Imagine you’re trying to bat in baseball. Your brain does some genuinely impressive computation — predicting trajectories, coordinating dozens of muscles, adjusting for wind — and puts it all together using Bayesian algorithms. But here’s the thing: making your brain infinitely smarter would not allow you to hit all balls. Some are out of reach, others move too quickly. At some point, regardless of your intelligence, you hit physical limits. You can only stretch so far or react so fast. No amount of genius overcomes the physics of your body.
This is intelligence saturation. For a given task, more intelligence helps. But it helps less and less as you add more intelligence. And it’s the key concept missing from most debates about AI and the future of work.
On one side, we have AI researchers who see exponentials everywhere: compute resource doubling every six months, costs halving faster than every six months, model performance doubling every seven months. The AI folks see that “intelligence” is scaling at unbelievable rates and conclude we’re headed for an economic singularity. In one popular scenario, human wages will go up as automated tasks make the not-yet-automated parts of a job more productive, until AI takes over everything and their wage goes to zero as there is no work left to be done. Then, the theory goes, everyone will have to be on Universal Basic Income.
On the other side, economists look at 200 years of steady growth despite countless “revolutionary” technologies and shrug: AI is just another general-purpose technology, nothing special. In a scenario popular with these econ folks, it is hard to make human workers obsolete even in the intelligence domain. In this view, AI replaces workers in some jobs that it can do better or more cheaply, but new jobs are also created, and AI makes people overall more productive. Overall growth is then just like without AI, only a little bit faster.
Physical Meets Intelligence
Economists traditionally divide the economy into two complementary sectors: capital and labor. We can replace capital, which includes machinery, equipment and technology, with human labor and vice versa, but that replacement is often difficult. The more we replace one with the other, the harder it is to replace more, because the easiest tasks to replace are targeted first. In our paper we argue that it is crucial to also divide the economy into the “intelligence parts” and the “physical parts.”
The intelligence sector comprises things that can be done virtually, remotely, purely through information processing. The physical sector comprises things that require bodies, presence, and manipulation of the actual world.
We believe that AI may be eating the pure intelligence sector alive. But here’s the catch: intelligence and physicality are complements, not substitutes. You need both.
by Konrad Körding and Ioana Marinescu, Transformer | Read more:
Image: Getty/Alex Bierens de Haan
[ed. Not if you have the Terminator standing at the plate. Besides, the more the work force transitions to "physical professions" (plumbing, electricians, beauticians, etc.) the more wages are likely to decline because the market can only absorb so many workers. I don't need a plumber every week.]
[ed. Not if you have the Terminator standing at the plate. Besides, the more the work force transitions to "physical professions" (plumbing, electricians, beauticians, etc.) the more wages are likely to decline because the market can only absorb so many workers. I don't need a plumber every week.]
