> I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.
I can't imagine this would last long with the social instability that would follow.
That also seems like a gross overestimate for many industries. Many supply chains are nowhere near able to be automated to the extent this ratio would imply.
20 years is far too long a time horizon to make a sensible prediction, to even say if the other post is an overestimate or an underestimate by either time or percentage.
20 years ago, the state of the art in AI was so bad that it predates reCAPTCHA being a functional business model for how to get labelled training data for an OCR to read scans of books. In cars, the DARPA Grand Challenge (2004) had no cars able to complete the route, and the winner only got 11.78 km (of 240 km) before getting stuck, and the subsequent Grand Challenge had yet to happen because that was October 8, 2005.
I can't sensibly forecast past 2032, because that's when various things currently under exponential growth reach absolute levels that I think suggest the exponential assumption may stop working. But also, I don't expect wild AI-induced economic disruption* before then, because one of those exponential growths is renewable energy getting to near-parity with current global electricity supply by about then, and the fact that the current global electricity supply is "only" 250 watts/capita, which means** there's just not enough electricity to run enough computers to disrupt that many jobs.
But if the question is "when will the AI be good enough to do ${task}?", rather than "how fast can we deploy the AI when this happens?", I have seen both (1) people claim we're decades away from AI doing things mere months before AI did those things, and also (2) Musk repeatedly saying FSD is 0.5-2 years away every year for the last decade, and when he finally soft-launched his robotaxi it was 6.5 years behind Waymo's.
* by which I mean international >20% unemployment that's not just due to a war or a global financial crisis or a pandemic
** absent algorithmic breakthroughs; I don't expect enough of those to matter, but I do expect some. I am also accounting for computers getting more energy efficient, because that's still happening and we're a long way from the theoretical limits.
> non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years
With that said, there is probably also a non-zero chance that something like that wouldn't be negative but something positive instead. I suppose that'd be the ideal scenario.
U.S. productivity has increased massively over the last half century and yet much of the increased productivity has ended up in the hands of a select few.
This is being accelerated by the bill passed the senate literally today.
Is there any reason to believe we will drastically reverse the trend?
>much of the increased productivity has ended up in the hands of a select few.
I do agree that wealth is not distributed particularly fairly but I don't understand the idea that it's mostly going to a select few. There are almost 20 million more jobs in the US now than there were 20 years ago, that's a lot of productivity right there.
Amazon employs 1.4 million people. Bezos has spent maybe the equivalent to a couple of weeks worth of Amazon payroll so far in his life. His yacht was the equivalent of a few days, his wedding maybe one hour. That money didn't come from Amazon either, it came from people wanting to own Amazon.
Leaving aside whether that's fair or not, surely it means that most of the productivity and money is going to the employees?
What am I missing here? How was this better before, what has changed recently that makes this such a big talking point now?
What you’re missing, in your relentless focus on mostly abstract economic measurements, is that the measures of individual success and happiness are going down. People on average, are less able to afford to buy homes, raise children and pay for health care.
I assure you I have no relentless focus on anything but trying to understand what's going on! There are many problems for sure but I don't understand how they can be solved with faulty explanations!
Many people seem convinced that the problems in society are caused by billionaires hoarding money, when they clearly aren't hoarding any relevant amounts of money. The problems with housing, healthcare and such are very obviously caused by other things (Home mortgages being a huge cornerstone of the entire economy for one, millions are placed in a situation where cheaper housing would be a catastrophe - including banks).
Maybe our parents, who were able to buy a house for like 5 years of a worker's salary, were just the luckiest generation? It sure hasn't been that easy to get a home before or after at any time in history.
Right now is one of the runner ups though, but we're comparing the situation with the best ever.
I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.