How will AI and technology change the future of work over the next 50 years?

“This free virtual event will bring together visionary researchers, executives, and policy experts to examine and discuss the profound impact of AI and digital technologies on productivity, business, and policy.”

You can watch here and livestream playback here.

And I am looking for some new ideas for my part.

Here are some of my earlier thoughts on the social impact of technology, especially AI, from similar gatherings over 2010-2020:

What if the nature of technology leads to an accelerating rich-poor gap that is not self-rectifying? Technology raises the bottom of the pyramid for all, and democratizes upward mobility, yet at the same time, transforms it from a “pyramid” to a conical spike — where an ever shrinking percentage of the population controls an even-growing percentage of an information-economy embedded with winner-take-all network effects and power laws.

So, as we bring the next 4 billion online, an ironic byproduct of erasing the digital divide will be a further acceleration of the rich-poor gap. Everyone will have access to the American Dream, writ large, but it will feel like the lottery. And, within many countries, like the U.S., the prior winners of the lottery run the lottery. This does not feel like a firm foundation for trust in the system.

Many of the new jobs in the new economy (like Uber drivers and Mechanical Turkers) are at the edge of automation, and thus, are ever so ephemeral against the unrelenting march of Moore’s Law.

Innovation thrives at the edge, with life flourishing at phase boundaries and at the edge of survival, in evolution and employability. This edge inexorably expands outward, as do the new employment opportunities. But can humanity adapt to ever accelerating change? Will it be exponential, as yet another refraction of humanity’s compounding capacity to compute?

AI in particular, will have profound effects:

1) Inevitability accelerating inequality in our current economic system

2) Concentrating influence from compounding power laws across fractal scales (individuals, companies and cultures)

3) Creating abundant opportunity in a post-employment era

4) Bifurcating technological evolution between classical engineering and iterative algorithms

6 responses to “The Future of Work”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Going back, I first starting questioning the role of technology in growing inequality at SIEPR in 2010Renewing the American Dream and then made my first talk on it at Google Solve for XThe Shadow of Technologywhere I ask if the ironic byproduct of erasing the digital divide is a further acceleration of the rich-poor gap?

    And presented this idea to a Silicon Valley audience (debating other VCs), and by electronic voting, they agreed 70/30%. The votes
    Trend Total Results    And brainstormed solutions, like free healthcare for all at X-Prize Visioneering 2014Free Healthcare for All — Seeking peaceful paths to Abundance as the rich-poor gap goes exponential Hosted a couple brainstrom sessions at work on the New Machine AgeReflections on the new Machine Age — technology, inequality and the economyand Google’s i4j Summit in 2015Disrupting Unemployment — the Innovation for Jobs Summit at Googleand then contributed a chapter to a 2016 bookDisrupting Unemployment Ch. 5 — Accelerating Towards a Jobless Future: The Rise of the Machine and the Human Quest for Meaningful Workwith the provocative opening: "Let’s go far enough in the future where no one will debate the sweeping transition of time. There are infinite possible paths to this distant future, but we can imagine reasonable endpoints. This future will look like much of human history prior to the industrial and agricultural revolutions, where serfs and slaves did most of the labor-intensive work in the city-state economies. But while we hope the arc of the moral universe continues to bend towards justice, there will be a new paradigm in master and slave relationship as the slaves of the future will be our machines."

    HAI Roundtable on AI and the Economy, 2019HAI Roundtable on AI and the Economy

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  2. sbove Avatar
    sbove

    Utopian take on the AI-abetted future: The ultimate AI will solve the meta-problem of resource allocation…it will control population (of humans and animals outside of AI-managed "natural zones"), education/accreditation, and it will match humans with work needing to be done for the collective good (algorithmically creating the highest standard of living and contributory-satisfaction for all). It will distribute "wealth" fairly, according to need, but with reasonable bonuses for exceptional individual contributions/innovations/solutions, with all transactions publicly auditable in real time via a block-chain like distributed ledger. On the way to the ultimate AI, certain humans will enjoy vastly expanded power and wealth due to development & ownership of specialist AIs. Early examples of companies/individuals who have created/trained and created asymmetrical wealth via advanced specialist AIs are Renaissance Capital/James Simons, Amazon/Bezos (search & recommendations, pricing, fulfillment routing), Google (search, adsense, adwords). The next 10 years is the era of comprehensive specialist AI dev. There are probably 1,000 extremely valuable specialist AIs in the offing, each of which will mint a group of exceedingly wealthy individuals (creators, deployers). In the near future, a typical AI-enhanced worker will regularly interact with a flock of online-uber-AIs in subjects that matter to them, each as smart, conversationally gifted, and humorous, as a combined Newton/Maxwell/Planck/Einstein/Schrodinger/Feynman/Penrose. All the valuable AIs will inevitably eat each other, rolling-up into the ONE AI, which, as stated previously will be guided by wise and enlightened humans, to fairly and equitably balance resource allocation and innovation world-wide.

    Dystopian take: Several competing cabals of globalist maniacs will use finance capital to gain control of all valuable AIs, consolidate and deploy them to create nightmarish authoritarian AI-ruled meta-states with massively inequitable wealth/power/weapons distribution, leading to a century or more of continued environmental destruction, war, and a complete implosion of civilization, the aftermath of which is unspeakably ghastly to contemplate.

    Reality: probably a combination of the above 😉

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  3. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Very interesting thought experiment. Comments from James Manyika, Chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute just now:

    Effect of AI on jobs: There will be more job change than total job lost. Only 10% of jobs lost, but 60% will be 1/3 automated.

    More job fragility now even though we have more jobs: more contingent, part-time, zero-labor-contracts. Shorter term employment.

    In the U.S., 1/3 of counties account for most job growth. 1/3 of counties have job loss, and they are mostly rural, with the exception of counties where there is fracking

    At most, 1/3 of people can actually WFH. 2/3 have to show up for work

    How to keep up? Lifelong learning, but now it is really real.

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  4. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Erik Brynjolfsson, who recently transferred from MIT to Stanford kicked it off. SML = Susceptibility to Machine Learning. ==> Near-term automation will most greatly affect low-wage jobs.The great decoupling of economic productivity and income over the past 20 years: (red = non-farm business sector real output per hour for all people, blue = US. real median personal income, with indexed to 100 for 1981, grey vertical bars=recessions)

    “Digital progress makes the economic pie bigger. But there is no economic law that everyone, or most people, will benefit.”

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  5. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Condoleezza Rice, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution: “Governments use AI very differently. The Chinese have created a Social Patriotic Index. If you say the wrong things, you can be denied a train ticket to your job. We can’t just take a parochial American or European view of AI.

    In democratic societies, the government can use AI to be responsive to its citizens without an exhaustive bureaucracy. For example, there are 1B biometric IDs in India. They can get food assistance directly deposited into their bank account without the corrupt intermediaries.”

    For a sense of what’s happening in China, here is a chilling inside perspective from their AI leader that runs the world’s largest surveillance network. Minority Report — Straight Outta Shenzhen“We can predict crime before it happens.” (seriously)

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  6. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    I have been wondering about UBI. There was a reason the U.S. did food stamps instead of cash (it can only be spent on food). Maybe it should be called "UBS" where the Survival/Subsistence layer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is free for all (this would include education and healthcare).

    Employment becomes a choice, not an exploitable prerequisite for survival, and you would no longer need a minimum wage, welfare, or related social programs.

    A post-scarcity society makes sense as the inevitable (optimistic) end-point of automation, when a machine can do any physical task better than a human, but a peaceful transition is not at all obvious. (more)

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