"AI could actually help rebuild the middle class," says David Autor.
"Artificial intelligence can enable a larger set of workers equipped with necessary foundational training to perform higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers and college professors. In essence, AI -- used well -- can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the US labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization."
"Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were handmade by skilled artisans: wagon wheels by wheelwrights; clothing by tailors; shoes by cobblers; timepieces by clockmakers; firearms by blacksmiths."
"Unlike the artisans who preceded them, however, expert judgment was not necessarily needed -- or even tolerated -- among the 'mass expert' workers populating offices and assembly lines."
"As a result, the narrow procedural content of mass expert work, with its requirement that workers follow rules but exercise little discretion, was perhaps uniquely vulnerable to technological displacement in the era that followed."
"Stemming from the innovations pioneered during World War II, the Computer Era (AKA the Information Age) ultimately extinguished much of the demand for mass expertise that the Industrial Revolution had fostered."
"Because many high-paid jobs are intensive in non-routine tasks, Polanyi's Paradox proved a major constraint on what work traditional computers could do. Managers, professionals and technical workers are regularly called upon to exercise judgment (not rules) on one-off, high-stakes cases."
Polanyi's Paradox, named for Michael Polanyi who observed in 1966, "We can know more than we can tell," is the idea that "non-routine" tasks involve "tacit knowledge" that can't be written out as procedures -- and hence coded into a computer program. But AI systems don't have to be coded explicitly and can learn this "tacit knowledge" like humans.
"Pre-AI, computing's core capability was its faultless and nearly costless execution of routine, procedural tasks."
"AI's capacity to depart from script, to improvise based on training and experience, enables it to engage in expert judgment -- a capability that, until now, has fallen within the province of elite experts."
Commentary: I feel like I had to make the mental switch from expecting AI to automate "routine" work to "mental" work, i.e. what matters is mental-vs-physical, not creative-vs-routine. Now we're right back to talking about the creative-vs-routine distinction.
AI could actually help rebuild the middle class | noemamag.com
