I think I’ve already done this song and dance but my take on technological unemployment is: general AI will probably have a catastrophic effect on employment but specific AI likely won’t, and it seems really unlikely current AI technologies will generalize to general intelligence. It could be just around the corner, but it’s a lot more likely that if you gear up for it now you’ll look like those guys at the dawn of computing talking about how natural language processing was right around the corner. Admittedly when we do have real artificial general intelligence there’ll only be like 15 years to decide how we want to handle it, but that may well not even occur in our children’s lifetimes, so it hardly seems worth trying to time it.
It does seem like we should anticipate large-scale short-term unemployment from future technological innovation, though, often of people who are good at the thing that’s obsolete, bad at the thing that replaces it, and – in many cases – too old or tied-down to start over. If current events show anything it’s “probably while awaiting a return to homeostasis you should try to make those people feel like the entire system isn’t out to fuck them".
The question, of course, being how you do this cheaply.
What makes me sad is that there’s decent bipartisan support for skills retraining and job transition services and stuff like that, but in practice any attempt to do that seems to result in 90% of the money being funded to garbage profiteers who are good at bidding for contracts and pitching services to the government.
I’m not convinced that retraining and job transition services actually work - most people who don’t do this on their own seem unwilling or unable for whatever reason (which is not to say it is morally their fault, there are many reasons why someone might have difficulty in retraining).
Since profitable employment is profitable, I suspect that retraining is probably something handled reasonably efficiently by an unregulated market that is able to respond to incentives.
As such, I think throwing government money after retraining programs is going to be more graft than not.
I’m not saying there aren’t people who could benefit from retraining that they don’t have access to for reasons that are theoretically susceptible to government intervention, but in practice it doesn’t seem to pan out.
The classic complaint about corporate retraining is that people take the training and run, so it’s not a good use of money.
Didn’t Murray find state sponsored job retraining didn’t actually work?