Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI
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🔗 via noahpinion.blog.
Highlights
economic history has seen a continuous diversification in the number of tasks humans do. Back in the agricultural age, nearly everyone did the same small set of tasks: farming and maintaining a farm household. Now, even after centuries of automation, our species as a whole performs a much wider variety of different tasks. “Digital media marketing” was not a job in 1950, nor was “dance therapist”.
So that really calls into question the notion that humanity is getting continuously squeezed into a smaller and smaller set of useful tasks. The fact that we call most of the new tasks “services” doesn’t change the fact that the set of new human tasks seems to have expanded faster than machines have replaced old ones.
But many people believe that this time really is different. They believe that AI is a general-purpose technology that can — with a little help from robotics — learn to do everything a human can possibly do, including programming better AI.
it’s very possible that regular humans will have plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI dominance — often doing much the same kind of work that they’re doing right now
When most people hear the term “comparative advantage” for the first time, they immediately think of the wrong thing. They think the term means something along the lines of “who can do a thing better”. After all, if an AI is better than you at storytelling, or reading an MRI, it’s better compared to you, right? Except that’s not actually what comparative advantage means. The term for “who can do a thing better” is “competitive advantage”, or “absolute advantage”.
Comparative advantage actually means “who can do a thing better relative to the other things they can do”. So for example, suppose I’m worse than everyone at everything, but I’m a little less bad at drawing portraits than I am at anything else. I don’t have any competitive advantages at all, but drawing portraits is my comparative advantage.
This is the concept of opportunity cost — one of the core concepts of economics, and yet one of the hardest to wrap one’s head around. When AI becomes so powerful that it can be used for practically anything, the cost of using AI for any task will be determined by the value of the other things the AI could be used for instead.
The concept of comparative advantage is really just the same as the concept of opportunity cost. If you Google the definition of “comparative advantage”, you might find it defined as “a situation in which an individual, business or country can produce a good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another producer.” This is a good definition.
it’s possible that many of the jobs that humans do today will continue to be done by humans indefinitely, no matter how much better AIs are at those jobs. And it’s possible that humans will continue to be well-compensated for doing those same jobs.
- Economic history shows an expansion in the variety of tasks performed by humans, with new jobs continually emerging despite automation.
- Some speculate that AI and robotics may eventually perform all tasks better than humans, questioning the need for human labour in the future.
- Comparative advantage means excelling in a task relative to other tasks one can perform, and is tied to the concept of opportunity cost.
- Jobs may still be performed by humans indefinitely due to comparative advantage, even if AI is more efficient, and humans may continue to be well-compensated for their work.