In 1900, the UK had 3.3mn horses. These animals provided pulling power, transport and cavalry. Today, only recreation is left. Horses are an outmoded technology. Their numbers in the UK have fallen by around 75 per cent. Could humans, too, become an outmoded technology, displaced by machines that are not just stronger and more dexterous but more intelligent, even more creative? The threat, we are told, is remote.
Yet this is a matter of belief. Maybe machines could do much of what we need to have done better than we could, with the exception of being human and caring as humans do.Yet even if no such revolution threatens, recent advances in artificial intelligence are highly significant. According to Bill Gates, they are the most important development since personal computers. So, what might be the implications? Can we control them?
The natural starting point is with jobs and productivity. A paper by David Autor of MIT and co-authors provides a useful analytical framework and sobering conclusions on what has happened in the past. It distinguishes labour-augmenting from labour-automating innovation. It concludes that “the majority of current employment is in new job specialities introduced after 1940”. But the locus of this new work has shifted from middle-paid production and clerical occupations prior to 1980 to highly paid professional and, secondarily, low-paid services thereafter. Thus, innovation has increasingly been hollowing out middle-income jobs.