Welcome to the singularity

The Singularity: wherein developments in artificial intelligence reshape our civilization in profound and irreversible ways. It sounds like science fiction, but we live in a world where science fiction becomes science fact every single day, and the singularity isn't some far-future possibility anymore. Increasingly, it's the world we live in right now. And people are starting to notice.

From the NY Times:

Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they’ve declared a different winner: the robots.

The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots.

The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels. Just as cranes replaced dockworkers but created related jobs for engineers and financiers, the theory goes, new technology has created new jobs for software developers and data analysts.

But that paper was a conceptual exercise. The new one uses real-world data — and suggests a more pessimistic future. The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing.

CGP Grey posted an excellent video on this same subject a back in 2014, so this isn't news to everybody, but with former optimists coming around to the more pessimistic realistic view, look for this to become a more common narrative thread going forward. I know that common wisdom in the last U.S. election was that Dems didn't spend enough time talking about how they were going to bring back blue-collar jobs, but reality is what persists in being true, regardless of what you want to believe, and reality is that Obama was right: the economic force that's elminating factory jobs really is automation, and there really isn't much that anyone can do about that now, except prepare for the coming paradigm shift.

Imagine a society where everyone gets a guaranteed minimum income, and hustles on the side for extra cash. And then stop imagining, because it's already happening, with pilot projects in Finland and Ontario. This is our new normal: unemployment statistics are, and have always been, more fiction than fact, "full employment" is something that we'll never see again in our lifetimes, and there may be no other way to ensure that we can continue having an economy, when 40% of workers' jobs have been replaced by automation.

Welcome to the Singularity.