Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0w1qzB37W6lJ8pGCYZplqbGcw

Since I get to go first, I will preemptively take the hyper-Olympian and very long-run historical point of view...

The human brain is a massively parallel supercomputer that fits in half a shoebox. It draws 50 W of power. 600 million years of proto- and mammalian evolution mean that almost every single human can solve AI problems that our machines cannot—what our machines find very hard or impossible, our brains find so trivially easy that we call such capabilities "unskilled".

Human fingers are amazingly fine manipulation devices. Human back and leg muscles—especially when testosterone soaked—are quite good at moving heavy objects. And so, back in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, we used our brains, big muscles, and fingers to lead interesting, if stressful and short, lives.

But as history has enrolled we have done other things to add economic and sociological value than use our backs, our fingers, and our brains to innovate and create. Over the long historical sweep, backs and fingers have declined and we have turned many of us into, instead:

• robots performing repetitive tasks,
• microcontrollers for domesticated animals and machines,
• relatively simple accounting and recording software bots,
• personal servitors,
• social engineers trying to keep all those things controlled by brains—especially by the testosterone soaked ones—working together harmoniously. With limited success.

while remaining innovators and creators.

Backs started to go out with the domestication of the horse. Fingers with the invention of the spinning jenny. Microcontrollers and accounting 'bots, we can see, are now on the way out too. So, fortunately, are the jobs that treat humans as simple robots.

That leaves us with a future of work made up of:

• personal servitors,
• social engineers,
• innovators and creators.

The market economy will fund AI that replaces workers in capital-intensive production processes. Such are large scale and oligopolistic: firms profit from R&D because they capture a significant portion of efficiencies in their value chains. There is no equivalent market force funding AI that assists and amplifies workers in labor-intensive production processes.

The first is poison for equity and inclusion. The second is gold.

That second is one thing this NGO institution that surrounds us would be good at doing, and needs to do.

Utopia or dystopia? Heaven or hell?

Over to you, James. And, in a broader sense, over to all of you—in the audience, and out there in Internet land.