gotten their way–a victory for a minority, and a devastating stagnation for all of society.
One issue of the anti-automation movement is that the decision of which technologies should be forbidden from being invented is arbitrary. To satisfy every worker is to freeze the economy, preventing our standard of living from rising, preventing problems from being solved.
Few white-collar workers would ever switch to physical labor. The very existence of their positions is a result of past technological progress that had automated more and more manual labor, until people were free and wealthy enough to satisfy cognitive demands, such as marketing, banking, and teaching.
People often emphasize the perils of automation, such as potential mass unemployment. But rarely do they weigh these against the benefits. Reduction in production costs frees up scarce resources to be employed towards previously unaffordable ends, and so everyone becomes wealthier.
When imagining a world without employment, one sometimes projects the current economic paradigm onto the would-be jobless. This is a parochial error. Those disparaging technological progress must, if they are to give a fair assessment of the problem, take into account the vast increase in purchasing power that will benefit the poorest member of society in such a hypothetical future. Taken to the limit, products will eventually cost no more than the raw materials needed to make them.
As seen with the computer, technologies are almost always employed towards ends that their original creators had never anticipated. Many anti-automation advocates claim that they care about the trash man, the IT assistant, the truck driver. They must concede that by protecting their jobs, they are not only preventing living standards from rising, but that they are also preventing paths to solutions no one has ever even considered yet.
It may be that the life of a middle-class American today is the life of the most impoverished tomorrow. In fact, this is already the trend, and has been since humanity’s first innovation. The fastest route to the end of poverty is innovation. To sacrifice potential prosperity for the sake of short-term concerns of a minority is to relinquish the only tool that has ever succeeded in solving problems.
Books
How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time by Matt Ridley
The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment by Kate Distin
In the News
Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) discussion on The Beginning of Infinity on Twitter
Videos and Audio
Fossil Future: The Time for Optimism is Now - EP 42 - Alex Epstein & Peter Thiel
Discussion about Freedom, Violence, and Law Enforcement, and negative externalities on AirChat with Naval, Moritz, Keith, Aaron, and more.
Articles on AI Automation
Cognition Augmentation Software (and automating cognition) by Moritz
Written by Logan Chipkin.
Edited by
.Image by Amaro Koberle.