🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #18
The case against mass tech unemployment; the dystopian economics of 'Blade Runner'; the SCOTUS EPA ruling presents an opportunity for climate and energy progress; and the Best of 5 Quick Questions
My free and paid Faster, Please! subscribers: Welcome to Week in Review+. No paywall! Thank you all for your support! For my free subscribers, please become a paying subscriber today. (Expense a corporate subscription perhaps?)
And the good stuff just keeps on coming! I again covered a wide range of subjects in the essays, Q&As, and micro reads on Monday and Friday, as well as the free, no-paywall issue on Wednesday. Enjoy the summaries, recaps, as well as a bit of new content (usually)!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
— The case against mass technological unemployment. (And what happens if I’m wrong.) (06.27.22)
— 40 years later, the dystopian economics of Blade Runner still make zero sense (06.29.22)
— Love it or hate it, the Supreme Court's EPA ruling presents an opportunity for climate and energy progress (07.01.22)
Best of 5QQ
— Caltech's Ali Hajimiri on the future of space-based solar power
— ETH Zurich’s Didier Sornette on the need for risk taking in science and society
Essay Highlights
🤖 The case against mass technological unemployment. (And what happens if I’m wrong.)
In the new NBER working paper “Preparing for the (Non-Existent?) Future of Work,” researchers consider “the labor market and distributional implications of a scenario of ever-more intelligent autonomous machines that substitute for human labor and drive down wages.” So, a future where supersmart technology potentially makes a large number of human workers redundant. Maybe almost all of us. This would be a world where “humans could no longer survive based on earning competitive market wages. Work would become obsolete and would cease to play the central role that it currently plays in our society.” To future-proof society via social insurance, the researchers recommend a modest UBI program indexed to the growth of the non-labor portion of national income. But I am skeptical of this scenario — at least anytime soon — for several reasons: We’re certainly not there yet, and the long history of disappointments in AI progress might suggest we’ve underestimated human superiority. What’s more, the amount of work to be done isn’t fixed. Finally, even if a machine could do everything a human worker could — from creating indistinguishable art to roofing a house to providing psychological therapy — lots of us might still prefer the work product of carbon-based life forms. It’s the ultimate economic nostalgia. (June 27, 2022)
🦄 40 years later, the dystopian economics of Blade Runner still make zero sense
Here’s what the dystopian Blade Runner-verse asks me to believe: The post-1960s Great Stagnation of tech progress — at least as it transfers into measurable business productivity growth — ends. (Or maybe never happens in that reality.) Humanity finally achieves many of the technological leaps anticipated by 1960s futurists and technologists: artificial general intelligence, sentient AI, bioengineered android bodies far more capable than human ones, off-world colonies across the Solar System, and flying cars propelled at least partially by anti-gravity technology (which also, presumably, helps enable space colonization). Instead of one of the most famous cinematic depictions of a future dystopia, the world of Blade Runner should be one of dramatically greater wealth, health (there’s a historical correlation between tech progress and higher life expectancy), resources, and problem-solving capabilities. Replicants take most of the jobs? Here’s a pretty generous basic income for displaced human workers. Destructive climate change? Mega-machines to suck carbon out of the sky. Resource constraints? Asteroid mining. Population explosion? To quote an ad from the first film, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” Then again, life on Earth should also be pretty good for the Earth-loving remainers. (June 29, 2022)
Thankfully, it only took about a day for a reasonable consensus to emerge regarding the US Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday in West Virginia v. EPA, the case challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. No, as so many politicians and activists on social media initially emoted, the court’s six-member conservative majority did not “strangle,” “gut,” or “dismantle” the EPA’s authority. Indeed, the decision wasn’t even the worst-case scenario that some environmentalists had contemplated: The decision does not prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, the Court affirmed greenhouse gases pose a public danger. That said, perhaps there’s an opportunity here. Perhaps we can now hope for a change in the way we might imagine possible climate futures and the methods of getting to those better tomorrows.
First, this new limit on a regulatory approach might spark new life in the idea of a carbon tax. Second, the Court’s decision could create a broader awareness that regulatory actions will never be the critical driver toward a future of both less carbon pollution and clean, affordable, abundant energy. Far more important is emerging innovation in power generation and geoengineering via carbon capture. Third, what sort of future are we imagining that our energy policies might create? Is it a future where all our regulations, subsidies, and innovations are meant to merely replace dirty energy with clean? How about a far more ambitious policy goal: a future of clean energy abundance. Or to put it another way: “What would it be like if we were able to consume vastly more clean, cheap energy?” (July 1, 2022)
Best of 5QQ
Ali Hajimiri is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is also co-director of the Space Solar Power Project, which is developing technology capable of generating solar power in space and beaming it back to Earth.
We’ve talked about demonstration projects, but what's the big dream here?
I think the power from space is one aspect of it, but I don't think it's even limited to that. Because these kinds of structures that you can make — very lightweight, deployable, that you can wrap into a cylinder a few feet across, and then you can launch them and they can deploy — they can have significant impact on communications; on storage of data; on actually even putting servers in space, putting computation space; and transferring a lot of things in space and taking the next step for humanity to expand beyond the realm of this surface that we are on.
Didier Sornette is a professor in the department of management, technology, and economics at ETH Zurich, where he serves as Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks. In 2020, he and Peter Cauwels authored “Are ‘Flow of Ideas’ and ‘Research Productivity’ in secular decline?,” which I have written about previously for Faster, Please! subscribers.
If the reality of risky research is years of "wasting money" followed by bursts of progress, how can we make government research funding more responsive to this reality?
It's almost impossible by the structure of so-called democracies where the utility function of politicians is to get re-elected and thus fund short-term projects that are visible to their citizens. The solution requires a complete revamp of democracies and of education, with also a culture of rewarding discoverers and inventors like Hollywood stars.
Do you find it "normal" or good for society that a tennis player in one tournament can pocket several times the value of the Nobel Prize, which is the culmination of a life of dedication to knowledge acquisition? If you think about it, all of society is structured around short-term incentives aimed towards "pleasure" and not for what are the really important engines of welfare for people and society.
Thanks for reading this far! Just a quick note for first-time visitors and free subscribers. In my twice-weekly issues for paid subscribers, I typically also include a short, sharp Q&A with an interesting thinker, in addition to a long-read essay. Here are some recent examples of those interviewees:
Economist Tyler Cowen on innovation, China, talent, and Elon Musk
Existential risk expert Toby Ord on humanity’s precarious future
Silicon Valley historian Margaret O’Mara on the rise of Silicon Valley
Innovation expert Matt Ridley on rational optimism and how innovation works
More From Less author Andrew McAfee on economic growth and the environment
A Culture of Growth author and economic historian Joel Mokyr on the origins of economic growth
Physicist and The Star Builders author Arthur Turrell on the state of nuclear fusion
Economist Stan Veuger on the social and political impact of the China trade shock
AI expert Avi Goldfarb on machine learning as a general purpose technology
Researcher Alec Stapp on accelerating progress through public policy