Recently I saw two innovations in retail, AI cashiers and human cashiers, but working remotely since another country as in the Philippines and earn much lower wages than domestic workers (examples are below). I worry that AI cashiers will compete with Filipino cashiers, resulting in the worst of all worlds, AIs doing low-productivity work. In an excellent room, People rather than robotsLant Pritchett explains the problem:
Barriers to migration encourage terrible misuse of resources. In the world’s most productive economies, the capital and energy of business leaders (not to mention the time and talents of highly skilled scientists and engineers) are absorbed in developing technologies that will minimize the use of one of the most abundant resources on the planet: work. Raw labor power is the most important (and often only) asset available to low-income people around the world. The drive to build machines that can perform roles that could easily be performed by people not only wastes money, but also helps keep the poorest in poverty.
The answer to immigration has always been: “we wanted workers, we got people instead.” But, with remote workers, we can have unstaffed workers! Even Steve Sailer might approve.
At the same time, the use of AI for cashiers illustrates Acemoglu’s complaint about “poor automation,” automation that displaces labor but with little impact on productivity. AI cashiers are great, but how big can the gains be when you replace human labor at $3 an hour?
It seems likely that at least one of these innovations will become mainstream. Unfortunately, I suspect American workers will be more opposed to $3 an hour remote workers taking “their jobs” than to AI. As a result, we will have AI cashiers and workforce moves to the United States. And Foreign workers. This doesn’t seem ideal. It’s not clear how to direct technology toward higher-productivity tasks and tasks that complement human labor, but at the very least, we shouldn’t artificially raise the price of labor to make AI profitable.
As Pritchett points out, this isn’t the first time forced labor has led to the creation of useless technology.
In the mid-20th century, the United States permitted seasonal migration of guest agricultural workers from Mexico under the heading of the Bracero program. The government eventually slowed down the program and finally stopped it altogether in 1964. Researchers compared employment and production patterns between states that lost Bracero workers and those that never had them. They found that eliminating these workers did not increase the employment of indigenous workers in the agricultural sector at all. Instead, farmers responded to the newly created labor shortage by relying more on machines and technological advances; for example, they turned to planting genetically modified produce that could be harvested by machines, such as thicker-skinned tomatoes, and abandoned crops like asparagus and strawberries, for which mechanized harvesting options were unavailable. limited.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but false necessity is the mother of stupid inventions.
Wendy’s AI.
