So, start with the very basics. Human desires and needs are unlimited – that’s an assumption but a reasonable one. There’re some number of people on the planet. This provides us with a lot of human labour but not an unlimited amount. Thus labour is a scarce or economic resource – and we’ve not enough of it to sate all human desires and wants.
OK, so, now we use machines to do some jobs that were previously done by humans. Imagine that this new technology actually required more human labour – that it created new jobs in greater volume than those it destroys. Say, the tractor and combine harvester industry needs more people in it than we used to use to cut the crops by hand. We’ve just made ourselves poorer. We used to have some amount of grain through the labour of some number of people. We’ve now got that grain but by using the labour of more people. We’ve used more of our scarce resource and we’re now poorer by the loss of what they used to make when not hand cutting grain but now no longer are by making tractors.
What makes us richer is if the tractor industry has record production statistics while using less labour than the hammer and sickle. That means that some human labour is now free to go off and try to sate a human desire or want for something other than grain. Ballet dancing for example. We’re now richer – tractors and combine harvesters have made us richer – by whatever value we put on more ballet dancing.
The entire point of any form of automation is to destroy jobs so as to free up that labour to do something else. The new technology doesn’t create jobs, it allows other jobs to be done.
The only point at which this fails is if human needs and desires aren’t unlimited. Which means that we might be able to provide everything that everyone wants without us all working. Which doesn’t really sound like much of a problem really.
Tim Worstall, “As Usual, World Economic Forum Gets Robots And AI Wrong Over Jobs”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-09-18.
February 5, 2021
QotD: Misunderstanding the threat/promise of robotics and AI
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