Seth G. Benzell, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Guillermo LaGarda, and Jeffrey D. Sachs write,
over time, as the stock of legacy code grows, the demand for new code and, thus for high-tech workers, falls.
The resulting tech bust reflects past humans obsolescing current humans. . .these robots contain the stuff of humans – accumulated brain and saving power. Take Junior – the reigning World Computer Chess Champion. Junior can beat every current and, possibly, every future human on the planet. Consequently, his old code has largely put new chess programmers out of business.
. . .tech busts can be tough on high-tech workers. In fact, high-tech workers can start out earning far more than low-tech workers, but end up earning far less.
Furthermore, robots, captured in the model by more code-intensive good production, can leave all future high-tech workers and, potentially, all future low-tech workers worse off. In other words, technological progress can be immiserating
They use an overlapping generations model, which would not be my first choice for this sort of analysis. In fact, it makes me highly skeptical of the value of this paper.
I am starting a new category, called Four Forces Watch, for my pointers to pieces on the four forces that I see shaping the economy over the longer term: New Commanding Heights (health care and education absorbing more resources); Marriage Stratification; Factor-price Equalization (aka globalization); Moore’s Law. The piece quoted above falls under Moore’s Law.
“over time, as the stock of legacy code grows, the demand for new code and, thus for high-tech workers, falls.”
So far, the exact opposite has been occurring, and it is clear that this won’t happen for the foreseeable future. A tiny percentage of the existing code is so good it isn’t worth rewriting, and there is an explosion of new devices that need to be coded for. Do we expect economic behavior to stop changing at some point, just because something works well?
The best example of this they could find was scribes being put out of work by the printing press? Perhaps someone who writes newsprint has conflated their job with the kind of creative work that techies like me actually DO.
Here’s a clue: We invent things, we don’t just spew code.
Related: All that legacy stock of GUI and gaming and accounting code for PCs and Macs sure wiped out the demand for phone apps a generation later, didn’t it?
Extraordinarily wrong. Sure, nobody needs to work on chess, but there are always more problems. Low end programmers/engineers will drift into admin and customization of complex mostly-prefab systems, serving as a sort of interface to human managerial directives, while the high end won’t hit any ceiling until AI can invent new systems and essentially do science better than the smartest humans (at least 50 years out, if it ever happens). And it seems likely that the smartest humans working with AI-like tools will build things that human want more aptly than an AI that guesses at human values or performs systematic market research.
Jeffery Sachs and his co-authors propose a variation on the Marxist theory of “overproduction leads to collapse”
http://www.reasonforliberty.com/economy/on-overproduction.html
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[edited] The Marxist doctrine of overproduction says that a capitalist economy becomes ever more efficient with labor-saving machines, leading to overproduction, falling prices, reduced profits, and even losses. The elimination of profits in the economy leads to a deep depression. So, it is the lack of profits which causes depression.
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Accumulated software (the machines built in the past) supposedly give production without further effort, leading to very cheap goods, but no salaries to buy them, leading to starvation among plenty. So, (non-sequiter alert) Progressives should run the society to prevent this disaster.
This story has never been true, but it flows off the tongue into uncritical minds. It reminds me of the “DirecTV: Get Rid of Cable” Commercials” where a sequence runs: You can’t record all of your favorite shows, so you become unhappy, go to a happy hour, take a turkish bath, meet Charlie Sheen, and reenact scenes from Platoon. So, get DirecTV, where you can record all of your shows, and don’t end up drunk, reenacting scenes from Platoon.
( http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/directv-get-rid-of-cable-commercials )
This has produced a flood of parodies showing things that can lead to other things. None are about Marxism to my knowledge. Some should be.
Beware the Moore’s Law fallacy. Yes, digital technology has improved exponentially. But that’s not what happens to most technology. Most improvements are incremental. Think batteries, for example–steady improvement, but hardly on an exponential trajectory. Likewise nanotech appears to plod along. Automobiles are getting steadily better, but it’s a real stretch to say they’re twice as good as they were 18 months ago.
Not a good sign when the very first sentence of the article is nonsense:
“Whether it’s bombing our enemies, steering our planes, fielding our calls, rubbing
our backs, vacuuming our floors, driving our taxis, or beating us at Jeopardy,
it’s hard to think of hitherto human tasks that smart machines can’t do
or won’t soon do.”
No, it’s not hard at all to think of human tasks that smart machines won’t soon do. Consider the robotic vacuum. The Roomba was introduced in 2002, and since then, robotic vacuums have been such a runaway success that in only a dozen years they’ve achieved a massive market penetration of…7%
Can robotic vacuums move furniture? Go up and down stairs? Mop tile and hardwood floors? Dump the collected dirt into the trash? Does anybody think we are close to a dusting robot that can carefully pick up fragile items off shelves, dust under them, and put them back? Or laundry robots that can go through the house, collect dirty clothes, sort it all by color, put it in the washer and then the dryer, figure out which items belong to which family member and then fold it all and put it away (or hang it in the closet)? Or how about a cooking robot — think about the skills and dexterity THAT would require.
The answer is no — we’re not close AT ALL to having those things. The robotic vacuum inventor cherry-picked one of the easiest possible household tasks and came up with a machine that can sort of perform it as long as you’re willing to live with its limitations. And most people aren’t.
My prediction is that we are much more likely to have household service drones than autonomous robots — machines operated remotely over the internet by low-paid workers. But I wouldn’t even bet much on that being available any time soon.