(2020-07-08) Doctorow Climate Change Full Employment

Cory Doctorow on Full Employment. I’m an automation-employment-crisis skeptic. That is, I believe that even if we were – by some impossible-to-imagine means – to produce a general AI tomorrow, we would still have 200-300 years of full employment for every human who wanted a job ahead of us. I’m talking about climate change, of course. Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and insectborne pandemics.

If we’re willing to stipulate a fundamental breakthrough that produces an AI, what about a comparable geoengineering breakthrough? Maybe our (imaginary) AIs will be so smart that they’ll figure out how to change the Earth’s albedo. Sorry, that’s not SF, it’s fantasy.

consider just one factor: the heat we’ve sunk into the oceans. The seas won’t cool until the energy trapped in their depths is expended. Which means that, to a first approximation, the ice-caps are toast.

The good news about all of this is that it reveals the locus of the problem with technological unemployment: it’s not a technological problem at all, it’s an economic one.

The pandemic crisis has taught us two critical things:

Blind adherence to government austerity destroys capacity – it doesn’t build it.

Sovereign currency (fiat money) issuers do not experience cash shortfalls during crises – they experience capacity shortfalls.

The money supply is fine. That helicopter money is going to procure things that the private sector doesn’t want (the labor of people who are quarantined at home).

That money is mostly chasing the same goods that were available before the crisis (rent, groceries, and debt service) so it’s not crowding out other buyers and causing inflation. Does that imply that not gushing that money would result in deflation? (MMT)

There’s one exception – one category of goods that is suddenly in much higher demand: health services, infrastructure, and supplies.

California doesn’t need money; it needs ventilators. If, in 2008, the Fed had bailed out the states, replacing the money the private sector had just annihilated, California would have ventilators. Stockpiling medical supplies is smart planning. Stockpiling money when you are the source of money is… weird.

Which brings me back to technological unemployment.

Should that day come to pass, the money-issuer – the central bank – can procure all that idle labor

What could the government ask us to do in exchange for all that money? How about doing the hard work to cope with the centuries of climate emergencies we definitely, unavoidably face?

when the pandemic crisis is over, 30% of the world will either be unemployed or working for governments. This isn’t after an Artificial General Intelligence Singularity in the distant future. It’s next year.

The 30% who are working under federal jobs programs (workfare) will have working lives completely decoupled from the workings of the market.

let’s dream big: I can see a path from here to a federal jobs guarantee. I don’t see a path from here to a General AI.

Keynes once proposed that we could jump-start an economy by paying half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in.

No one’s really tried that experiment, but we did just spend 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now we’ll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there. (carbon sequestration)