Here's what bugging me today:
Scott Alexander recently wrote an essay on Technological Unemployment, the idea that technology will someday raise unemployment levels by replacing human workers; he starts off by pointing out that this sort of thing has been happening for centuries and actually it is okay, and then he says something stupid:
"Imagine there’s a perfect android that can do everything humans do (including management) only better. And suppose it costs $10 to buy and $1/hour to operate. Surely every business owner would just buy those androids, and then all humans who wanted to earn more than $1/hour would be totally out of luck. There’s no conceivable way the androids would “augment” human labor and there’s no conceivable way the displaced humans could go into another industry.
Which is dead wrong.
First, to get it out of the way: the economy would crash. Totally. But we'd get over that. So moving past the economic disaster and on to the mistake: money reflects value. Whether you want it too or not. If labor costs $1 an hour, then iron will be mined at $1 an hour, forged at $1 and hour, and built into cars at $1 an hour, and cars will cost $100 to make ($150 MSRP). The minimum wage will be $0.20, humans will compete, and we will buy cars, houses, and food.*
This is an oversimplification, because most of us will spend a few hundred dollars to invest in androids and become proper capitalists. There will still be an underclass and there will still be insanely rich people. Things will be pretty much the same, except much better.
This is a particularly annoying mistake because there's nowhere for the assumed lost value to go. It's assumed that we will be able to produce things more cheaply, but there's no mechanism for assuming that someone is getting super rich (unless it's the androids?), there no explanation as to why $1 an hour is a meaningful number ($1 in the android future is clearly not the same as $1 currently), and no explanation as to what all the poor unemployed humans are doing now that they are, apparently, supposedly, broke. And most centrally, no explanation as to why all those business owners would bother to buy an android to produce something if all consumers are flat broke.
Granted, I understand why Alexander doesn't want to get into a technical discussion on the probable necessity of a government-funded Universal Basic Android Ownership Program, but the solution to that is to not say dumb things about androids.
*Obviously, a lot of this is only vaguely true. For example, I will be trading in my car and apartment for an obscenely elaborate sedan chair/mobile home.