Great piece today. I firmly believe that the doom and gloom of people wanting new things to fail is failure to see what might be, indeed is already happening. Sure there are failures and bad things, but how do we survive if we stay status quo?
On another note, I'm not happy with Delete Me; I subscribed on your advice, but I don't see that they've cleaned up, reduced my spam - phone calls, email, messages to any degree. Maybe you should take another look at what they say they will do as opposed to what they actually Don't do!
Interesting considerations in this article. Would like to hear more about the transition of manual tasks and "thinking" tasks with the AI transition. As an example, besides making lesson plans and presentations easier, what does academia in an AI world look like? What creates value in the future?
This is indeed the big question about AI: will it be like previous innovations (loss of jobs in specific sectors, but increased employment overall due to new opportunities), or will it simply crash employment. The length of time for adjustment variable seems like an important part of the question, thanks for emphasizing that. In any case, we know some sectors will be wrecked, since that always happens with any big innovation, and there need to be policy responses to that. The political impact of the China Shock in the early 2000’s that hit rural areas in particular is a very cautionary tale here.
Having personally survived the rise of the computer industry (I wrote my first code in 1962) and the subsequent .Com meltdown, far more recent technology transitions than bootmaking, I'll say your analysis is completely correct. And I do believe the AI revolution will be forced to slow down as no company wants to adopt a system that will indiscriminately hack other companies and their own. The lack of sanity around AI adoption is completely the product of Trump and his friends in the AI business. We still have a federal system, and states are still "the laboratories of democracy."
I am personally using Claude AI Code and I find it makes mistakes about 5-10% of the time. I spend a lot of time testing and debugging the code that Claude writes. I even drew in Fable 5 to critique the code produced by Opus 4.8. I've found that I don't need to know any particular coding language any more, but I do need a strong grounding in basic principles of coding. I suspect the change to primarily AI coders to be far less dramatic than many currently envision, for exactly the reasons you state: we will need other people with other skills to take advantage of the increased coding productivity. Back in the 1970s I did an analysis for my then-supervisor that coding represented only about 7% of the total task to produce a working software system. Automating the coders won't make that big of a change in the overall requirements for labor. Again, this is all just what you said in this article.
I enjoyed your informative piece on English bookmaking and the response to a new, more efficient technology. And you made a valid point about the fact that there was no change in the number of folks engaged in making shoes and that they made lots more. Your conclusion that AI may well have the same results is true. However, there is an important additional result - the kind of new jobs that the technology created and the wages of the new workers. I did my dissertation decades ago on the English woolen industry in the late 18th and early 19th century the years of massive technological change. And the similarity with bootmaking is telling: after 50 years, there were as many workers in the industry and more woolens produced. However, apparently unlike in bookmaking, technological change in the textile industry immiserated a generation of skilled, prosperous workers because the change was pretty rapid. And the jobs that were created were much less remunerative. I think we should be aware that this result is probably equally likely and should this be the case, I hope our government responds more effectively that the British government did 200 years ago. But I don't hold out much hope.
Professor, your Platypus Economics vocation is now my Platypus Economics avocation.
Another avocation of mine is all things Tolkien. I will, henceforth, combine them in "econohobbitplatypal". I intend to use that term in the new essay I am currently outlining, "The Polymathinization of a Couch Potato".
Great piece today. I firmly believe that the doom and gloom of people wanting new things to fail is failure to see what might be, indeed is already happening. Sure there are failures and bad things, but how do we survive if we stay status quo?
On another note, I'm not happy with Delete Me; I subscribed on your advice, but I don't see that they've cleaned up, reduced my spam - phone calls, email, messages to any degree. Maybe you should take another look at what they say they will do as opposed to what they actually Don't do!
Totally agree with first paragraph. Nothing to relate on Delete Me.
Interesting considerations in this article. Would like to hear more about the transition of manual tasks and "thinking" tasks with the AI transition. As an example, besides making lesson plans and presentations easier, what does academia in an AI world look like? What creates value in the future?
This is indeed the big question about AI: will it be like previous innovations (loss of jobs in specific sectors, but increased employment overall due to new opportunities), or will it simply crash employment. The length of time for adjustment variable seems like an important part of the question, thanks for emphasizing that. In any case, we know some sectors will be wrecked, since that always happens with any big innovation, and there need to be policy responses to that. The political impact of the China Shock in the early 2000’s that hit rural areas in particular is a very cautionary tale here.
Having personally survived the rise of the computer industry (I wrote my first code in 1962) and the subsequent .Com meltdown, far more recent technology transitions than bootmaking, I'll say your analysis is completely correct. And I do believe the AI revolution will be forced to slow down as no company wants to adopt a system that will indiscriminately hack other companies and their own. The lack of sanity around AI adoption is completely the product of Trump and his friends in the AI business. We still have a federal system, and states are still "the laboratories of democracy."
I am personally using Claude AI Code and I find it makes mistakes about 5-10% of the time. I spend a lot of time testing and debugging the code that Claude writes. I even drew in Fable 5 to critique the code produced by Opus 4.8. I've found that I don't need to know any particular coding language any more, but I do need a strong grounding in basic principles of coding. I suspect the change to primarily AI coders to be far less dramatic than many currently envision, for exactly the reasons you state: we will need other people with other skills to take advantage of the increased coding productivity. Back in the 1970s I did an analysis for my then-supervisor that coding represented only about 7% of the total task to produce a working software system. Automating the coders won't make that big of a change in the overall requirements for labor. Again, this is all just what you said in this article.
I enjoyed your informative piece on English bookmaking and the response to a new, more efficient technology. And you made a valid point about the fact that there was no change in the number of folks engaged in making shoes and that they made lots more. Your conclusion that AI may well have the same results is true. However, there is an important additional result - the kind of new jobs that the technology created and the wages of the new workers. I did my dissertation decades ago on the English woolen industry in the late 18th and early 19th century the years of massive technological change. And the similarity with bootmaking is telling: after 50 years, there were as many workers in the industry and more woolens produced. However, apparently unlike in bookmaking, technological change in the textile industry immiserated a generation of skilled, prosperous workers because the change was pretty rapid. And the jobs that were created were much less remunerative. I think we should be aware that this result is probably equally likely and should this be the case, I hope our government responds more effectively that the British government did 200 years ago. But I don't hold out much hope.
Collapse or reorganization.
Destructive creation or creative destruction.
Professor, your Platypus Economics vocation is now my Platypus Economics avocation.
Another avocation of mine is all things Tolkien. I will, henceforth, combine them in "econohobbitplatypal". I intend to use that term in the new essay I am currently outlining, "The Polymathinization of a Couch Potato".