MonteQuest wrote:Pops wrote: So anyway, what happens at the juncture of AI & PO?
"The decades to come will see many things that are now done by machines handed back over to human beings, for the eminently pragmatic reason that it will again be cheaper to feed, house, clothe, and train a human being to do those things than it will be to make, fuel, and maintain a machine to do them."-John Michael Greer.
MonteQuest wrote:Pops wrote: So anyway, what happens at the juncture of AI & PO?
"The decades to come will see many things that are now done by machines handed back over to human beings, for the eminently pragmatic reason that it will again be cheaper to feed, house, clothe, and train a human being to do those things than it will be to make, fuel, and maintain a machine to do them."-John Michael Greer.
Robots have indeed eliminated a great deal of factory work and are rapidly moving on to product design, medical diagnostics, research, teaching, accounting, translating, copy editing, and a great deal more. Once-secure professions are no longer safe. From that, many economists conclude that we may just have to adjust to a high plateau of unemployment.
Half a century ago, the Nobel laureate economist Wassily Leontief posed a thought experiment in which the economy was so productive that there remained only a single human worker, and her job was to flip the switch. What then? The questions, Leontief said, were (1) how to allocate the fruits of all of that amazing productivity, and (2) what everyone else would do for a living.
The need for policies of social investment to keep the economy at full employment to bridge over technological displacement was also a theme of the economist Hyman Minsky, who observed that the problem was laissez-faire capitalism and its tendency toward periodic financial crises; it took activist government to keep the economy at its potential.
The problem is that market forces aren't competent to translate the productivity gains into new jobs, much less good jobs, because the demand is in the wrong place.
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