Denis Rancourt over at
wrote down some recent thoughts and the first item was about AI (artificial intelligence) vs. RI (real intelligence). He said that AI isn’t really intelligence, but a dressed-up surveillance — and I agree. In fact, I’ll go even further in speculation: AI kills people.Imagine a hospital ward overwhelmed with incoming patients and an AI algorithm using triage to tell you who should be treated and who should be left to die out in the hallway. Backers of the AI program that optimizes the health care resources would claim that, after all is said and done, more lives got saved with AI than without it.
They would unwaveringly appeal to “utilitarian ethical standards” but utilitarianism actually does not have any standards, because even the purest so-called standard that it has — “The most benefit for the most people (the greater good)” — requires subjective interpretation.
Life imitates Art
In the 2008 movie, Eagle Eye, an AI system makes the judgment that top government officials must be killed — invoking “Operation Guillotine” — and be replaced with people who are not as big of “screw-ups” as the current government officials are.
If asked “Why are you killing humans?” then the AI system would say “For the greater good.” If you then ask the AI system what the greater good is, you’ll get a canned phrase for an answer, invoking something not substantially different from singing by a campfire and group-hugging. The answer you get may merely be: World peace.
That’s because AI systems, which are inherently amoral, cannot understand objective human good. If AI systems can kill people, then what about jobs?
Do technological advances kill jobs?
While a simple question is: Do technological advances kill jobs?, a more important question to ask is whether technology reduces the total purchasing power of all earned wages paid out. In a low-tech society, you live hand-to-mouth, but “unemployment” is always low, because if you do not work, you starve to death.
If a job makes you rich and you retire early, that is better than if a job kept you poor.
So, more important than how many people are working is the question over the growth rate of the total buying power of all paid wages. Before the Luddite Revolt against machines in 1812, total real weekly earnings in the UK grew by 0.5% a year.
Page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luddite.jpg
Attribution: Unknown. 195 years since publication, copyright extinguished, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In British pounds set to the year of 2015, total real weekly earnings in 1760 were 162,316,300 British pounds. That was 52 years before the Luddite Revolt of 1812. By 1812, total real weekly earnings had grown to 213,700,760 British pounds — an average growth rate of 0.5% a year.
For the first 52 years after the Luddite Revolt, up to the year of 1864, total real weekly earnings shot up to 623,187,800 British pounds — an average growth rate of 2.1% a year. The concerns of the Luddites — that machines would make them more poor — never panned out. The rate of growth in total real wages increased, instead.
A similar situation occurred in the US, as the real wage growth for those employed in manufacturing grew by 2.8% a year from 1921 to 1929 — before the social benefits schemes of FDR’s New Deal:
The steep rise at right involves a lead-up to WWII, where even former housewives were taken out of their homes and put into manufacturing factories so that the USA could enter WWII with enough equipment and armament.
There is even a gap in model years for Ford automobiles, because Ford stopped making cars so as to prepare for war. In other words, that large rise at right is artificial and circumstantial, rather than being an organic rise in real pay.
Conclusion
Luddites had it wrong. AI, and technology in general, does not lower the sum total of all wages paid out to workers. If certain jobs are eliminated, then other jobs take up the slack by more than 100% — so that more total real wages get paid out, after any technological advance (workers as a whole always have more buying power after).
Workers always have more purchasing power of wages after a technological advance. Technological advances do not cause the sum total of real wages to go down. It is only restrictions on economic freedom that can cause the sum total of real wages to drop.
The reason that people focus on technology as a harm to wages is so that they don’t have to face the truth that the restrictions on economic freedom are the true cause.
Reference
Bank of England, Consumer Price Index in the United Kingdom [CPIUKA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUKA
Bank of England, Average Weekly Earnings Per Person in the United Kingdom [AWEPPUKA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWEPPUKA
Bank of England, Average Weekly Hours Worked in the United Kingdom [AWHWUKA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHWUKA
Bank of England, Employment in the United Kingdom [EMPUKA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMPUKA