Society Over-Incentivizes Labor Automation Over Human Augmentation
Erik Brynjolfsson · Wait, The Robots Didn't Take Our Jobs? — With Erik Brynjolfsson · Jun 4, 2022 · at 16:34
Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson outlines the thesis of his paper 'The Turing Trap' on AI development and economic policy.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 18.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In the Turing Trap article, I argue that, as I said earlier, while both of those strategies can in principle be profitable, right now there are excess incentives to focus on substitution and automation, and then not enough to focus on complementing humans.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Erik Brynjolfsson
AI Cannot Fully Automate Any Single US Occupation, Study Finds
“What we found was that in most jobs, there were some tasks that machine learning could do better than humans, or would be able to if you applied the technology, and there's kind of a gold rush now to do that. But in not a single occupation, we looked at all of…”
Brynjolfsson: Next Tech Wave Will Disproportionately Hit Lower-Skill Jobs
“Our analysis that we did in a follow-up paper with Daniel Rock of Wharton suggests that as with the previous wave, the next wave of technology also will disproportionately affect some of the lower and middle skill jobs compared to the higher skill jobs”
Davos Attendees Genuinely Want to Improve the World, Not Just Hoard Wealth
“I think a big misconception about Davos is is, you know, there's all, The plutocrats and all the wealth and power that's here. But the people who come here they really do seem sincerely interested in changing the world to make it better.”
AI Can Augment or Replace at Least $1 Trillion of Economic Work
“If you look at the subset of tasks where machine learning can Help or take over for humans or augment humans. It adds up to about a trillion dollars worth of work if you were most conservative.”
AI Depresses Middle-Skill Wages Rather Than Creating Mass Unemployment
“It's taking certain tasks. It's not leading to mass unemployment, but it is shifting the demand for different types of skills, and so there are places where there's less demand and there's more demand, and wages in some areas are depressed when a machine can d…”
Robotic Process Automation Was Overhyped Because It Merely Automates Existing Tasks
“I think that RPA was a bit overhyped, and so there's a bit of a bubble. There's definitely some value there, but in the end, it's what I said earlier. It's kind of focusing on taking what people are already doing, and automating that often they'll literally, l…”