Robots: Our New Overlords, Or Just the Latest Bit of Silicon Valley Hype?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Will artificial intelligence take away all our jobs in the fairly near future? I think so, but I acknowledge that the case either way is speculative since there’s no way to know for sure how fast we’re going to make progress on AI. All any of us can do is marshal the evidence about how fast AI is progressing and then make our best case one way or the other about the likely pace of future progress.

That said, there are good argument and bad ones against AI-driven robots taking away all our jobs. Here are the two absolute worst:

  • If automation were taking away jobs, we’d see it in high productivity growth figures. But productivity growth is low, not high.
  • Automation creates jobs, it doesn’t eliminate them. Just take a look at the Industrial Revolution.

I say these are the worst because they’re almost literally hot air:

  • It’s true that productivity growth is low, and and it’s also true that this means AI isn’t taking away jobs right now. That’s because AI doesn’t exist yet. My best read of the evidence is that we’ll see the first glimmers of true AI in about ten years, with full AI coming 20 or 30 years later. That’s a guess, but nobody—not one single person—thinks we’re anywhere close to AI today. So of course it’s not reflected in the current productivity statistics.
  • The AI Revolution will be nothing like the Industrial Revolution except for the fact that both have “Revolution” in their names. AI, by definition, implies human-level intelligence. Thus, by definition, if the AI Revolution creates new jobs, those new jobs will also be done by AI-equipped robots.¹ There’s really no way around this if you accept that AI is coming anytime soon in the first place.

I truly don’t understand why smart people keep making these arguments.² They’re embarrassing. And yet here is Wired, which surely knows better, publishing an article by a very good writer, who ought to know better, telling us not to worry about this whole robot thing. And it’s based almost entirely on exactly these two arguments. Why?

¹It’s possible, of course, that a few jobs will still be left for humans: legislators, CEOs, a few artists, who knows? But this is just nitpicking. If 1 percent of the jobs stay around—or even 10 percent or 20 percent—we still have mass unemployment on our hands.

²So what are the good arguments that mass unemployment is a long way away? You can argue that Moore’s Law is breaking down and it’s going to be a very long time before we have the computing power for true AI. You can argue that robots will be smart but never very sociable, so humans will all move into jobs that require social skills. You can argue that our knowledge of the human brain is rudimentary and we’re still underestimating what it will take to emulate it. I think all of these arguments have weaknesses that undermine them, but they aren’t ridiculous.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate