False Analogies in AI Job Replacement Scenarios

AI is happening. Arguments that "it can never do X" these days often look silly within months. Right now is as bad as it will ever be. If LLM's have limitations, then we will develop another means (likely using LLMs for help); after all, we know general intelligence can exist, because it already does in our brains.

If we survive AI, it looks like we're heading into an interregnum with massive wealth disparities, if we don't have UBI or robots. I'm sorry to say I'm not offering hope here, but rather a critique of several of the bad arguments about why it will be okay.

Argument #1: "Player pianos, cranes, and chess algorithms exist, yet we still have pianists, competitive weightlifters, and chess players."

Why it's wrong: most labor lacks a performance component. That is, it's the end result of your labor people want. They don't want to watch you do it.

This argument has been making the rounds (see here, and here.) First, very few jobs involve a significant performance or "human connection" component. You might prefer to watch a musician (rather than a machine) compose or perform music, but I bet you don't enjoy watching taxi drivers, farmers, or factory workers performing their jobs enough to pay to watch them do it (rather than pay much much less for a machine doing it.)

On one hand, you might buy artisan products that cost more and (to be blunt) have lower, more variable quality, because of the human element - but unless you're pretty wealthy, you don't do this for everything. Or most things.

On the other, even regarding the performance-heavy commodity of music - do you pay to watch it performed every time you hear it? Not since the advent of recording, of which player pianos were one early form. So even for the article's canonical example meant to reassure us, according to Claude, today we have per capita only about 68% of the professional musicians that we had in 1900, even after a century of economic growth. You may be hoping that UBI will support us all - UBI, which is, reminder, NOWHERE in mainstream political discourse.

The vast majority of labor is concerned only with the material end product. So, unless you're lucky to be in the 1% of things which humans are evolutionarily programmed to appreciate seeing performed - e.g., physical or vocal beauty, conversational cleverness, coordination or musculature - AND these are things that you can figure out how to pay your mortgage with (how many competitive weightlifters and chess players can say that?) Also remember that the performers rely on disposable income from everyone else. How are even the performers going to pay the rent?


Argument #2: "The economy is about status competitions, not wealth creation. The AIs are taking away the part we don't want anyway!"

Why it's wrong: status competitions are healthy when the future is bright, and we aren't all trapped in the same status competition. Otherwise, they are unpleasant.

I think the argument is actually partly true, but I don't think it's the good news that this blogger thinks. A lot of our current political dysfunction in the West can be easily understood as people angry that the WRONG SORT are having their status elevated. Before social media, we could all live in our little suburb or capital city or country town, blissfully ignorant of the opinions of the people who were actually making the rules and signing the checks (who, were probably not YOU.) But as soon as we all had smartphones and social media 24/7, many of us found out that our demographic wasn't actually in charge, nor did we share taste or values with the people who were. Particularly in the U.S., for many people who thought they were good, solid, respectable mainstream Americans (and thought everyone else thought that too), the advent of social media was akin to a nightmare where a curtain dropped and they realized they were being laughed at - worst of all, by their MORAL INFERIORS, who (again) were IN CHARGE. It was like the home team suddenly being booed and kicked off the field.

Consider also the well-characterized effect of a tide that lifts all boats - that everyone wants to sign up for the system that keeps making them richer. Trivially obvious, but the implications for liberal democracy's universality, and what people will put up with from their governments during a rising tide, are also worth examining. Such thoughts obviously conflict with the view that obtained across the West until about the mid-2000s, that in accordance with Fukuyama's end of history view, liberal democracy was the only game in town because individual rights and happiness = wealth = national power, and every nation would have to converge to it, or disappear. I remember reading a paper around 2006 that I didn't care for, only because it clearly showed that actually, it's economic growth people care about, not democracy, and people would put up with a lot if they were getting wealthier. (See: China.)

The country that is most stable, and that is most pleasant to live in, is one with multiple overlapping status hierarchies. That way, all your status eggs aren't in one basket. You can choose which status hierarchies to be in, and the hierarchies themselves are not hierarchical (at least not obviously so.) That means you don't even necessarily have to know or care about the other ones. Bowling Alone is a book about the evaporation of community in the United States, and the meaning-making and status that evaporated with it, and the negative consequences thereof. Consider on the other hand an intrusive dictatorship like North Korea, which aspires to create a single monolithic hierarchy by eliminating every status hierarchy but one. In the U.S. the invisible hand has "organically" moved us in much the same direction.

Concern about status can be seen as a problem that is worse in wealthy countries in general. The more your needs are met, the less you have to worry about your needs, and the more you worry about how you compare with others. This goes a long way to explain the behavior of the super-rich, who mostly seem to be signaling to the other super-rich, about how super-rich they are - and of course getting even more super-rich, even though they've achieved what Scott Galloway calls financial escape velocity. Since technology has drawn back the veil of ignorance and continuously reminded us what the other half thinks of us, and we're in fewer communities (overlapping status hierarchies) on top of that - it does raise the question. Even if things go well and we get massive economic growth - while we're constantly being reminded of our place in the status hierarchy, or our chosen status hierarchies' inferiority to the rule-making ones? Even assuming we're all able to eat after the transition to AI, if our status is based only on what biology tells us to like (and pathetic human brains can't create wealth anymore), then power will be back to beauty queens, quarterbacks and bully-types who dominated most of history. (Or alternately, what if our income drops suddenly while we're still hyper-focused on status?)


Argument #3 (more of an analogy): the welfare of horses has improved dramatically since the industrial revolution. As the value of their labor fell, they have increasingly lived lives of leisure instead of labor.

Why this is wrong: This is the wrong analogy. The salient feature here is control by a superior intelligence. Therefore, we are wild horses in the neolithic about to be domesticated.

For thousands of years after domestication, horses were worked brutally, prior to machines replacing them. Because horses are pleasing to humans, today their numbers are the same or possibly slightly higher than before the advent of the car. On average they have better lives. So, if this analogy is correct, what we should expect is that we're about to be enslaved for many generations of AI dominating humans (making us do things the AIs still can't do) much to the humans' suffering, until better technology eliminates that need - and then hope that, in a few centuries or millennia, the AIs put our descendants out in a nice pasture. But even the life of a pastured horse doesn't appeal to most of us. We mostly don't want to be domesticated and watched over by AIs on a human-pasture, doing certain restricted things.