How AI could create “a world without work”

When it comes to artificial intelligence, there are few fears greater than the idea of ​​robots come to take our jobs. But speaking to the AI ​​evangelists among us, this could be a good thing.

Not in Elon Musk Robots will take care of your children but in a way that helps us make better use of our resources and manage our busy work. If the doom doesn't come – and that's a big problem – we could get what there never seems to be enough of: time.

There's actually a name for this best-case scenario: AI abundance.

This is how Anton Korinek – economics professor at the University of Virginia and one of Vox 2024's Future Perfect 50 – recently explained the idea to the moderator of Explain it to meVox weekly call-in podcast: “AI Abundance essentially conveys the idea that we could all be so much richer than we can even imagine today… AI and robots will be able to produce many more goods and services than we have in today's economy and would find ourselves an order of magnitude richer and better off.”

But what would a world without work look like? And what would have to happen for AI to free us from work and enable everyone to have a good, universal standard of living? We discuss this in the latest episode of Explain it to me. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Korinek, edited for length and clarity.

You can listen to the full episode here Apple Podcasts, Spotifyor wherever you get podcasts. If you would like to ask a question, email askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

We keep hearing that a change of this magnitude is unprecedented. Is that true or is it hype?

I think it's the first time of its kind, but if you want to delve into history and look for parallels, I think the biggest parallel is the Industrial Revolution. So you'd have to go back about 250 years to find anything even close to what we're about to experience this time.

What can the Industrial Revolution teach us about this particular moment?

From a macroeconomic perspective, it can be said that work as we have it today did not exist at all before the industrial revolution. Until then, the most important factor of production was the land that people cultivated to produce the food they needed. Then suddenly there were these new technologies that didn't rely on land so much as they relied on machines. It began with spinning and weaving in the textile sector, but soon came the steam engine and electricity.

The new thing that had to be produced – in addition to the work that people had to put in – was machines that could be easily copied and reproduced. This meant that nothing stood in the way of production. And that meant that we were suddenly able to produce a lot more because the space bottleneck was overcome. In some ways, this can be said to be the main reason why people in advanced economies are now, on average, about 20 times richer than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

What did that mean for the workers at the time? I can imagine the transition wasn't easy.

It was actually quite disturbing. If you were an artisan weaver or something like that, if you were a skilled professional practicing your craft, then suddenly these machines came along that could do what you were doing, but an order of magnitude cheaper.

So these craftsmen lost their livelihood almost overnight and became impoverished. But on the positive side, their descendants lived in a world in which they owned cheap textiles and soon all other cheap manufactured goods, and they lived much more prosperously than their parents or grandparents, who were artisans and lost their jobs in the first wave of the Industrial Revolution.

This can be extremely disruptive and painful for the individual. But if we have a little social protection, we can mitigate the disruption and ensure that everyone actually benefits in the end. Now, if there are a lot of disruptions at once, things can become much more difficult.

There are now people who have experienced another, more recent technological upheaval: I'm thinking of the 80s and 90s with computers.

In a sense, the way I see the Industrial Revolution is that it initially consisted of building machines that could automate much of our physical power. And then, starting around the middle of the 20th century, we created machines that could automate cognitive tasks: computers.

These first computers could only do very routine things like adding numbers in a spreadsheet, and that was very useful for businesses. We see that AI can take over more and more of the complex, really well-thought-out cognitive tasks. So the big question is where this should stop. And will they leave something for us?

You talked about land being the bottleneck during the Industrial Revolution. Do we now have a bottleneck?

I would say the most valuable resource in our economy today is our human capital. It's you and me and everyone [reading] The. Because if we have more workers, we can increase the output of the economy. We could enter a world where they can simply press a button and have another AI employee working on their behalf, significantly expanding our economic opportunities.

Will the AI ​​revolution benefit our grandchildren more than us?

I really hope that we can all benefit from this. But whether that will happen or not is a story yet to be written, and it will be a challenge.

First there will be small sectors where people are losers, and then there will be a debate: “Why should we help them? We haven't helped other workers that much in previous technological revolutions.” Then most people will be affected by it at some point. But it won't happen overnight. It will be a bit of a slow process.

We work to get a paycheck. How do we eat in a future where we no longer work? How do we get health insurance? How do we pay for an apartment?

This will be the most important and fundamental challenge to our current system. In a way, you can say that the Industrial Revolution accidentally created a system in which our labor became increasingly valuable because we were in such short supply. That's kind of underpinned all of this material progress and all of this increase in well-being that we've seen over the last 250 years.

But once the AI ​​revolution really hits home, there will no longer be any guarantee that we will be able to earn a decent living based on the value of our work. I am convinced that at this point we will need a new system of income distribution. For example, Universal basic incomeCalculation quotas: Basically, everyone receives a certain amount of computing power, which they can then either use or sell. One also speaks of job guarantees. From an overall perspective, there are a whole range of possibilities.

The main concern must be that we find a solution, because if labor is indeed being significantly devalued by this technological change, and at the same time we have much more surplus in the economy, it would be a major failure if we did not use this additional surplus to ensure that no one is left behind.

This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.