Throughout the 20th century new technology has been steadily increasing the value of human labour, but some forms of human labour have increased more than others, and this imbalance has caused a market distortions.
Technology has done a great deal to make railroad engineers more valuable for instance, because one guy could suddenly move hundreds of tons of goods. Used to be it took an army to do that.
On the other hand we have plumbers, and the amount of work a plumber can do has changed little in a century. There is no plumber who can to the work of a hundred plumbers from 100 years ago.
This causes a market distortion is what is hurting so much of what America calls the middle class. If we deploy AI well, it may correct some of these market distortions. A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. Maybe. If one were to entertain the notion that there are certain jobs we haven't automated enough, which hurts their ability to compete with the value we get from low cost goods and services.
> A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour.
This also implies that fewer individual plumber/robot/AI teams than the current number of plumbers. To offset that, we either need quite a bit more work at this level, or we need a rethink of the whole work-to-live system.
In the past it has always turned out that there are new kinds of jobs to be done. That may happen this time too. Things like living off of making YouTube videos are perhaps an early indicator of the direction we should be looking in. But it seems like most of the new models that are successful are based on ads and it seems to me that advertising-based business models can only ever make up a relatively small portion of the total economy.
Just curious, but are there stats on how the comparative income of some professions has changed due to changes like this? I feel like the change in the importance and work done by people in jobs impacted in this way (you mention railroad engineers specifically) hasn't substantially changed the amount such people are paid, but this is admittedly only a gut instinct.
Technology has done a great deal to make railroad engineers more valuable for instance, because one guy could suddenly move hundreds of tons of goods. Used to be it took an army to do that.
On the other hand we have plumbers, and the amount of work a plumber can do has changed little in a century. There is no plumber who can to the work of a hundred plumbers from 100 years ago.
This causes a market distortion is what is hurting so much of what America calls the middle class. If we deploy AI well, it may correct some of these market distortions. A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. Maybe. If one were to entertain the notion that there are certain jobs we haven't automated enough, which hurts their ability to compete with the value we get from low cost goods and services.