Remember 2013, when Very Serious researchers and pundits warned us that AI & robotics would cut employment by a factor of 2 within 15 to 20 years? US unemployment has gone from 8% to 3.6% in the 6 years since.
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The irony here is that 2013-2019 has seen an incredible boom in the deployment of AI in processes and products across most industries, and a not insignificant fraction of the drop in unemployment is linked to the economic windfall of AI
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Replying to @fchollet
AI doesn't have to unemploy humans; in most industries it just disempowers them. That's how we get that low unemployment with no upward pressure on wages (which violates basic economic theory but economists can't yet grapple with this). My 2015 piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/the-machines-are-coming.html …pic.twitter.com/6UWVT5iVZs
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Replying to @zeynep
The point of the doomsayers from 2013 wasn't "automation will disempower workers", it was explicitly "automation will create mass employment within 20 years". Also, looking at the past 150 years, automation has not been disempowering workers -- usually, it's the opposite.
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Replying to @fchollet
Automation does disempower workers, and has, historically. The opposite did happen, sure, but only after massive political upheaval changed the rules: no child labor, 40 hour week, unions, etc. The direct effect of automation was disempowerment. It's an important distinction.
1 reply 3 retweets 3 likes
I don't speak for mass unemployment predictions. But logically speaking, disempowerment is fairly inevitable unless and until there is a wholesale reorganization to protect people. (There are smaller segments that are empowered in each transition but they aren't the masses.)
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