David Autor was recently interviewed by Martin Wolf on the effect of AI on jobs. The question of if its fair to compare a possible economic shock on knowledge work to the China shock in manufacturing. He had two responses to the question:
1. The geographic dispersal of knowledge work should allow retraining of displaced workers, in opposition to the loss of manufacturing jobs which centre around single employer towns.
2. The china shock resulted in a sudden drop in prices, whereas AI would lead to efficiency gains.
The second point, to me, feels more pertinent, and mixed with the first could allow for a freeing up of labour, ideally into higher value add work. I think the time horizon is also worth speaking about here, as most economists will be thinking in 5-10 years where we can expect substantial improvements in models, but barring new model architecutre, it seems doubtful that we'll see some sort of emergent intelligence from LLMs.
Post-ASI, knowledge labour necessarily has zero value, at which point the challenge is to design an equitable society.
1. The geographic dispersal of knowledge work should allow retraining of displaced workers, in opposition to the loss of manufacturing jobs which centre around single employer towns.
2. The china shock resulted in a sudden drop in prices, whereas AI would lead to efficiency gains.
The second point, to me, feels more pertinent, and mixed with the first could allow for a freeing up of labour, ideally into higher value add work. I think the time horizon is also worth speaking about here, as most economists will be thinking in 5-10 years where we can expect substantial improvements in models, but barring new model architecutre, it seems doubtful that we'll see some sort of emergent intelligence from LLMs.
Post-ASI, knowledge labour necessarily has zero value, at which point the challenge is to design an equitable society.
The full interview is fairly interesting in itself: https://www.ft.com/content/4e260abd-2528-4d34-8fa4-a21eabfd6...