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3.5.2: Accelerating the right applications

Technological change can be hard on an economy, and harder on the people making up that economy.  (1).  Jobs get lost.  It happens.  What makes technology a good thing - the reason why the doomsayers and slowsayers and Luddites always prove mistaken - is that new jobs come along to replace the old.  My father has a saying:  "If the modern government had been around in the time of Ford, cars would have been outlawed to protect the saddle industry."  (2).

Nonetheless, there's a limit on how fast economies can adapt.  There's a limit to how fast people can be reeducated.  (I should note, for the record, that we are presently not even approaching this limit.  (3).)  Even infrahuman AI is still an ultratechnology, and if we can really pull off the zero-to-sixty stunt needed to have a seed AI ready by 2010, much less 2005, this implies a rate of change that could put enormous stresses on the economy.

However, there are technologies that can compensate.  The great computer revolution has increased rates of change in some industries, but other computer technologies have enabled (some) companies to change faster and keep up.  It's the reason why "change" is one of the great clichés of our time.  Technology doesn't just create economic stress, it creates the ability to keep up with economic stress.

So within the near-term economic horizon, meaning the next 10 years or so, we want to accelerate the stabilizing applications of AI, such as educational AI, and avoid accelerating the applications that would cause "ultraproductivity", which in today's economy would translate into "mass unemployment".  I do have some schemes for "smart economies" that can rapidly absorb almost unlimited increases in productivity, although the technologies involved (4) are not AI as such; these also go on the list of things to accelerate if we have the spare time.  (After all, if the Singularity drags on beyond the next 10 years, human economies are just going to have to adjust to ultraproductivity.)

• 1:  Of course, "hard" is relative.  Compare losing one's job to the kind of personal catastrophes that were routine in the Middle Ages.
• 2:  Nowadays, of course, cars are a major source of jobs, to be protected at all costs.

  Odd idea, protecting "jobs", trying to create more "jobs", as if the quality of our lives were determined by how much work we have to do, rather than how much stuff is produced and consumed.  This has struck me as being extremely silly since the age of around nine, although now, of course, I understand the several ways in which the phenomenon arises.

• 3:  I don't even know of any historical case of anyone approaching this limit.  It's a completely hypothetical limit.
• 4:  Collaborative filtering, open corporations, complex barter, insulated transaction cycles, and dynamic pricing futures.  I need to write a page on this at some point.

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