Gigaom AI Minute – February 7

Transcript

Many people who are worried about automation and artificial intelligence taking all the jobs often grant that we have had those things in the past without having unemployment. But they quickly go on to add that this time is different. Now the interesting thing is that the "this time is different" argument is that it's about as old as the worry itself. You can hear it back in the 60s, you can hear it back in the 30s, and you can even hear it earlier than that.

Today, when pressed, "why is this time different?" you get a narrative like this: Way back in the day we did physical work, and that through automation we transitioned our jobs to knowledge work. And now computers are coming along and doing the thinking jobs, and the question is, well, what are we going to go do next?

Now there are two problems with this logic. The first is that while automation has increased the productivity of human laborers, it hasn't really reduced, that much, the number of jobs that require some amount of human action. Just consider everyone in your extended family and what they do for a living, and ask if there's any physical component. Do they have to thread a needle, or fine keys to go unlock things, or push something, or go let someone into someplace, or retrieve something? Or any number of other physical activities? I mean, we live in a world where robots do amazing things, but they are incredibly narrow, incredibly defined, and we've not come anywhere near building something of the complexity of, say, a human hand.

Likewise, the second mistake is to assume that all knowledge work is ubiquitous, and that once computers learn how to do any of it, they, by necessity, will know how to do all of it. While we will automate great amounts of knowledge work, there will still be plenty of jobs that require some human to go do something or think about something or manipulate something or alter something in some way.

Automation's great gift is that it increases productivity, not that it permanently erases the need for humans. And that has been true for 250 years and it is also true today.