Futurology

This article is remarkable for two reasons. First, three of the economists it interviews work for an MIT-affiliated body called The Institute for the Future of Work. It is their job to be global leaders in thought on this issue. They are the best of the best the academic discipline of Economics has to offer. Secondly, this article puts the central question to them unequivocally. - "What happens after AI/robots are capable of doing all work (even new as yet uninvented jobs), but are much cheaper to employ than humans?"

The central argument they're replying to is that an economic concept called comparative advantage means jobs are safe from AI. The argument is that as computers will remain a scarce resource, super-intelligent AI won't want to waste resources on doing "lesser" work, and will leave that to less capable humans. It hasn't occurred to the economist proposing this idea that computing won't be a scarce resource as it's always getting cheaper, and more powerful.

One, David Autor, says AI won't ever be better than humans, instead, it will give all humans new skills, so that everyone will have the economic advantages the highly educated now have. Another, Ethan Mollick, is at least honest in admitting economists don't know what the future will be like when AI can do all work. One of the IFTFW economists, Pascal Restrepo, agrees with the idea of comparative advantage. He says AI will create vast wealth, but even the crumbs the owners of that AI give to humans to do the lesser work AI is not interested in will make us all richer than we are today.

So in summary. One economist who isn't aware computers are getting cheaper. Another who doesn't think AI will get better. Another who doesn't know what will happen (the most honest of the bunch). And another who's cheerful about the prospect of our future economy being a new feudalism where AI's owners benignly let the peasants (everyone else) subsist on the leftover crumbs they don't want.