session-4.md

24 Feb: Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems

Topics

• Aggregate and distributional consequences of automation (e.g., on labor markets, inequality)
• Role of policy in shaping the impact of AI and automation broadly, as well as specific policy responses (e.g., universal basic income)
• Competitive global landscape of AI development, comparative approaches to governance, and historical precedents for responses (e.g., Asilomar conference)

Table of contents

• Lecture notes
• Reading list
  • Supplementary reading

Lecture notes

Technology's effect on labor is not new.

How can we think systematically about the effects of automation on wages, employment, and economic growth? Acemoglu and Restrepo offer an economic framework for assessing the impact of automation:

1. A displacement effect whereby AI and robotics replace workers in tasks they previously performed
2. A productivity effect as the cost of production declines
3. Capital accumpulation triggered by increased automation will increase the demand for labor
4. Deepening of automation as productivity increases further in already-automated tasks
5. A reinstatement effect in which new tasks increase the demand for labor

While we don’t have estimates of automation’s impact on social dynamics, there is growing literature on the political and social impacts of job losses from off-shoring labor:

• Feigenbaum and Hall (2015) find that job losses drive politicians to adopt much more protectionist positions in Congress
• Ballard-Rosa, et al (2018) find that job losses drive the adoption of more “authoritarian values” and support for anti-establishment parties (in both the US and UK)

How might automation-induced job losses affect political behavior and attitudes?

We must address AI and automation’s potential to increase inequality.

Council of Economic Advisers, 2016

Oxford researchers posit 47% of jobs are at a high risk of being lost to automation by 2030 while the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development only estimates 9%. (Grayline)

Reading list

• Acemoglu, Daron, and Pascual Restrepo. “Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work.” NBER, 15 Jan. 2018.
• Smith, Aaron, and Monica Anderson. “Americans and Automation in Everyday Life.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 6 Aug. 2020.
• Van Parijs, Philippe. “A Basic Income for All.” Boston Review, Oct./Nov. 2000.

Supplementary reading

Technical deep dive

• One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (Stanford, 2016) (pp. 1-3, 12-49)
• “Society-in-the-Loop” by Iyad Rahwan (ArXiv, 2017)
• Artificial Intelligence in Society, Chapter 4 [Public Policy Considerations], (OECD, 2019)

Tensions and trade-offs

• “The Pursuit of the Ideal” by Isaiah Berlin (ch. 1 from The Crooked Timber of Humanity)
• “Never Mind the Trolley: The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles in Mundane Situations” by Johannes Himmelreich (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2018)
• “Isaiah Berlin: Against Dogma” by Henry Hardy (Times Literary Supplement, 2020)
• “Pluralism and Incommensurable Goods” by Elizabeth Anderson (in Value in Ethics and Economics)

Rights and responsibilities

• “AI and the Economy” by Jason Furman and Robert Seamans (NBER, 2018)
• “New World Order” by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Michael Spence (Foreign Affairs, 2014)
• “Liability and Regulation of Autonomous Vehicle Technologies” by Nidhi Kalra, James M. Anderson and Martin Wachs, pp. 17-36 (RAND, 2009)
• “Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets” by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo (NBER Working Paper, 2017)
• Andrew McAfee & Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
• “The American Corporation is in Crisis—Let's Rethink It” by Lenore Palladino (Boston Review, 2019)

Making choices

• Kai-Fu Lee,AI Superpowers, chapter 4 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)
• ”It’s already too late to stop the AI arms race—We must manage it instead” by Edward Moore Geist (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2016)
• “The Short-Term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor” by Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016)
• “Who Really Stands to Win from Universal Basic Income” by Nathan Heller (New Yorker, 2018)
• “Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream” by David H. Freedman (MIT Technology Review, 2016)
• Y Combinator Basic Income Study (browse website)
• “A Layered Model for AI Governance” by Urs Gasser and Virgilio A.F. Almeida (IEEE Internet Computing, 2017)
• “Is effective regulation of AI possible? Eight potential regulatory problems” by John Danaher (Philosophical Disquisitions, 2014)
• “Perspectives on Issues in AI Governance,” Google