The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

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The conscience of a liberal

December 7, 2013, 2:36 pm 61 Comments

Gordon Versus The Androids

We just had a session with Bob Gordon and Joel Mokyr on the outlook for future growth, and I think I have a new way to explain why my gut feeling is that Bob, while making a persuasive case (pdf), is probably wrong.

Bob’s key point, actually deeper than his specific numbers, is that the digital revolution really just doesn’t match up to the major innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century, which he contends drove growth well into the 20th century. Basically, indoor plumbing beats iPads.

But let’s ask the following question: What would a digital revolution that lived up to the past look like – and is anything like that plausible?

Well, suppose that we learned to build true androids – robots that could do more or less anything humans can do. Surely that would be transformative; it would effectively end diminishing returns to capital accumulation, and raising GDP per capita would simply be a matter of multiplying the androids.

So how are things going on the android front? A decade ago I would have said “very badly”: the field of artificial intelligence had marched from failure to failure.

But something has happened—things that were widely regarded as jokes not long ago, like speech recognition, machine translation, self-driving cars, and so on, have suddenly become more or less working reality. Our suddenly smarter machines aren’t intelligent in the way people are, and the way they do their work is nothing like the way we do it: the translation program doesn’t understand the text, the self-driving car isn’t consciously avoiding collisions. Instead, they’re using big data and correlations and so on to implement algorithms – mindless algorithms, you might say. But if they can take people’s place, does it matter?

The anti-Gordon case, then, would be that something like my android revolution is underway.

If you buy that case, you can become a technological optimist in the sense that you believe that there’s lots of growth in the future. You might also be a pessimist in the sense that you wonder what happens to wages once androids can do most human work. Also, Skynet will kill us all.

But that, anyway, is where I would place the issue."

We are replacing Americans workers with ten times cheaper workers from developing countries,
We are replacing workers from developing countries with robots.
It is reality of our days.
Main question for economists must be: how find directions for new jobs for American and overseas workers in case of globalization of today level and android revolution?
We did not find these directions for American workers because many economists, including Krugman, are using outdated schools of economy-Keynesian and Austrian with their recipes-stimulus, austerity, more (less) taxes from rich, which in today reality created more jobs for overseas workers.
Robots also do not create more jobs for Americans workers.
Economists must be ahead of any revolution to create possibilities of new jobs, despite globalization and android.
Please, Mr. Paul Krugman, Mr, Bob Gordon and Mr. Joel Mokyr, make your job better, than you did till now.
I can't say something about Bob Gordon and Joel Mokyr, but as I see from his articles Mr. Krugman long ago forget, that he is an economist and play more game in political propaganda machine with zero economical effects.
It is the main problem with our economical science.