Devaluing Humans
David Siegel
Co-founder and co-chairman Two Sigma Investments
One thing that I worry about, which may not necessarily be something that people talk about all the time—remember, I’m a tech guy—is that we may be building a world that is not particularly designed for humans.
Henry Ford talked about it long ago. He wanted to produce cars, but he wanted to make sure that the people producing the cars could earn enough money that they could buy the cars. And you get this wonderful effect where the growth in economic output produces good jobs, which then will help grow the economic output. It becomes a virtuous cycle.
What we’re doing today is finding more and more ways to essentially reduce the need to have humans involved with work. So much of the investment in business in America is to essentially automate away human labor or, even more curiously, to devalue human labor.
The nature of work is changing. For some people it’s getting a lot better. But for probably the majority of people, it’s not really getting better. If you can’t fix this problem, what could occur is that we end up with this sort of barbell economy where a lot of people aren’t really doing all that well. Not only is that just not a good thing, but also they’ll have less money to spend to make the economy get bigger, so the Henry Ford thing won’t occur. I think this is being overlooked. And it’s happening kind of slowly.
I am not at all concerned that there’ll be a shortage of work. There will be plenty of things for people to do. The problem is, they may be things that we don’t want to pay much money for.
Are we truly building a better world for ourselves? Or are we trying to essentially optimize some number like GDP, which in the end doesn’t have all that much to do with whether or not we’re happy and fulfilled and it’s a good stable society? So we’re having more and more focus just purely on automating stuff away, trying to make things more efficient, that may not actually make your life and my life and everyone else’s lives feel better. It may not be like a human-centered society.
I don’t think people are reflecting enough, in America anyway, as to whether or not this is precisely what we want. It’s different in other countries. In Japan, for example, I think people have put more emphasis on upgrading experiences because they understand that when you go out—walking down the street, going into stores, and all that—if you make it appealing, people not only will want to go to your store, but it’s an experience, you enjoy it. So what will the modern experiences be? Are we going to all be sitting at home, wearing VR goggles, and clicking away all the time?
“Do you really care about GDP? Is that how you’re gauging the quality of your life?”
Social networks like Facebook, people talk about all the problems, but you know one thing that it does is it makes socializing very efficient. So you can have your 100 friends or 500 friends, and you don’t have to waste time calling people up telling them what happened. You go click, click, click, and then everyone knows about your life. It’s the most efficient way to socialize, right? Something doesn’t sound right. You know that. Do you really want these levels of efficiency?
I’m not nearly the first one to say this, but at least at a very high level, GDP is the thing everyone looks at. And, you know, quite frankly, I’m not sure that that matters all that much. Because it’s literally such a crude number. Do you really care about GDP? Is that how you’re gauging the quality of your life? No? OK. We don’t spend very much time thinking about the quality of life more broadly. You could in some sense create an ever-growing GDP but have most people saying this is pretty bad. We could end up with a lot of unhappy people. Maybe we’re there already.
A lot of people talk about, is AI dangerous? Some people have been out there saying it’s more dangerous than nuclear weapons. I think that that’s very silly. AI is a very useful tool. But the question is, how do you use it?
This article was provided by Bloomberg Markets.