When it comes to artificial intelligence, few fears are bigger than the idea of robots coming to take our jobs. But if you talk to the AI evangelists among us, that might be a good thing.
Not in the Elon Musk way: robots will take care of your children, but in a way that helps us make better use of our resources and manage our busy work. If doom doesn’t come true, and that’s a big if, we might get the one thing there never seems to be enough of: time.
In fact, there’s a name for this best-case scenario: AI abundance.
That’s how Anton Korinek, an economics professor at the University of Virginia and one of Vox’s 2024 Future Perfect 50, recently explained the idea to the host of Explain it to meVox weekly podcast: “The abundance of AI essentially carries with it the notion that we could all be much richer than we can imagine today… AI and robots will be able to produce many more goods and services than we have done in the current economy, and would make us an order of magnitude richer and better off.”
But what would a world without work be like? And what would have to happen for AI to free us from work and provide everyone with a universally good standard of living? We discussed that in the last episode of Explain it to me. Below is an excerpt from our conversation with Korinek, edited for length and clarity.
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We keep hearing that change of this scale is unprecedented. Is that true or is it exaggeration?
I think it’s the first time of this particular nature, but if you want to go into history and look for parallels, I think the closest parallel would be the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, you would have to go back about 250 years to find anything even close to what we are about to experience this time.
What can the Industrial Revolution teach us about this particular moment?
From a general economic perspective, it can be said that work as we have it today did not even exist before the Industrial Revolution. Because before that, the most important factor of production was the land that people worked to produce the food they needed. Then, suddenly, these new technologies appeared that did not depend so much on the land but on machines. It started with spinning and weaving in the textile sector, but soon we had the steam engine and electricity.
The new thing that had to be produced (in addition to the work that people had to do) were machines that could be easily copied and reproduced. That meant that nothing slowed down production. And that meant we were suddenly able to produce a lot more because that land bottleneck was overcome. In a sense, you can say that this is the main reason why people in advanced economies today are something like 20 times richer, on average, than before the Industrial Revolution.
What did that mean for workers at the time? I imagine that transition was not easy.
It was actually quite disturbing. If you were a craft weaver or something, if you were a trained professional in your craft, then all of a sudden you had these machines that could do what you were doing, but at an order of magnitude cheaper.
So those artisans lost their livelihood practically overnight and became impoverished. But if we look on the bright side, their descendants lived in a world where they had cheap textiles and soon all other kinds of cheap industrial products, and they lived to be much richer than their artisan parents or grandparents who lost their jobs in the first wave of the Industrial Revolution.
This can be enormously disturbing and painful for the individual. But if we have a little social protection, we can mitigate the disruption and make sure that in the end everyone really benefits. Now, if there are many disturbances at once, then it can become much more difficult.
Now there are people who lived through another more recent technological disruption: I’m thinking about the 80s and 90s with computers.
In some ways, the way I see the Industrial Revolution is that it first involved building machines that could automate much of our physical strength. And then, around the middle of the 20th century, we created machines that could automate cognitive tasks: computers.
Those early computers could only do very routine things, like adding numbers in a spreadsheet, and that was very useful for businesses. We are seeing that AI can increasingly perform complex and truly thoughtful cognitive tasks. So the big question is where will this end? And will they leave us something?
You talked about land being the bottleneck during the time of the Industrial Revolution. Do we have a bottleneck now?
I would say that the most valuable resource in our economy today is our human capital. it’s you and me and everyone [reading] this. Because if we can have more workers, then we can increase the amount the economy produces. We may enter a world where you simply press a button and have one more AI worker do the work on your behalf and essentially expand our economic opportunities.
When it comes to the AI revolution, is this something that will benefit our grandchildren more than us?
I am very hopeful that we can all benefit. But whether that will happen or not is a story that has yet to be written and will be a challenge.
At first, there will be small sectors where people are losing, and then there will be a debate: “Well, why should we help them? We didn’t help other workers as much in previous technological revolutions.” So over time, most people will be affected by this. But this will not happen overnight. It’s going to be a somewhat slow process.
We work to receive a salary. In a future where we no longer work, how will we eat? How do we get health insurance? How do we pay for a place to live?
That will be the most important and also the most fundamental challenge for our current system. In a sense, you can say that the Industrial Revolution accidentally created a system in which our labor became increasingly valuable because we were so scarce. That has underpinned all this material progress, all this increase in well-being that we have seen in the last 250 years.
But once the AI revolution truly arrives, there will no longer be a guarantee that we will be able to earn a decent living based on the value of our work. I think at that point we are going to need a new income distribution system. For example, Universal Basic Income, computing allocations: essentially everyone is allocated a certain amount of computing power that they can then use or sell. There is also talk of labor guarantees. There is a whole range of options from a general perspective.
The main concern has to be that we find some solution because if labor is significantly devalued by this technological change and at the same time we have much more abundance in the economy, it would be a failure if we did not use that additional abundance to make sure that no one is left behind.
This series was funded by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had complete discretion over the content of these reports..