WORK IN PROGRESS
I’m going to research and explore the topic of unemployment and automation. Questions to be answered:
How has automation affected unemployment in the past?
Is automation responsible for current unemployment rate?
How will automation, and more specifically narrow AI, affect unemployment in the upcoming decades (2015-2035)?
On this page I’ll list resources I will use for research, and various tidbits of information I might find relevant. Most of the research will be presented via wiki pages.
Resources
Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQAlexei (by YudkowskyEliezer Yudkowsky)
Crossposted: http://zanaduu3.appspot.com/pages/3b
Related:
http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes (by Gwern)
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/08/eliezer-yudkowsky-asks-about-automation.html
“Humans Need Not Apply” is a good youtube video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
I’d like to see this discussed industry 1. by industry, 2. by technology/science.
(Technology: Computer vision) could impact (Industries: automated farming, automated transportation, etc).
(Industry: Retail/Fast-Food) could be impacted by (Technologies: Using ipads) resulting in (X number of jobs being replaced). The cost of a worker is Y, the cost of an ipad is Z. Consumer polls should L% of consumers thought ipads at fast-food restaurants were creepy.
Honestly, I don’t understand why there are still people at the register at fast-food restaurants (as opposed to i-pads). In some restaurants, this is already the case. Is it just a matter of time? If so, why hasn’t it happened yet?
The key question is not whether particular industries get automated. They will be. But so was weaving and farming (3% agricultural employment in First World countries that export food, vs. 98% agricultural employment in the old days) and that didn’t impact long-term unemployment. So the question is not whether particular jobs get automated, but whether employment as a whole will marginally drop as a result of marginally better automation given continuation of other current trends, potentially including incompetent central banks that allow aggregate demand slumps and so on.