Lubna Kabir tells us, in this newspaper, that “Artificial intelligence is coming for your job” and this is entirely correct, it is -- and it's going to be absolutely wonderful.
The rest of that analysis about how we're not going to have anything because the machines will be doing all the work is nonsense of course.
Because if the machines are going to do all the work, then everything gets done without us having to do anything.
We will be approaching -- and if they really do everything, get to -- Marx's nirvana of true communism. You know, without all that eliminating the bourgeoisie, Gulags and that unpleasantness.
For Marx's point was that we can only get to that point when we eliminate economic scarcity -- and he really did believe that this free market capitalism is the process that would get us there.
Now, it is possible to wonder about this idea that if AI is coming for my job -- that it's coming for yours would be less of a worry of course -- then what is it that we're going to do?
There are two essential points to grasp here. Once these are established, then the rest of it becomes entirely clear.
Firstly, the process of economic progress is destroying jobs. Every time we invent something that makes someone unemployed -- but we still get the thing produced -- we get richer.
The entire aim of this game of technological progress is to hunt down jobs and execute them. Kill them off, make them extinct.
Every politician in the land marches around shouting about how they're going to “create jobs” but that's just politicians being politicians -- spouting nonsense.
We really do aim to, desire to, and often enough succeed in killing the necessity of a human being doing a job -- that's what makes us all progressively richer.
The reason is two assumptions built into the very bedrock of economics.
We face a universe of scarce resources
There are limits on the things we can do things with. Maybe those limits aren't as close as many environmentalists say they are, but they do exist. One of those limits is the amount of human labour we've got that we can do things with.
2. Human desires are unlimited
Not necessarily for physical items, not for any specific item -- there would be no such thing as declining marginal utility if that were true. But sate one desire and there's always another.
Men like me can expect to live into our 70s and 80s these days instead of dying at 30 -- so now we demand that we should be able to have hair at our age as well.
You can build your own examples, it's obvious enough. That people escape that life with the water buffalo and the paddy doesn't mean that they stop wanting the next thing also.
Now mix these two basic assumptions together. If we have to use human labour to meet one of those desires, then it cannot be used to meet one of the others.
On the other hand, if we can now use a machine to produce something that we desire -- to the extent that we desire low level accounting perhaps -- then we can use that now freed-up human labour to sate some other human desire.
We are now richer because we get accounting and also that other thing. Which could be, well, ballet, health care, good comedy, or just a bit of decent childcare.
But we now have two things because we now use less human labour to do that old thing.
We have killed that job, held it down and executed it -- and we're richer as a result.
For we've now freed up an economic resource -- human labour -- to go and sate some other human desire.
We're richer by whatever the value we apply to that ex-accountant now doing ballet -- an arguable point, agreed.
It is this that makes all the talk of how we tax AI, or tax corporations, or insist that the benefits have to be spread so silly.
By definition, the benefits will be spread. People can stop doing those boring things that can now be done by machines -- believe me, as a graduate in finance and accounting, no one actually looks forward to being an accountant.
The rest of society gets to enjoy both the accounting -- because the machine now does it -- and also the other production of that moved-along human labour.
OK, so you don't believe this. Now think a little about the tractor -- or, as we might put it, the mechanisation of farming. That alleviated this generation from the grief of the backbreaking labour faced by millennia of our forebears.
It also meant that the new generation could start to teach children, cure us in hospitals, design and make mobile phones, and do everything that makes a civilization up above the level of peasant farming. Yes, including ballet -- to the extent that that is civilized.
Anyone want to go back to following that buffalo through the paddy? The art of economic advancement is in inventing and deploying the technologies that kill a job, kill it stone dead.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
