[Animats]

This seems to be the author's main point:

"Recall that the advent of pre-AI computing made the expert judgment of professional decision- makers more consequential and more valuable by speeding the task of acquiring and organizing information. Simultaneously, computerization devalued and displaced the procedural expertise that was the stock-in-trade of many middle-skill workers. But imagine a technology that could invert this process: what would it look like? It would support and supplement judgment, thus enabling a larger set of non-elite workers to engage in high-stakes decision-making. It would simultaneously temper the monopoly power that doctors hold over medical care, lawyers over document production, software engineers over computer code, professors over undergraduate education, etc."

"Artificial Intelligence is this inversion technology. By providing decision support in the form of real-time guidance and guardrails, AI could enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts like doctors, lawyers, coders and educators. This would improve the quality of jobs for workers without college degrees, moderate earnings inequality, and — akin to what the Industrial Revolution did for consumer goods — lower the cost of key services such as healthcare, education and legal expertise."

"Moderate earnings inequality" means "fewer high-paying jobs", as someone pointed out in another comment. From where does the pressure come to raise incomes across the board? That's what unions were for. In the US, the unions were crushed. The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement, is almost forgotten. Yet that's what this paper assumes will happen. Somehow.

This is "trickle-down" economics with an "AI" label pasted on it.

The author has better papers. His "Why are there still so many jobs" (2014) [1] is worth a read. He makes predictions one can now check.

[1] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/w...

[thfuran]

>The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement

No, it wasn't. A company can't survive long paying all its employees more than they're worth. The goal of unions was, at least as far as pay is concerned, only to reduce the margin that was skimmed off of employee value by employers.

[Animats]

That assumes total victory by management over labor. Which is why workers need to be organized. Samuel Gompers, 1890, arguing for an 8-hour day.

"What we want to consider is, first, to make our employment more secure, and, secondly, to make wages more permanent, and, thirdly, to give these poor people a chance to work. The laborer has been regarded as a mere producing machine ... but back of labor is the soul of man and honesty of purpose and aspiration. Now you cannot, as the political economists and college professors, say that labor is a commodity to be bought and sold. I say we are American citizens with the heritage of all the great men who have stood before us; men who have sacrificed all in the cause except honor. . . . I say the labor movement is a fixed fact. It has grown out of the necessities of the people, and, although some may desire to see it fail, still the labor movement will be found to have a strong lodgment in the hearts of the people, and we will go on until success has been achieved!"

Gompers was noted for answering, when asked what labor wanted, "More".

[1] http://historymuse.net/readings/GompersWhatdoestheworkingman...

[MichaelZuo]

The quote doesn’t make sense, labor is pretty much a commodity for the vast vast majority of people. Almost by definition.

I would say at most 1 out of 50 are genuinely really unique in some way, and that’s being generous, the rest of the population are just regular average Joes or not too far off.

[Animats]

So much labor history has been forgotten. Here's the founding document of the International Labor Organization.[1] This was, when it was founded, on a par with the World Trade Organization. The ILO position, mainstream at the time, was that wages are an output, not an input. The purpose of economic activity is to maximize worker wages. Not return on capital.

That few people today even know this was once mainstream is the result of a very effective lobbying campaign started in the early 1970s. Milton Friedman provided the theory, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce providing the money. There was a master plan for this, the Lewis Powell Memorandum.[2] This is where the organized conservative movement came from, from think tanks to talk shows.

[1] https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:62:0::NO:62:P62_...

[2] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/

[MichaelZuo]

I know the history, it still doesn’t make sense.

e.g. Wages can be both inputs and outputs. Because there’s no ultimate judge deciding how these things should be considered.

Millions of writers can write billions of words about it one way or the other, but at the end of the day they don’t count for anything, when compared to 8 billion lives worth of daily decisions.

[thfuran]

>That assumes total victory by management over labor.

No, it assumes that companies can't pull money out of the ether. There definitionally isn't enough value produced by the collective labor of all the employees for them to each be paid more than their value.