Artificial Intelligence, Employment, and Income

Artificial intelligence (AI) will have many profound societal effects It promises potential benefits (and may also pose risks) in education, defense, business, law, and science In this article we explore how AI is likely to affect employment and the distribution of income. We argue that AI will indeed reduce drastically the need fol human toil We also note that some people fear the automation of work hy machines and the resulting unemployment Yet, since the majority of us probably would rather use our time for activities other than our present jobs, we ought thus to greet the work-eliminating consequences of AI enthusiastically The paper discusses two reasons, one economic and one psychological, for this paradoxical apprehension We conclude with a discussion of problems of moving toward the kind of economy that will he enahled by developments in AI ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [Al] and other developments in computer science are giving birth to a dramatically different class of machinesPmachines that can perform tasks requiring reasoning, judgment, and perception that previously could be done only by humans. Will these I am grateful for the helpful comments provided by many people Specifically I would like to acknowledge the advice teceived from Sandra Cook and Victor Walling of SRI, Wassily Leontief and Faye Duchin of the New York University Institute for Economic Analysis, Margaret Boden of The University of Sussex, Henry Levin and Charles Holloway of Stanford University, James Albus of the National Bureau of Standards, and Peter Hart of Syntelligence Herbert Simon, of CarnegieMellon Univetsity, wrote me extensive criticisms and rebuttals of my arguments Robert Solow of MIT was quite skeptical of my premises, but conceded nevertheless that my conclusions could possibly follow from them if certain other economic conditions were satisfied. Save1 Kliachko of SRI improved my composition and also referred me to a prescient article by Keynes (Keynes, 1933) who, a half-century ago, predicted an end to toil within one hundred years machines reduce the need for human toil and thus cause unemployment? There are two opposing views in response to this question Some claim that AI is not really very different from other technologies that have supported automation and increased productivitytechnologies such as mechanical engineering, ele&onics, control engineering, and operations rcsearch. Like them, AI may also lead ultimately to an expanding economy with a concomitant expansion of employment opportunities. At worst, according to this view, thcrc will be some, perhaps even substantial shifts in the types of jobs, but certainly no overall reduction in the total number of jobs. In my opinion, however, such an out,come is based on an overly conservative appraisal of the real potential of artificial intelligence. Others accept a rather strong hypothesis with regard to AI-one that sets AI far apart from previous labor-saving technologies. Quite simply, this hypothesis affirms that anything people can do, AI can do as well. Cert,ainly AI has not yet achieved human-level performance in many important functions, but many AI scientists believe that artificial intelligence inevitably will equal and surpass human mental abilities-if not in twenty years, then surely in fifty. The main conclusion of this view of AI is that, even if AI does create more work, this work can also be performed by AI devices without necessarily implying more jobs for humans Of course, the mcrc fact that some work can be performed automatically does not make it inevitable that it, will be. Automation depends on many factorsPeconomic, political, and social. The major economic parameter would seem to be the relative cost of having either people or machines execute a given task (at a specified rate and level of quality) In THE AI MAGAZINE Summer 1984 5 AI Magazine Volume 5 Number 2 (1984) (© AAAI)