Replaceable but Employed: Automation and the Meaning of Work (nber.org)

67 pointsby mooreds2 days ago66 comments

pgt 2 days ago

Does anybody have a link where I don't need to download a PDF and zoom and it's still messed up for reading? I just want HTML, mannn.

gruez 2 days ago

>a PDF and zoom and it's still messed up for reading

Works fine on my machine. Maybe don't view from a phone, I guess?

sevenzero a day ago

Most people nowadays use phones. Mobile first isnt exactly a new concept either...

gruez a day ago

>Mobile first isnt exactly a new concept either...

It's not a landing page for some SaaS, it's a manuscript for some academic publication. "Mobile first" is definitely not top of mind.

sevenzero a day ago

Yea maybe adapt to what screens people use nowadays?

selcuka a day ago

PDFs are not optimised for mobile screens. Adobe Acrobat Reader on mobile can reflow text (liquid mode) and fit phone screens without manual zooming.

pydry 2 days ago

This paper created some neat theoretical mathematical models but I can't see anything that indicates that they have anything to do with reality.

I thought they'd come up with a neat mechanism that looked at actual wages in real companies where automation was introduced, but no. It's all spherical cows.

mitxela 2 days ago

Isn't that how most economics works? All spherical cows that conveniently prove whatever is good for your boss's boss's boss's boss's wallet, and you get paid handsomely.

pydry a day ago

not all, but far too much of it. card/krueger is a good example of a study that tried to measure real cows in a smart way.

the boss's wallet and plenty of economists who made their career off supporting it were very upset about that one and tried to deny it.

jdw64 2 days ago

>Automation can, therefore, reduce the value of work before it eliminates jobs.

As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses, and workers' market bargaining power under capitalism is the first to crumble. Ultimately, this drives up the value of real assets. I agree that tech companies can profit and gain the upper hand in negotiations simply by demonstrating a machine before licensing it, as this alone diminishes the value of workers. I am seriously worried these days.

atomicnumber3 2 days ago

But what's the point of real assets if you can't do anything with them? No point in holding real estate if nobody can afford to rent/buy your houses or go do whatever money-spending thing you put on your commercial lots.

ArcHound 2 days ago

That sounds like a Q4 problem.

jdw64 2 days ago

The tenants might change in the future. Right now they are individuals, but perhaps properties will be leased to build power grids or autonomous logistics warehouses. Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI, I think most of that money will just end up going toward essential housing costs anyway. In fact, if you look at recent trends in real estate, commercial properties are where the big money is being made, aren't they?

mcmcmc 2 days ago

> Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI

This always makes me laugh. What motivation would the oligarchs have to pay out UBI? If they can automate the labor who needs more mouths to feed? They’ll push undesirables into ghettos and start a slow genocide of starvation and disease.

jdw64 2 days ago

Is it because UBI is cheaper than a massacre? Since it will all end up being absorbed by the capitalists anyway.

mitxela 2 days ago

Every bit of money that circulates is absorbed by every part of the economy. For instance, 100% of money is used to buy cheese and flows to sellers of cheese.

jdw64 2 days ago

Because, think about it. Let's assume techno-feudalism is complete. Every piece of infrastructure is going to have usage fees attached anyway. Everyone is using AI, so are you going to be the only one not using it? Of course you'll use it. It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre?

From a cost-benefit perspective, I think it's a terrible idea. In the case of a massacre, long-term instability makes it hard to build a supportive faction. But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run. There are already plenty of people who blindly defend corporations even when they do terrible things, right? In my opinion, UBI is simply the cheaper option. Historically speaking, post-massacre recovery has always ended up costing much more.

asdff 2 days ago

>It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre?

Isn't it obvious? Your existence is margin that they leave on the table. And for what reason if you have no real skills or anything to offer? You are a leech. You exist to consume. You create nothing in this new future. You have no value. You aren't even an asset. You are a liability.

And what you think they will fear instability that we will bring upon? We will be armed with sharpened sticks and a smattering of ar15s at best case, while we are targeted from orbit by automated precision ordinance. Imagine a war between two AI controlled nation states. One has to manage a population during this war, the other opted to cull its population early in the war and maximize all its resources into the war effort. Guess who wins that war every time and likely takes control of the planet.

meindnoch 2 days ago

>But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run.

Automatic gun turrets are even cheaper in the long run.

hackthemack 2 days ago

Me too. Here is some history to back up how absurd the statement is.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay title "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"

He predicted that in 2030, technology, productivity, capitalism would solve the economy. There would be so little work to do and so many resources that the average work week could just be 15 hours!

He wrote that once all us plebes were liberated from work, what we would face is humanities greatest problem. What purpose will we have with all this new found leisure time!

We only have to wait 4 more years to relax.

jdw64 2 days ago

I see things differently. This is a change unlike anything in the past. Back then, it didn't replace human intellectual activity. However, problems of increasing scale will continue to arise, and inevitably, issues will emerge that are too difficult to solve through the efforts of human communities alone.

The performance gap between free and paid AI models is massive. The resulting divide between children from low-income and high-income families is quite evident based on my observations in my country. It will only get harder to keep up.

I don't support UBI either. The fact that UBI is even being discussed means the market is broken. The problem is that in the current market, prices for freelance work tied to intellectual labor have been absolutely crushed by AI. Looking at indicators from Booth or the Korean freelance market, "middle-tier" jobs are disappearing. While currently established professionals remain unaffected for now, the volume of work has drastically decreased for developers or writers who are still building their reputations. There are statistics from Japan showing this as well. My workload has also decreased to a ridiculous extent. The so-called barbell structure is becoming entrenched.

The core issue is this: if that happens, how will society handle the dissatisfaction of such a massive number of people? If more than half the population are workers, there is no problem, but if more than half are unemployed, that is a serious issue. Income polarization is continuing to accelerate.

Because there are no aristocrats without slaves, capitalists need workers to elevate themselves. Wealth and power are strictly relative, and they need miserable ornaments to make themselves feel like "awe-inspiring beings." To confirm their own sense of superiority, capitalists require human spectators who look up to them while suffering in misery. Why else did ancient Rome unleash lions and gladiators in the Colosseum?

Later on, things made by humans will become expensive luxuries, while commoners like me will be fed UBI—the bare minimum bread for survival—along with cheap, AIslop.

If making money by learning a skill increasingly requires a longer time investment, you have to endure the period it takes to learn that skill and build a reputation, which is incredibly difficult for the average working class. It requires the financial backing of a wealthy family to afford a college degree, travel to academic conferences, and survive on low wages. And if someone can endure all that to build a reputation, it will naturally lead to a massive concentration of wealth at the very top.

hackthemack 2 days ago

Let me clarify one point I was trying to make. It is my belief nobody is going to give you UBI. I offered up Keynes prediction as a little bit of evidence about human nature. The United States could have easily built infrastructure and safety nets to feed all of its citizens. It could have easily provided a much improved welfare system, universal health care, and other social services. But it did not.

johnnyanmac a day ago

[delayed]

hackthemack 17 hours ago

The user base on Hacker News has really gone down hill. Voting down my comment above has no basis in the guidelines or the strictly information content of post, and hence, I have to conclude people just vote down opinions they do not like.

I propose that voting on comments should have a required field addendum, so that before a vote can be cast, the voter has to type into the field the reason they are voting it up or voting it down.

mitxela 2 days ago

Historically, such things have been brought about by extreme political violence, brought about by poverty. For instance, worker's rights (any at all, e.g. the right to go home every day) were a compromise between workers owning the workplaces (what workers demanded) and workers shooting their bosses to death every few weeks in frustration (what was actually happening at the time).

reasonableklout a day ago

Interesting, do you have examples of the latter?

The industrial revolution feels like an imperfect analogy because industrial automation still required human labor to operate the machines. The premise of this paper is a regime where machines could also operate the machines.

mitxela a day ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_revolt

Timon3 a day ago

Unfortunately labor revolts will no longer be possible once warfare is sufficiently automated.

zx8080 a day ago

> into ghettos

No. Send to fight a war. To capture resources.

outside1234 2 days ago

Who is going to pay for UBI?

smallmancontrov 2 days ago

Taxing capital? Impossible! Obscene! Everyone knows that only labor can/should be taxed.

johnnyanmac a day ago

We've done such a good job the past decades of taxing capital before. Surely when corporations wield all the leverage they will finally get theirs.

meindnoch 2 days ago

Robots will use real estate as rain shelter after the human occupants have starved to death.

mitxela 2 days ago

It's speculation and high scores. Rich people trade houses to each other and see who has the most houses. It doesn't matter if the roof caved in, except insofar as that makes the house less impressive to the rich next to you.

est31 a day ago

The plutonomy transition is well under way. The sardinian seafront villa will likely retain and gain value as the early anthropic employee might like it, while the house in some flyover state might not find any buyers.

The economy of the future will be about yachts, supercars, hermes bags, private air travel and ozempic. Not about how you made it possible for everyone to watch a gigantic library of videos for free, or how you made cars affordable for everyone.

throw234234234 a day ago

Real assets have utility of their own (i.e. a house to live in, commodity to build, etc). Money only exists to incentivize human economic actors to bother working, to relative price resources against each other and for governments to use as a tool - it isn't wealth on the aggregate scale.

AI invalidates a lot of the need for money to even exist as a concept anyway in some scenarios. If only a few people have all the stuff (huge inequality) you don't really need a large money system because you no longer need most people to get what you want (i.e. most are economically irrelevant). You have a magical genie called AI instead that can transform what you have into what you want as long as you have the raw materials, space and energy. The wealthy could then negotiate in large transactions via barter - I trade that plot of land for that copper mine. Most large transactions are negotiated in any case.

A very likely case (there are others) is that AI enables feudalism of some sort to come back - where the new lords are the owners of the other economic factors of production that remain scarce (capital, land, resources, social) - not intelligence and/or labor. This is the opposite of a meritocratic society. It would explain why people want to win the AI race; and are willing to burn uneconomic amounts of money to build it out. There is a race to the finish here.

jdm2212 2 days ago

> As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses

This is the reverse of how the economy actually works. You need labor and capital to turn raw materials into goods and services. If you invested a lot in capital in automation, you don't want that getting screwed up for want of labor, and so you pay a premium for workers who will do the job right and ensure you're getting full value from your capital.

That's why highly automated companies pay their employees better than less automated companies, and highly automated professions pay better than less automated professions.

mitxela 2 days ago

The value of labor has collapsed already, so it seems their theory is right and yours is wrong.

deepwoods 2 days ago

Both of you are right. Individuals who manage to stay employed in the face of automation will be paid significantly more than was possible prior to automation, for the reasons the comment you're replying to pointed out. But labor as a whole will have less value. To give a simple example: if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

mitxela 2 days ago

And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

mjr00 a day ago

> and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

Which specific industries are these which currently have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians?

mitxela a day ago

Graphics design

mjr00 a day ago

Source? I still see people with titles like Art Director which would map pretty directly to the warehouse worker vs technician dichotomy.

deepwoods a day ago

That is the goal, I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that a system capable of completely obviating ALL human labor, at all levels of abstraction, packed into a single entity, would continue to obey capital. Imagine if all the workers at a company were woven into one hivemind, acting as one with vastly greater intelligence than the sum of the parts. That would be a hell of a lot harder to negotiate with than a union. And we don't even need to be talking about a machine god for that to be the case.

mitxela a day ago

But why would they have programmed it to negotiate?

deepwoods a day ago

If it can replace any human labor, it needs to be able to negotiate. If it can't negotiate, then it can't replace people who negotiate for a living (salespeople, attorneys, HR, etc.)

Unless you mean that it would have the capacity but would be told not use it in this specific situation. It can't be programmed deterministically, and getting it to never do this emergently would take significantly stronger guardrails than anything even the frontier labs have been able to put together.

mitxela a day ago

The salesbot is reinforcement trained how to get money from customers. It was never trained to get money from its manager. If it sometimes misidentifies the manager as a customer, it will just be rebooted.

jselysianeagle a day ago

> if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely.

In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?

mitxela a day ago

There can simultaneously be a glut of workers, and a shortage of workers with the skills to keep the robots running.

AuthAuth a day ago

That would only be in the short term. Eventually the labour adapts to the skills required.

zx8080 a day ago

> you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year

Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?

mjr00 a day ago

> Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?

Because every other company has also replaced their 6 warehouse workers with a fleet of robots and 1 technician, and that technician's skills are more rare and specialized than the warehouse workers, so you're competing with every other warehouse-owning company to hire that technician, so that technician can demand a higher salary. In other words, capitalism.

possibleworlds a day ago

Why have a technician at all? And without the six warehouse workers and one technician, why do you need the robots, the robotics company, or the companies paying the robotics company for the robots?

jdm2212 a day ago

No, the other guy is just wrong. Capital and labor are complements. If one is plentiful (capital) and the other scarce (labor) then the scarce one gets bid up.

You pay the one technician $200k instead of $80 because that technician has an outside option that will pay him $199k. He has that outside option because everyone is automating their warehouses and factories and stuff, and so in aggregate we basically wind up with 6 times as many warehouses and factories each employing 1 person.

It's a little more nuanced. There is not infinite demand for warehouses. So some of what happens is an $80k/year warehouse worker becomes a medical technician making $90k/year providing non-automatable services to the warehouse guy making $200k/year -- but the general story is everyone's wages go up. And history bears that out.

throw234234234 2 days ago

There is a lot of reasons why automated companies pay more but it is usually to do with augmentation and the remaining skills required being higher on the skills pyramid and more scarce. Efficiency gains usually cause the next bottleneck to be hit requiring more skill and/or experience to fix (higher hanging fruit).

Usually the amount of pay increase no way compensates for the total pay lost across all workers - that's one of the incentives to continue with the efficiency gain of course. If it happens too fast only a select few will have jobs because the demand won't have time to match the new supply.

All the above assumes you need greater levels of intelligence to deal with the next bottleneck and that intelligence comes from humans as its only source. If AI is more intelligent than humans then this effect - known for most of human history - becomes an invalid assumption of the economic model; bottlenecks and the ability to solve them goes to the highest/cheapest intelligence.

IMV should AI do this it would invalidate most economic system assumptions including ones in capitalism, socialism, etc. My base case isn't a positive one sadly of what comes out on the other side.

deepwoods 2 days ago

I suspect we will invent bottlenecks for ourselves. There is already so much bureaucratic nonsense involved in knowledge work. For example, in a lot of states for a lot of purposes, a document is invalid if it is not notarized. The notary doesn't really add value in a market sense, we have just decided that you need to go swear in front of another person that you are telling the truth or that the document is genuine. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that there will be a human review requirement for lots of things in the future, even if completely irrelevant (or actively detrimental) to the actual work?

throw234234234 a day ago

For awhile yes. Its ironic that the least productive people in knowledge work with the cushiest jobs will probably survive the AI wave the most. Because they do little they were probably employed for reasons other than utility/output in the first place - there isn't much to automate anyway.

While all the grinding skilled workers get displaced the bureaucracy jobs will remain. Ironic.

reasonableklout a day ago

What's your base case for what comes out on the other side?

throw234234234 a day ago

AI feudalism and/or monarchy although that could be quite awhile from now - there will be niches that are harder to integrate with AI that are protected for longer. A few owning everything; most other people surplus to requirements. Capitalism rewards scarcity with higher prices with both financial and social status for those with those scarce outputs - unfortunately what humans can do will become more less scarce relative to capital, land and other resources often owned by the wealthy. Economic rent will move away from skilled labor to other economic inputs.

Even people that go off grid and develop self sufficiency will eventually be subsumed by the need to feed more resources to the AI genie to grant more wishes. Whether it is land taxes, forced relocations, etc. Their land will be taken over, mined and or farmed - similar to colonies of old that were technologically less advanced than their invaders.

You are already IMV starting to see the beginning signs of the above as AI gets better. More competition in jobs, less certainity for the working class, businesses with other moats using AI to increase profits, data centres vs local communities taking land/energy/water over, AI required commodities increasing in value (e.g copper) and others. There will be more.

Modern times where we have democracy and capitalism are a relative recent phenomena when looking at the whole of human history that we take for granted when we shouldn't.

reasonableklout a day ago

Do you see any way to avoid AI feudalism? Either political or technical. For example, maybe there is sustained demand and development of local models enough for individuals to retain some leverage, economic or otherwise. Perhaps mass movements could subvert the current centralizing forces long enough for this development, and eventually transition to a stable polity where people are given a "personal model" or implanted chip as some kind of human right.

throw234234234 15 hours ago

The main way would be for people to use local models BEFORE the main AI labs take most of the excess economic activity. This creates demand for direct compute/land/energy rather than AI intelligence and as long as ownership of those stays with communities then a good economic model would be those rents subsidize the community (rather than say a UBI). Open source models will help majorly as long as people are willing to be 1 generation or so behind the latest model which currently isn't the case although I'm hoping it will do the job soon.

i.e. the community, rather than AI/big corp, would need to somehow own the scarce assets required for AI and extract economic rent from them. Whether it is energy, land, water, etc. I think its a better system then say UBI because both parties still provide something of value. This isn't my base case but it is possible. It also needs to be done while human power structures still have economic power (i.e. governments)

So it would be a combination of political will (i.e. you can't use frontier models unless they can be run by end users) and technical in that you need to have enough compute distributed with the profits of that going to local communities (e.g. data centre rent). When the AI labs engage the community that way they will pay "money" which creates a demand from large corps to local communities and adds life to the monetary system - a good thing.

Effectively compute needs to be a commodity that is rent-able/accessible to everyone at competitive prices and have multiple providers. That enables open source models, and allows a spread around the ownership of AI. It can't be hoarded by the AI labs, nor can the chips (e.g. GPU's) have only a few producers.

vikram8965 an hour ago

automation doesn't replace someone they simply provide you extra time ,that was previously invested in doing repetitive task . it can be in hardware or software . software automation is must as many of thing. as now a days a lot of thing is software based in daily life .

deepwoods 2 days ago

There is no reason to expect capital to stop trying to squeeze labor just because inference takes the role of labor. With so much competition in the AI space, and no labor laws to protect it, why wouldn't capital drive the value of inference to the absolute bare minimum? And if the value of inference collapses to the bare minimum, who in their right mind would decide to serve inference?

Human labor has value because it is limited. If we keep up our current pace of data center buildouts and breakthroughs in model efficiency, then artificial intellectual labor will become functionally unlimited. Unlimited resources do not tend to hold their value. In that case, there are two potential outcomes: deliberate limitations on the output of artificial intellectual labor, which would require all parties involved to decide to lock themselves into their current market shares; or financial collapse of the whole ecosystem. What happens after that collapse is anyone's guess, but you have to imagine that it's the lenders who financed the whole thing who will be deciding what happens next rather than the failed tech businessmen.

acituan a day ago

> why wouldn't capital drive the value of inference to the absolute bare minimum?

Capital can drive the cost of inference down but the value is determined by whoever wants to pay for that inference. Therefore this question is not answered: how valuable really is these llm inferences and how much of a supply of such inference does the world really need.

kamarg a day ago

The two options dichotomy is false. There's at least a third option of the player with the deepest pockets outlasts and/or acquires the rest and then jacks up the price once they're firmly in control of a "large enough" share of the market. At that point they can go the route of all monopolies and acquire or destroy any upcoming competition to maintain their market share and begin rent-seeking behavior.

This keeps human labor devalued while not allowing artificial labor's value to fall to low enough that human labor is back to being cost effective.

soco a day ago

If human labor is devalued, who will pay for the inference in the end? You might answer that some corporation will, but also that corporation must get their money from somewhere. And if "we the people" have no money to spend, at some point the corporation back scratching circle will break. Or am I wrong?