The Economic Singularity Cakum Chace Posted on: July 26, 2016 / Last Modified: July 26, 2016 Tue eesscuune autHom oF suamine an. MY,new book The Esonomi Singularity res tat CALUM CHAGE: seria metre a ysans pr ay thet perp, the robots) wile able to do $ anything that we can do for money cheaper, faster and Bete, dunce us thei capbities willbe improving all he ins. At an exponstia a, iat faster » This is far fom outlandish thinking to most readers of THE ay this log-in fat it may even be enthony hee, Bul ies ary vw enone a ECONOMIC traditional economists would say it is the Luddite Fly Noid alo pray sves scaly crc pn igh ay SINGULARITY _ ssmssetslinsiinsincnsent ene carly industrial revolution. They weren't advancing Zarificialineligence and the death ef capitaism any sophisticated economic argument — they were simply trying to defend themselves and their families from imminent starvation, Sas tebe tre Soe But economists point out rightly ~ that so far, fuormton hs ao etsed ling srmplyment. So fat has made prodson pose cheaper and mr este egal he protcve apes of the conony ied move wel ce dened td sot listen commas eles he no Mov of atomatonty Als wl do he same Maybe they are tight: the truth i, we just don’t know yet, But it seems to me unlikely. Machines are now able to recognise and classify faces better than humans, They are catching up fast in speech recognition and they are also making rapid progress with natural language processing. These are not easy tasks for AL researchers, and continued progress is not guaranteed, but it does seem overwhelmingly likely. These capabilitics are what most people rely on to carn their daily bread — service industries now comprise by far the largest part of most developed economies. Robots are also improving dramatically quickly, and itis hard to see how most manual jobs in factories, warehouses and elsewhere will still be done by humans @ couple of decades from now. If and when machines do all these things better than us, how will we all earn a living? ‘Mainstream economists argue that we will work ever more closely with machines, but we will always bring uniquely human things to the party. Those uniquely human things are usually some combination of creativity and empathy. This combination of man and machine is sometimes described as a centaur, & term borrowed from modem chess, and invented by Gary Kasparov, the brilliant (human) chess player who was. famously and controversially beaten by IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, Unfortunately, most of us are not exceptionally creative in our daily jobs, and itis not true to say that ‘computers cannot be creative. Creativity is the combining of two of more ideas in a novel way, and itis not true that you have to be conscious or human to do that, The DeepMind system which taught itself to play Atari video games (thereby establishing a price tag of halfa billion dollars for itself) displayed ereativity when it invented a new way to win at Pong. (If you haven't seen the video it’s here.) Many Als érom Google and others have demonstrated creativity since,Machines don’t have empathy, and probably won’t unless and until we ereate an AGI and it turns out to be conscious. Empathy is dependent on having feclings about another person, and that would seem to require consciousness. But machines can fake empathy incredibly well, and in many situations where we think we ‘want empathy, we actually don’t. Machine therapists are proving surprisingly effective in many contexts, and robotic carers like the fake baby seal Paro are adored by many of their “patients”. Traditional economists then go on to argue that even if machines do take all our existing jobs, we will invent heaps of new ones which we cannot currently imagine. Virtual reality landscaper, anyone? Dream ‘wrangler? They argue this has happened before: the farm workers who moved to the city in the 19th century in search of work in the factory could not have imagined that his grandson would be a website designer ~ for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, an analysis of US labour statistics don’t bear out the claim that we have transformed the job ‘market by creating hosts of new categories of employment that didn’t exist before. 80% of the job categories listed by the Bureau of Labour Studies today existed back in 1900, More important, 90% of the people working in the US today are doing jobs which existed in 1900. Maybe will invent scores of new jobs which only humans can do, but neither common sense nor past experience support that claim, Many people here, who have thought about these ideas for years, would agree with this argument, but they don’t see it as a problem. They think we will arive fairly painlessly ata situation of radical abundance, where everyone has a Universal Basic Income and can do more fulfilling things with their lives than being accountants and actuaries. agree that is the goal, and it is a future which can be truly wonderful. But I'm not convinced the transition from here to there will be plain sailing. I think we will probably necd a new economy, and we haven't even started sketching out what it might look like, nor how we might get there without massive social untest That is why I think we are heading towards an Economic Singularity, and we have work to do.