As an AI researcher, I think I am required to have an opinion about this. Here's what I have to say to the various tribes.<\/p>\n
AI-pessimists:<\/em> please remember that the Luddites have been wrong about technology causing\u00a0economic cataclysm\u00a0every time so far. We're talking about several consecutive centuries of wrongness. ((I am aware of the work of Gregory Clark and others related to Industrial Revolution era wage and consumption stagnation. If a disaster requires complicated statistical models to provide evidence it exists, I say its scale can not have been that disastrous.)) Please revise your confidence estimates downwards.<\/p>\n AI-optimists:<\/em> please remember that just because the pessimists have always been wrong in the past does not mean that they must always be wrong in the future. It is not a natural law that the optimists must be right. That labor markets have adapted\u00a0in the long term does not mean that they must adapt, to say nothing of short-term dislocations. Please revise your confidence estimates downwards.<\/p>\n Everyone:<\/em>\u00a0many forms of technology are substitutes for labor. Many\u00a0forms of technology are complements to\u00a0labor. Often a single form of technology is both simultaneously. It is impossible to determine a priori which effect will dominate. ((Who correctly predicted that the introduction of ATMs would coincide with an increase<\/em> in employment of bank tellers? Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?)) This is true of everything from the mouldboard plough to a convolutional neural network. Don't casually assert\u00a0AI\/ML\/robots are qualitatively different. (For example, why does Bill Gates think we need a special tax on robots that is distinct from a tax on any other capital equipment?)<\/p>\n As always, please exercise cognitive and epistemic humility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As an AI researcher, I think I am required to have an opinion about this. Here's what I have to say to the various tribes. AI-pessimists: please remember that the Luddites have been wrong about technology causing\u00a0economic cataclysm\u00a0every time so … Continue reading