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Pervasive smart machines pose challenges to labor, well-being
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IN their compelling new book “The Second Machine Age,” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee document the progress in artificial intelligence that is enabling computers to exceed what they were capable of only a few years ago.
The leaps in machine intelligence, along with the connection of human beings around the world in a common digital network, will enable the development of new technologies, goods and services.
The authors are optimistic about the “bounty” or economy-wide benefits of brilliant machines. But they warn that the distribution or “spread” of these benefits will be uneven.
Their fears are justified. During the last three decades, even before breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, computers have been replacing and multiplying the physical labor of human beings. Improvements in computer and communications technologies have also enabled employers to offshore many routine tasks that machines cannot directly replace.
As a result of both technological displacement and technology-enabled globalization, the share of employment in occupations in the middle of the skill distribution has declined rapidly in both the United States and Europe. Technological progress has also been skill-biased.
Ever-smarter machines and ever-tighter global connections are likely to aggravate adverse labor-market trends and growing income inequality, as technology displaces more and more workers.
How should policymakers respond? First, it is important to acknowledge that weak aggregate demand and anemic economic growth, not an acceleration in the labor-displacement rate, explains the slow jobs growth of the last decade.
Second, the educational attainment levels of the workforce must be increased.
As smart machines become more powerful and pervasive, they will pose a challenge to a fundamental feature of the US economy: most people gain their income by selling their labor.
The near-term policy remedies are clear: raise the minimum wage to a level that will keep a fully employed worker and his or her family out of poverty, and extend the earned-income tax credit to childless workers. In the longer term, more radical policies — such as the introduction of a negative income tax or a basic income — must be considered.
Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2014.www.project-syndicate.org
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