[civilized]

Abstract - admirably concise and accessible:

> How will the emergence of ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) affect the skill premium? To address this question, we propose a nested constant elasticity of substitution production function that distinguishes among three types of capital: traditional physical capital (machines, assembly lines), industrial robots, and AI. Following the literature, we assume that industrial robots predominantly substitute for low-skill workers, whereas AI mainly helps to perform the tasks of high-skill workers. We show that AI reduces the skill premium as long as it is more substitutable for high-skill workers than low-skill workers are for high-skill workers.

I don't know if I agree with the "literature" as represented here. It seems to thoughtlessly conflate low-skill with blue collar and high-skill with white collar. I would expect the impacts of AI on wages to vary across skill levels of white collar workers.

[empath75]

Yeah I was going to say they seem to be equating anybody doing "office work" as being "high skill" and there are tons of mediocre hacks in office jobs doing menial, brain-dead work. I think those people will continue to do menial, brain-dead work, except now it will leverage AI.

95% of people or some ridiculously high number like that used to be involved directly in agriculture in some way. Now a small percentage of americans do farm labor. If you told someone in 1845 that in 2024, only 10% of americans were working on farms, they would probably naively assume that the vast majority of us would be living lives of idle leisure, when what actually happened is that automation just made different, more advanced work economical to engage in.

There is not a limited amount of work that can be done, and if we relieve people from having to do some kinds of labor, they'll figure out how to spend their time doing stuff that would have been unimaginable before.

The scenario that I bring up a lot is that there is not a limited amount of movies and books that could be produced a year. We only produce the amount we do because that's how much we can produce _economically_. But if you had a super powerful AI that could actually cheaply produce movies on demand near the quality of professional movie makers (something that I don't imagine will happen any time soon, but it's the "worst-case-scenario" for creative workers), people will be spending their time making their own personal streaming service -- movies just for them, on demand. TV shows that never end, tailored for the individual's taste. There could literally be 10s of billions of hours of media produced a year, all of it at the quality of a modern block buster -- all of it that might be viewed by only a single person. And there will still be plenty of jobs available at the companies that are producing that media.