23 thoughts on “The Abundance Apocalpyse”

1. I think the worry is that robots will replace low end labor, but not high end labor. So the low end laborer will lose his source of income, and be unable to pay the high end laborer for this services because he has nothing of value to trade. Call it the glue factory scenario. When horse labor became obsolete society did keep on going…but without horses.

   I guess you could have a program to provide the now useless person income to pay the heart surgeon, but since heart surgery would still be a scarce labor intensive good this would fall prey to third party payer and socialist calculation problems. As we can see today its not welfare of mass produced goods causing fiscal strain, but welfare in the form of skilled professional services.

   And of course even the low end labor goods would require some kind of income to pay for. Assuming your marginal value of labor is perfect zero and excepting UBI, where would this income come from if your labor is useless? If the price of goods drops 99% but your income drops 100%, you can’t buy anything.

   I agree that abundance isn’t a problem per se, but you should understand the worry of people who think they will be unemployed is that they will not share in that abundance because what possible claim could they have on it (besides existing).

2. I think you (and I) are in a small minority of cases who will still live ordered lives and thrive happily without regular work, with secure material abundance, and without the compelling need for some way to be able to signal social status and show off impressiveness to others. Most people, however, are not constitutionally well-suited to such a state of affairs, and I think the subsidized yet dreary lives of many of the inhabitants of Indian reservations provides an example of a possible scenario. In particular, most people will still feel the need to signal status, and without labor or wealth-based opportunities to distinguish themselves, we are likely to see men especially revert to primitive instincts and traditional, pre-civilized methods. One should not so easily dismiss the thesis that civilization depends on scarcity in the same way that preservation of fitness depends on the pressures of natural selection.

   Now, it’s hard to know how much sexual, familial, and physical disorder to expect in such circumstances, though the evidence we have is not promising. It could be that robots cheaply replace all police and that, even with 4th Amendment protections, there is effectively a policeman, er, policerobot, monitoring his, er, its, beat in every hallway and every public space, effectively eliminating crime. Or it could be that politics is just as broken as it is now, and there will be bad neighborhoods.

   If so, without work, even talented people who wish to live well-ordered lives in safe, harmonious surroundings will have a hard time extracting themselves and their children from these disordered circumstances. All of this is quite speculative, of course, but there is plenty of good reason to worry about such a scenario.

   Furthermore, that doesn’t take into account the tricky problem of how we arrive at the world in which robots can do (almost) everything cheaply, which would seem to involve either the emergence of genuinely strong AI or Hanson’s scenario involving emulated minds.

   Both of these cases are real game changers after which all bets are off, however,neither scenario provides us any reason to be sanguine about the future prospects for biological human life on earth subsequent to these developments.

3. Well, I have not had a regular paid job in more than twenty years. My life has not lost its meaning. If your material needs are nothing to worry about, and you are tasked with finding a meaningful life, you can figure it out.

   Yeah, but you are bit atypical, Arnold (in a good way!). You arrived in that position of not having to work as a mature adult with a lot of social and intellectual capital. The outlook for a typical young person who reaches the age of majority with no expectation of working is, I think, a little uglier, given the kind of drug and alcohol abuse that exists on college campuses. Imagine if these people were not at least pretending to study and there was no expectation that you’d leave after four years and actually start behaving like a responsible adult.

   • Or consider this. People who strike it rich due to their own effort (say someone that cashes out after a successful internet start up) do tend to find meaningful things to do with their lives afterward (even if they never earn a dime again). Even if they become wayward playboys afterward they at least feel like “they earned it” and are special.

     By contrast nobodies who win the lottery tend to squander it all and end up miserable.

     Maybe its the kind of person in both scenarios. Maybe its that in one case the money is a big “you did it” symbol rather then “your lucky” symbol, and both the person and everyone else knows it.

     I agree I’d probably find something to do if you just handed me a check, but that’s because I think I could be productive and useful in non-monetary ways.

4. If robots are actively designing other robots to handle “people’s needs”, then you should be worried more about the AI alignment problem far more than the economy

   • Actually there’s a better way to take care of people’s needs.

     What’s better than a robot? A hologram. And what’s better than a hologram? A memory.

     And the memories are better than digital. You can select the memory of having heart surgery. Or better yet, the memory of never having high cholesterol to begin with, because in your memory you liked to eat healthy foods. As far as you remember, you loved making mango smoothies every morning for breakfast.

5. Hang on Arnold. What’s your unit of account/numeraire here? Cheap in terms of *what*?

   • Nick,

     That is indeed the right question to ask!

     Highly relevant is your post from a few years ago (where I also highly recommend the discussion from the comments):
     http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/01/robots-slaves-horses-and-malthus.html

     And on the topic of the future of work in a world where human labor is made obsolete by technology, here’s another one that comes to mind:
     http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2014/08/why-do-i-hate-driverless-cars.html

   • The base currency is always time.

     • Comparative advantage isn’t an infinite concept

6. The next thing you might say is that without jobs, life will lose meaning for people. Well, I have not had a regular paid job in more than twenty years. My life has not lost its meaning. If your material needs are nothing to worry about, and you are tasked with finding a meaningful life, you can figure it out.

   I think this is an article of faith, rather than a belief with evidence. There are at least 3 counterpoints: people/families on long-term welfare, children of rich people, and people who win lotteries. None of these groups are known for for having deep and meaningful lives.

   Personally, I believe “the devil makes work for idle hands” is a more accurate vision of how people behave in this situation.

7. “The next thing you might say is that without jobs, life will lose meaning for people.”

   A lot of this comes from the conditioning inherent in our current school system which beats out most creativity and independence from a child by 3rd grade. The current system was designed to create clock punchers and rule followers. A few lucky ones used to get some restoration in college, but no more.

   Some balance of self-discipline without regimentation will have to be achieved in instruction. Of course, a lot of the regimentation was imposed to manage a large body of children in a classroom. Five year olds starting kindergarten are a bit unruly, but then they are being conditioned to the rules. Yet they still seem to learn even before conforming.

8. America has been running a large experiment providing abundance to people for free for quite some time, and the results suggest that it might be well to be cautious when generalizing from your own example. Moldbug wrote about it back in 2013 better than I could:

   We move on to Solution B, which I think is the solution most people believe in. Work? Who the hell wants to work? Work is anti-hedonic by definition. If it didn’t have negative utility, it wouldn’t be work. So, it’s supposed to be a problem that in the future, work will be obsolete, and we’ll be able to produce goods and services without any human labor at all? That doesn’t sound like a problem to me. It sounds like a victory.

   The problem with Solution B is that we’ve already tried it, quite extensively. You see Solution B every time you go to the grocery store. Next to the button marked “Debit/Credit” is one marked “EBT.” Ever pressed that one? Even just by mistake? It’s the Solution B button. America has entire cities that have moved beyond anti-hedonic labor disutility and entered the gleaming future of Solution B. One of them is called “Detroit.”

   Solution B is not the culmination of human civilization, it turns out, but its destruction. Even in terms of mere Pig-Philosophy, it is destructive, because it ruins a human asset. If we appraise humans as robots, we see that this is a special kind of robot: it rusts up if not continually operating. As beasts, we are beasts who evolved to work. Our species achieved world domination as a result of our capacity for work. To feed and entertain a human being, without requiring productive effort or at least some simulation of it, is in the end just a way to destroy him – not too different from Solution A.

   There are some human beings, Sam Altman [and the rest of the present company — C.] presumably among them, who are natural aristocrats. They can acquire the resources they would need to never work again, and still continue to work. While this is lovely, we need to face the reality that the human species is what it is. The population does not consist largely or even significantly of natural aristocrats. Not, for instance, in Detroit. “Dead corpses, the rotting body of a brother man, whom fate or unjust men have killed, this is not a pleasant spectacle; but what say you to the dead soul of a man, — in a body which still pretends to be vigorously alive, and can drink rum?”

   • I might add a class of historical examples I just happened to think of: harems. Abundance was provided by the harem’s owner, no work was required except being ready to please the boss. Inhabitants were usually recruited from the population at large. As far as I remember, harems were noted not for flowering of culture or reason or excellence, but for poisonings, backbiting and backstabbing chimpanzee politics of the meanest sort.

     • I believe the politics was involved because the abundance was a lifetime guarantee, but you could be kicked out when no longer young and beautiful. Therefore there was plotting to be able to bear a child and thus establish a long term tie.

       • Good point, but I feel it doesn’t account for all of the politics. Consider the most mundane possible example: girls’ junior high school.

9. The number one reason is that, assuming this plays out, there is a flip side: goods and services will be cheap, and in fact for all intents and purposes they will be essentially free. Take heart surgery as an example.

   Today, heart surgery is one of the more expensive things you can get. But if you take all of the labor out of health care, then heart surgery does not need to cost more than a happy meal.

   wow Arnoldl Kling subscribes to the labor theory of value ..did not expect that

10. Others seem primarily concerned with the loss of meaning. I’m having problems seeing how markets will clear. What happens when human beings consume value but lose their means to create much value? What exactly is it they trade for these automated heart surgeries?

    Some technologies have gotten dramatically cheaper, but I see that as just a phase that occurred due to the emergence of China. More recent trends are for tech companies to give no ground on margins, and to pursue strategies to protect their revenues from free market pressure to lower prices. I don’t see a trend towards a more competitive marketplace.

    The big question is whether market forces can hold or they break down.

11. Here’s a couple of issues:

    1) Define “your job.” My job is to generate documents. I sit at my desk tapping at my keyboard to type up documents in a word processor application, send and receive email, checking/checkout files from version control systems, and make phone calls. To the extent that it existed, my counterpart job in 1980 invovled about 1.5 of those things.

    2) John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15 hour work week on the theory that increased production would let everyone work fewer hours for the same high standard of living he enjoyed in his upper class life. He discounted humanities apparently unending hunger for greater levels of acquisition.

    3) You said “Well, I have not had a regular paid job in more than twenty years. My life has not lost its meaning. ” Having just finished Coming Apart today, I would point out that this is 100% in line with some of the major assertions of the book. You and others in the elite look at work differently than most Americans, and you live a culturally and geographically separated life that fails to provide you with a perspective into those other Americans.

    Just out of curiosity, have you ever the cultural bubble test put forward in that book? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/white-educated-and-wealthy-congratulations-you-live-in-a-bubble

12. Why would the AI fire the humans?

    Humans make good robots better than the steel and plastic variety. The AI will almost certainly be smart enough to use humans effectively.

13. It’s not the robot. It’s the metaphor of the robot. We should worry about that.

    When people understand that robots are like people, and people are like robots, that’s a destructive idea. People can get it, intellectually, but they never really believe it.

    It’s like evolution. It’s like the metaphor of the chimpanzee. Intellectually, we can understand that people are like chimpanzees. But from moment to moment we still resist the idea that this is something we need to take on board. It’s in the back of our minds, but we can’t take it seriously.

    To the limited extent that we accept the metaphor of the chimpanzee, it is destructive. Whereas the metaphor of the angel is the opposite of destructive. The metaphor of the angel is an ideal and a goal. That’s something to aspire to.

    This is from an Updike novel: “We’re all trash, really. Without God to lift us up and make us into angels we’re all trash.”

    The metaphor of trash, of course, is the biggest danger. If we ever understood that our bodies are just packaging, shrink wrap, to be disposed of, that’s as destructive as it gets.

    The shell gives up the ghost. The shell replicates itself, uses us, lives on forever, discards the extraneous waste.

    Our experience isn’t like this. And yet it’s true. The basic pleasure models in Blade Runner don’t believe they were designed and manufactured. Evolution designed and manufactured us to replicate ourselves. We haven’t admitted it yet. Not more than a shadow.

14. Furthermore, in this futuristic scenario, the robots will themselves be designed and made by robots, so that the robot heart surgeon will be a cheap commodity, at least if there is competition in production.

    This seems very simple of the future of lots of cheap goods. While I don’t think our abundance Apocalypyse leads to a disutopia but it is going to be very rocky ride to this future. (Did you see the 2016 election?)

    1) Probably the weirdest part is the richer we are the less we can afford to have children so there will be a government bust sometime in the next 40 years. I vote Japan.

    2) Doesn’t the profit motive drive most economic behavior so all cheap goods has a lot of issues as you don’t profit from selling cheap goods. Look at the 2001 US housing markets as one reason for the bubble was it was very profitable after tech busted. This is one reason why I don’t see private schools for most poor students as we see most for profit schools for colleges for lower end students are not good.

    3) In terms of modern economy one reason why there is ‘too’ much post-HS education is young people fear without one they will left out for losers at 40.

15. It’s not the labor of the surgeon that elevates the cost of heart surgery. Its all the other stuff. Your flashlight is on the wrong wall.

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