Labor-saving technologies 🤝 the welfare state
- SciArt
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "The reason why the solutions to economic inequality and instability are always the same is because the problems are fundamentally the same. Capitalist economies distribute income by paying people for their labor and paying returns to people who own capital (wealth). Due to certain feedback loops, capital factors — or wealth — end up overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of people. Labor factors — or work — are more dispersed, but individuals are constantly churning in and out of jobs, different jobs receive different pay, and a large swath of the population is not able to work at any given time.
Every AI-related distributive concern can be neatly organized into this basic framework.
Because it is a labor-saving technology, the implementation of AI throughout the economy will result in some people moving from employment to joblessness, at least for a time. But this is nothing new. It already happens in America over 60 million times a year.
Constant labor reallocation is a fixture of all dynamic economies. Yet it can be made relatively painless by establishing generous unemployment benefits and setting up a package of universal welfare programs — like child allowances, child care, education, and health care — that are not contingent upon one’s current employment or income.
...Curiously, when it comes to differences in pay among laborers, the current conventional wisdom seems to suggest that AI would actually have an egalitarian effect. Right now, certain kinds of cognitive labor are compensated at much higher rates than other sorts of labor. This has resulted in a neat association of educational attainment with earnings, which has helped legitimize economic inequality as being fundamentally meritocratic in nature.
But in a new technological environment in which the supply of “intelligence” that can execute certain cognitive tasks is massively increased, this association could attenuate or break down altogether, resulting in a wage compression that actually reduces earnings inequality among workers."