There seems to be a sudden interest in the automation of the manufacturing processes as well as in many other parts of our economy. What is quite surprising is the sudden discovery of this process, especially by academics, and moreover especially by economists.
So much of classic
microeconomics is predicated on the assumption of massive capital investments
and long capital lives of such investment. In the past thirty years we have
seen shortened lives of capital plant and in some cases the elimination of such
means of production totally. Vertical integration has migrated to
globalization, in the extreme.
Now in a recent piece by a Berkeley Economist on the left
there appears to be a sudden discovery of automation[1].
The author states:
In their compelling
new book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee document
the progress in artificial intelligence that is enabling computers to exceed
what they were capable of only a few years ago. The leaps in machine
intelligence, along with the connection of human beings around the world in a
common digital network, will enable the development of new technologies, goods
and services. The authors are optimistic about the “bounty” or economy-wide
benefits of brilliant machines. But they warn that the distribution or “spread”
of these benefits will be uneven. Their fears are justified. During the last
three decades, even before breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, computers
have been replacing and multiplying the physical labor of human beings.
Improvements in computer and communications technologies have also enabled
employers to offshore many routine tasks that machines cannot directly replace.
Now, as I have noted several times in this line of
discussion, it was Norbert Wiener in the late 1940s who first called out the
changes to our economy by the use of intelligent machines in his many writings
on Cybernetics. In fact, as the father of what we know see as “automated
everything”, he raised the concern as to what this would do to our economy.
Thus almost seventy years ago we knew what was happening and it was not just
artificial intelligence.
The above sudden insight to artificial intelligence has
itself been slowly evolving for almost the same period initiated also by Wiener’s
colleagues and co-workers. Wiener had in the 40s a keen insight into the
obvious which was totally missed by all economists for decades, and they seem
now to want the praise for discovering it some seventy years after it was first
well-articulated.
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