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!
Babs - I have no experience with DeleteMe, just want to pass along some observations from 30 years observing email spam & telemarketing. For me, the key issue is that most of what reaches me is scam/crime (too-good-to-be-true offers, get rich schemes, attempts to obtain personal data, crypto sales). My belief is that the sources of these emails/texts/calls do NOT obtain my contact info via any legit broker, so the people Delete Me likely works with may well not be the source of your problem either. Our contact info is widely available from less savory brokers, including on dark web which is probably not an arm of the Internet that would reliably cooperate with Delete Me & other such services.
I wish I had better news. My only success has been with some filtering, manually blocking & reporting, and trying to be as anonymous as possible. Best regards - j
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.
Explainomax - for e.g., will there be a new space for the level of serious quality control testing & debugging that would seem to be a necessity to work through the 5-10% mistake rate? Not that I have eyes on exactly what those tasks are, but I assume that before we deploy the Ai-directed air traffic control system or prostate surgery robot, there'll be an Ai liability attorney advising the Ai management agent that those errors need to be a lot closer to null!
We already know what the worst case scenario looks like (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project for an example). The answer needs to be human control at every major decision point. The attorneys who were sanctioned for making up fake case citations are just one example of how AI does bad things without proper human supervision (or "quality control").
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.
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?
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".
Chuck - so far I too am happy to let Justin be my agent to curate informative info and make me a bit more polymathematicized. Even if an Ai could replace his knowledge, would it have his charming accent and expressions, you reckon? 😉
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.
I was a bit on the edge of my seat waiting for you to write: “and of course there was then a huge number of people wearing sturdy, if less artisanal, boots which they could not have afforded before.” The utility of that to all the folks who otherwise would have had to work and walk in worn out boots they couldn’t afford to replace must have been enormous. (I’m assuming that’s part of the story, though I confess I didn’t look it up to be sure.)
In the late 1990’s working for a Soro’s fund Bessent realized that an Asian financial crisis triggered by a failing yen brought about a disrupted Britain economy. When the fund shorted the pound, it broke the Bank of England a few years later. Whether there is a cause effect relationship is debatable but what is undeniable is that Bessent believes he can influence governments under pressure with his policies as Treasury secretary.
Bessent recently pulled the unusual move to support the Japanese yen((bit.ly/4q1dsnZ). One can see a primany reason for such a move. The Japanese government have recently become sellers of US treasuries now the largest investor of US bonds at $1.1T. More selling could eventuate in the rise of the 10y bond yield toward the debt trap moment of 5% due to foreign investors seeing a loss in confidence and weakening US economy. This is a point of no return for the US government. The US can ill afford losing foreign investors who own $9.5T in US bonds.
So Bessent’s support of the yen in foreign currency exchanges is a plea to the Japanese government, “please don’t sell US treasuries” and can be seen as a financial bribe, completely in concert with the way Cheeto and his regime works. With a mounting national debt of nearly $40T the fascist regime can ill afford loss of foreign investors to support our debt service.
Already happening: huge data centers being built. They have huge energy demand. Eventually our stupid government will be wrenched from grip of fossil fuel interests so will need massive investment in renewables and modern grid to distribute the energy from where it is cheap to where it is needed. Water projects. Maybe we’ll decide to teach reading in school. Maybe we’ll put beat cops back on streets… not like there is a dearth of work that is going undone.
I hope you do a second part to this very interesting analysis - the part about the resulting development of the consumer society, Who needs 10 pairs of boots?
Love the piece. I've been saying that new jobs will arrive. BUT, will the new jobs pay what the old ones did? I'd be interested in seeing what happened in the bootmaker example.
I just read this article by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic about the changing drone technology and recalled this post from earlier today. She writes of changes in civilization apart from the changes in warfare, e.g., crime, policing, lawyers, policymakers and ultimately everyday life. This article begins with Russia using drones with cameras to kill civilians. (The cameras were initially added to drones so that soldiers would not strike.)
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.
Babs - I have no experience with DeleteMe, just want to pass along some observations from 30 years observing email spam & telemarketing. For me, the key issue is that most of what reaches me is scam/crime (too-good-to-be-true offers, get rich schemes, attempts to obtain personal data, crypto sales). My belief is that the sources of these emails/texts/calls do NOT obtain my contact info via any legit broker, so the people Delete Me likely works with may well not be the source of your problem either. Our contact info is widely available from less savory brokers, including on dark web which is probably not an arm of the Internet that would reliably cooperate with Delete Me & other such services.
I wish I had better news. My only success has been with some filtering, manually blocking & reporting, and trying to be as anonymous as possible. Best regards - j
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.
Explainomax - for e.g., will there be a new space for the level of serious quality control testing & debugging that would seem to be a necessity to work through the 5-10% mistake rate? Not that I have eyes on exactly what those tasks are, but I assume that before we deploy the Ai-directed air traffic control system or prostate surgery robot, there'll be an Ai liability attorney advising the Ai management agent that those errors need to be a lot closer to null!
We already know what the worst case scenario looks like (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project for an example). The answer needs to be human control at every major decision point. The attorneys who were sanctioned for making up fake case citations are just one example of how AI does bad things without proper human supervision (or "quality control").
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.
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?
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".
Chuck - so far I too am happy to let Justin be my agent to curate informative info and make me a bit more polymathematicized. Even if an Ai could replace his knowledge, would it have his charming accent and expressions, you reckon? 😉
I reckon not, mate.
By golly, I feel you are right. Poly mathematicization...it sounds cooler.
Good thing it's still in the outline stage.
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.
I was a bit on the edge of my seat waiting for you to write: “and of course there was then a huge number of people wearing sturdy, if less artisanal, boots which they could not have afforded before.” The utility of that to all the folks who otherwise would have had to work and walk in worn out boots they couldn’t afford to replace must have been enormous. (I’m assuming that’s part of the story, though I confess I didn’t look it up to be sure.)
Thanks for another great article.
What about the environmental damage and extraordinary energy consumption of AI?
Will Bessent’s Bribe Work?
In the late 1990’s working for a Soro’s fund Bessent realized that an Asian financial crisis triggered by a failing yen brought about a disrupted Britain economy. When the fund shorted the pound, it broke the Bank of England a few years later. Whether there is a cause effect relationship is debatable but what is undeniable is that Bessent believes he can influence governments under pressure with his policies as Treasury secretary.
Bessent recently pulled the unusual move to support the Japanese yen((bit.ly/4q1dsnZ). One can see a primany reason for such a move. The Japanese government have recently become sellers of US treasuries now the largest investor of US bonds at $1.1T. More selling could eventuate in the rise of the 10y bond yield toward the debt trap moment of 5% due to foreign investors seeing a loss in confidence and weakening US economy. This is a point of no return for the US government. The US can ill afford losing foreign investors who own $9.5T in US bonds.
So Bessent’s support of the yen in foreign currency exchanges is a plea to the Japanese government, “please don’t sell US treasuries” and can be seen as a financial bribe, completely in concert with the way Cheeto and his regime works. With a mounting national debt of nearly $40T the fascist regime can ill afford loss of foreign investors to support our debt service.
Great article again! And really enjoy the comments & discussion that ensue!
Already happening: huge data centers being built. They have huge energy demand. Eventually our stupid government will be wrenched from grip of fossil fuel interests so will need massive investment in renewables and modern grid to distribute the energy from where it is cheap to where it is needed. Water projects. Maybe we’ll decide to teach reading in school. Maybe we’ll put beat cops back on streets… not like there is a dearth of work that is going undone.
I hope you do a second part to this very interesting analysis - the part about the resulting development of the consumer society, Who needs 10 pairs of boots?
Love the piece. I've been saying that new jobs will arrive. BUT, will the new jobs pay what the old ones did? I'd be interested in seeing what happened in the bootmaker example.
I just read this article by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic about the changing drone technology and recalled this post from earlier today. She writes of changes in civilization apart from the changes in warfare, e.g., crime, policing, lawyers, policymakers and ultimately everyday life. This article begins with Russia using drones with cameras to kill civilians. (The cameras were initially added to drones so that soldiers would not strike.)
Scratch the gift link, she included the article in a post here on Substack: https://substack.com/@anneapplebaum/note/c-308702013?r=5k9s3t&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
An honest exposition, Mr. Platypal.