Thursday, May 19, 2011

Hanson, Caplan, and Yglesias on the Economics of the Far(?) Future

I don't have time to comment too much now, but I think I disagree with all of them. Here's Caplan and Hanson. Here's Yglesias. What do you think?

I have trouble thinking of robots as labor rather than capital. I have trouble understanding why Yglesias thinks Marxian growth theory implies a Marxist polity, and therefore have trouble with his assertion that we'll move into socialism. I do think we'll drift towards a socialization of investment and a smart interventionism, simply because it's the intelligent thing to do. I also think the sort of subsistence dynamics they highlight is contingent on very real resource constraints and in a world where one of our most important products is innovation that repeals resource constraints, I have a hard time swallowing this "driven to subsistence" talk. We can certainly hit painful hiccups and speed-bumps, but if robots push us to subsistence we'll just spend a little less time constructing robots that are indistinguishable from humans and a little more time mining asteroids, terraforming planets, and developing renewable energy sources.

2 comments:

  1. Machines won't drive humans to "subsistence".

    Why? Because with any radical automation of production in the future, you need equally radical Keynesian demand managment, employment programs or just transfer payments to humans, to maintain aggregate demand.

    And there is no reason why robots used in production have to be anything but unconscious, unfeeling machines.

    http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2010/09/automation-and-robotics-future-of.html

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  2. "I do think we'll drift towards a socialization of investment and a smart interventionism, simply because it's the intelligent thing to do."

    This, my friends, is known as a tautology.

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