If machines can produce every useful good and service better than humans -- including manufacturing copies of themselves -- then the global economy (denominated in units of currency) might be under threat, but people will materially prosper. It's not dollars or euros or renminbi that people really need. People need goods and services. If the machines-do-everything technology gets invented once, copies will soon spread globally [1].
The real problem is more likely to be the transitional turbulence. If self-driving vehicles do wipe out millions of truck driver jobs in the year 2029, but automated doctors aren't ready until 2059, large groups of workers lose income without seeing deflationary relief in the prices of services they need.
[1] The spread of maker machines could happen "legitimately" -- Gates Foundation or a similar organization financing freely shareable re-implementations. It could also happen "illegally" -- a government in a poorer country will just decide to tell international patent/copyright holders to pound sand in favor of their own domestic constitutents. This would be similar to South Africa's treatment of HIV drug patents in the 1990s.
Exactly. Those machines/processes/knowledge are a form of capital, and failure to redistribute it through taxes has known consequences in inequality, poverty, etc.
Not arguing that inequality is not an issue, it certainly is. But to say that only the wealthy have benefited distorts the picture. Rockefeller or Getty could have spent all their billions and never owned an iPhone, or had a child in vitro, or videoconference with a person in another continent, things taken for granted by everyday non-billionaires.
The average person's "wealth" -- as measured by life expectancy, access to vaccines, medicines, and advanced procedures, clean food, safe shelter, labor laws (in most countries) plus an enormous variety of entertainment and leisure options -- continues to increase over time, even if wealthy people get the majority of the gains.
Yes, increasing efficiencies of production have mostly benefited owners and a relatively small slice of high skill workers. (Like the engineers who build systems to remove human labor from processes.) Displaced workers in high income economies have seen their prosperity diminish because they lose a lot of earning power without seeing it fully counterbalanced by lower prices. In fact, inflation targeting efforts (and a host of other factors) keep inflating the costs of health care, housing, and higher education in an era where improved techniques "should" be making everything cost less.
Quoting from the article, Elon Musk has apparently said "There will certainly be a lot of job disruption because what’s going to happen is robots will be able to do everything better than us." I don't think that the story is "more of the same for ordinary people, and even worse" if machines can take all routine, productive jobs [1]. If owners don't need ordinary people as employees, then neither do ordinary people need owners. If machines do everything, then the cost (and price) of goods and services falls toward the costs of raw materials and energy. And raw materials and energy themselves fall precipitously in cost if machines can perfectly build more nuclear reactors or solar farms and batteries and mine even low-grade ore deposits without wages or breaks.
In this scenario, ordinary people don't even need to seize the existing assets of rich people to start living well without them. Just have the robots make copies of everything. There are a few edge cases of positional goods where robots can't duplicate things (you can't make more Old Master paintings or Manhattan real estate), but those don't really stand in the way of broad prosperity. If robots do everything routine, then everyone can have good medical care, clean water, plenty to eat, safe and climate controlled housing, abundant electronic entertainment... pretty much everything that the median adult citizen of highly developed countries currently enjoy today.
Keep in mind that I'm not saying that machines will replace human workers in all routine, productive jobs. I'm just thinking about the effects if they can.
[1] Routine, productive jobs would include things like driving trucks, diagnosing and treating leukemia, picking apples, and running experiments as planned by a principal investigator. It wouldn't include things like writing new poetry or coming up with a novel line of research as a principal investigator. But nonetheless, the "routine" jobs include most of today's economic activity, including most that are currently high pay and considered high skill.
This is a bit like the arguments economists made for globalisation. Very sound theory but by experiment it is being proven wrong. The focus was too much on the demand side. There will always be some cost for things and if you are not a supplier then you are out. The machines put too many people out in any particular location. Same as globalisation.
This will only be true in societies where the government interests of developing things like surveillance technology do not outweigh the interest of fulfilling their basic responsibilities.
Look at how financially powerful a city like Hong King is compared to the issues they’ve struggled with over the last several years.
If we can’t agree on some basic human rights questions, there’s just no way that technology will proliferate in a way that universally benefits everyone.
I think, it's way more complicated. Different people could have a very different definition of prosperity. Someone would fine with a dorm bed, while others would strive towards buying that 3-storey mansion they dreamed about since childhood. Earth simply doesn't have enough resources for everyone to have any level of luxury they could imagine, so there has to be some capping mechanism. So far, the deal was doing something that others would find useful, getting others to pay for it and using that money to pursue your own dreams. If we take that mechanism out of equation, we might be opening a much bigger can of worms.
If you would accept my analogy with a farm, the crop yield per worker may get higher, but instead of working at the field together because we all want that bread at the end of the day, we will be spending most of our time arguing on who's more entitled to get served first.
The truck drivers who lose their jobs will get new ones. Same story has been told for generations and it is never true. So-called AI won’t eliminate the need for workers, they will just shift into new jobs.
No one shed a tear when the carriage drivers lost their jobs. Except maybe the carriage drivers and their families.
> The truck drivers who lose their jobs will get new ones. Same story has been told for generations and it is never true.
The idea that new jobs will always arise is not a law of nature, it's only an empirical observation that keeps on being true, until one day it doesn't.
The real problem is more likely to be the transitional turbulence. If self-driving vehicles do wipe out millions of truck driver jobs in the year 2029, but automated doctors aren't ready until 2059, large groups of workers lose income without seeing deflationary relief in the prices of services they need.
[1] The spread of maker machines could happen "legitimately" -- Gates Foundation or a similar organization financing freely shareable re-implementations. It could also happen "illegally" -- a government in a poorer country will just decide to tell international patent/copyright holders to pound sand in favor of their own domestic constitutents. This would be similar to South Africa's treatment of HIV drug patents in the 1990s.