9 February 2024. AI and jobs | Singing
The ‘vast uncertainty’ of AI and jobs // Singing for climate change [#541]
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish three days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. A reminder that if you don’t see Just Two Things in your inbox, it might have been routed to your spam filter. Comments are open.
1: The ‘vast uncertainty’ of AI and jobs
I wrote, critically, about the recent IMF report on the impact of AI and jobs. I was doing some research for a report I was writing recently which required me to go back into the same area, and found an article by David Autor that has a different view. Not more cheerful, necessarily, but maybe more honest about the radical uncertainty that pervades this whole area.
Autor is a credible voice in this area, since he has been writing about the relationship between technology and labour markets for several decades now, so has the benefit of context. But it is also a reminder that thinking about models is more useful in addressing uncertainty than just pumping out modelling data.
(Fernand Leger, ‘Soldiers Playing Cards’, 1917. Kroller-Muller Museum.)
The title of the article, on the NBER website, conveys the tone: ‘The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty’. It’s a long article, though never technical, and so I’ll only have the space here to pick up some of the main points.
This is his starting point:
what workers earn in a market economy depends substantially, though not exclusively, on their productivity–that is, the value they produce through their labor. Their productivity depends in turn on two things: first, their capabilities (concretely, the tasks they can accomplish); and second, their scarcity... In conventional terms, the skill premium depends upon the supply of skills and the demand for skills.
So, if that is the structure of the market, what is the impact of technology? The answer is not obvious, and different models of the relationship between technology and work generate very answers. Autor reviews four models, briefly summarised here by me.
1. The education race
This is the most influential model, originally proposed by Jan Tinbergen and popularised by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. Tinbergen started by observing that the wages of Dutch workers with post-high school education were rising, even though their numbers were increasing. He concluded the modern economies had a race between increasing demand for skills and being able to supply it.
There’s more to this, but it leads to an important question:
what is it about technology that raises the demand for better-educated workers?
The model doesn’t really have an answer to this. In theory, at least, technology should help all workers by augmenting their productivity, if by differing amounts. But, as we know, this is not what the data says.
2. The task-polarisation model
The task model tries to explain why the real wages of some groups of workers fall even while technology is increasing the productivity of issues. In this, jobs are construed as a bundle of tasks, and the extent to which the tasks can be replaced by technology is then assessed.
In this model, automation replaces some of the tasks in the bundle. In turn, this also helps to explain why computerisation has benefitted high-skilled workers. In brief, the tasks that have been harder to automate have involved non-routine, cognitive, and inter-personal tasks that are more likely to part of a high-skilled bundle. And a bit more:
The productivity and earnings power of workers who specialize in abstract reasoning, expert judgment, and interpersonal interactions and leadership rises as the inputs into their work—information access, analysis, and communication—becomes less expensive and more productive.
Although there are also tasks (such as care work) that technology can’t easily substitute, neither does technology help their productivity.
The task model thus underscores that technological change, like most economic transformations, creates both winners and losers. ... (It) further implies that a substantial component of this effect stems from the adverse impacts of technological change on the earnings of less-educated workers rather than (exclusively) the positive effect of factor-augmentation on the earnings of high-skill workers.
3. New work and task reinstatement
As described above, the task model doesn’t capture the emergence of new tasks, but we know that work is continually evolving. One innovative way of assessing this, at least in the US, is by looking at the emergence of new job titles in the Census. Acemoglu and Restrepo have integrated this into the task model by proposing that
automation displaces workers from existing job tasks as before; but now, new task creation potentially ‘reinstates’ demand for workers by generating new tasks that require human expertise.
In this version, the labour market effects of automation are effectively a race between task automation and task reinstatement. And it’s also possible to identify both technology innovations that automate tasks, and those that augment tasks, enabling reinstatement.
4. The era of AI uncertainty
So the question is whether this framework is well-placed or not to assess the impact of AI:
Does AI fundamentally change the relationship between technological change, labor demand, and inequality—and if so, how do we characterize these changes analytically?
The task model assumes that those tasks that can be automated involve explicit instructions, and AI undermines this assumption. AI is able to infer certain relationships.
Despite this, Autor concludes that the task model is still analytically useful. But AI still raises important questions:
“what work tasks will AI prove capable of accomplishing in the years (and decades) ahead?”
“what new demands for human skills and capabilities will emerge as AI displaces a growing set of traditional human work tasks? “
'Ungrounded speculation’
Having gone through all the evidence in a lot of detail—I’ve had to summarise ruthlessly here—Autor concludes with a section called ‘ungrounded speculation’. In brief summary here, he makes four observations:
First, “further improvements in AI’s capabilities may accelerate the process of task automation relative to task augmentation. Broadly, this will mean that labor’s share of national income will decline further.”
Second, AI reshapes the type of tasks (and therefore worker skills) that are substituted for and complemented by technologies. However, at the moment, “there is an upper limit to this substitution process at present... People effortlessly do extraordinary things on an ongoing basis, such as applying common sense to tease apart otherwise intractable problems.”
Third, he does not expect AI to reach deep into the areas of low paid service work. Human interaction matters in this work, and the robotics involved is complex. The economics of displacement, in other words, are unattractive.
Fourth, “while it is easy to imagine which tasks and what jobs will succumb to automation, it is far harder to forecast what and where new work will emerge... new innovations almost always generate new work as people deploy, master, maintain, refine, and improve new technologies, tools, and services.”
Autor is clear that the advent of AI has created greater uncertainty about the future of the labour market, and he isn’t necessarily optimistic. But it is right to underline the uncertainty. And, as he observes, a lot of these issues aren’t about technology. They’re about policy and politics.
2: Singing for climate change
There’s an interesting article in the Guardian about the rise of the “climate choir” as a vehicle of protest. The Climate Choir movement was founded in 2022 in Bristol, and the first action was a a year ago, in February 2023. According to the website there are now 10 choirs across the country, with more than 550 members.
The article is interesting about both the relationship between the Climate Choir movement and more radical groups such as XR, and the very different response to people who are singing.
(H/t to Charles Arthur’s Overspill blog for noticing this.)
First, the relationship to the more radical parts of the climate protest movement: singing is better than being arrested:
Jo Flanagan, the co-founder of the Climate Choir Movement, watches (the rehearsal) with pride. “We’re growing the moderate flank of protest on the back of those who have the courage to glue themselves to bridges,” she says. “People hear about protests like that and want to do something that doesn’t involve the risk of getting arrested, and that’s where we come in.”
But this is about more than just singing. The article lists a whole lot of what might be described as performance-based protest. The London choir wore “black suits and bowler hats” for a musical protest in the City of London.
A “flash choir” has gathered impromptu at the Science Museum in response to its taking funding from the coal producer Adani and the oil company BP. (The Science Museum continues to be among the most tin-eared of our museums when it comes to pocketing fossil fuel money, along with the British Museum).
The AGM of Barclays Bank was greeted last year by singers from several different Climate Choirs with a Spice Girls’ song with a reworked lyric:
“Stop right now, you dirty, dirty bank.”
A video of that event on the Climate Choir Movement website gives a sense of the style, and the protest:
Those involved all point to the way in which singing provokes a different response from shouting. Kate Honey, who is the musical director of the Bristol choir:
“Protest hardens hearts by shouting and chanting but we don’t want hearts to be hardened: it’s very important not to fall out with each other if we want change to happen,” she said.
This also means that it is less risky for the participants, even despite Britain’s increasingly anti-democratic protest laws. Gabriella Rowe joined the Climate Choir for the Science Museum protest:
“This peaceful method makes it possible to reach those at the top who are making the decisions without risk of arrest,” she added. “My mother is still nervous because of the new anti-protest laws but she’s relieved that this is the path of protest I’ve chosen.”
The protestors report that the police are much more tolerant of choirs—at the City of London protest, one police officer if he could get a recording. The sense is that music triggers different psychological responses in listeners, even if you are less sympathetic to the lyrics. Sally Davies, who is the co-leader of the London choir, and also a composer, puts this in this way:
“A big mass of people singing is really moving and, whatever your politics, if you can hear the words being sung, the music then becomes a tool to wonder why you’re moved... And that moment can be the moment of truth – of change.”
I asked my son about the neuroscience of this, and he pointed me to Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary. Music, says McGilchrist, is “a natural expression” of the right hemisphere of the brain—the hemisphere that specialises in non-verbal communication, in contrast to the left hemisphere, which deals with more explicit concerns, such as speech. The section is quite dense, but here is an extract:
(M)usic is a natural candidate for the concerns of the right hemisphere. It is the relations between things, more than entities in isolation, that are of primary importance to the right hemisphere. Music consists entirely of relations, 'betweenness’...
The relationship between music and emotion is fascinating, and to some degree baffling. Suzanne Langer said that music not only has the power to recall emotions we are familiar with, but to evoke emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before. Music seems, in other words, to expand the range of possible emotions limitlessly because the emotion experienced is so bound up with the particularity of the work that mediates it. (p.72-74. Emphasis in original.)
There is a long history of singing being embedded in protest. Much of this is about creating solidarity among the protesters in the face of repression. You think of the songs of the anti-apartheid movement, for example, or those from the American civil rights movement.
There is the use of song as a less controversial way of challenging the authorities—as in Mikel Laboa’s singing of songs in Basque in the later days of the Franco regime, when the use of Basque in public was still a criminal offence in Spain.
The example that seems closest to the Climate Choirs is the independence struggle of the Baltic states, notably in Estonia which was called the “Singing Revolution” at the time. The site of the Song Festival Grounds in Tallinn, which hosted spontaneous mass signing demonstrations in the summer of 1988, is still a tourist destination.
The annual song festival, Laulupidu, dates back 150 years, and involves thousands of people:
These gatherings, which have attracted crowds of hundreds of thousands, have always been as much about the popular yearning for national self-determination as they have been about music. Laulupidu became the cornerstone of the resistance against the Soviet occupation, when—in addition to singing the requisite songs praising the state and the Communist Party—the organizers defied Soviet officials by including banned nationalist songs and symbols.
The shared cultural history of these songs, of course, makes this a potent source of nationalist protest. There’s a documentary about that, as it happens. Here’s the trailer.
Update: Davos
I had a piece here a few weeks ago on Davos. John Naughton’s Memex 1.1blog points to a piece on the cosmopolitics newsletter by a jaundiced member of diplomatic press corps. And sure, I’m primed for pieces like this, but Davos and World Economic Forum are well enough placed to promote their own agenda and own vast importance, so I’m happy to provide a mote of balance.
The piece is by the American journalist Elise Labott. Here’s an extract:
Davos has become less of a “forum” and more of a festival, with FOMO being the real draw: The price of admission, the color of your badge, and the invites to swanky parties all speak louder than the panels themselves... Back in the real world, people grapple with immediate issues like rising living costs, job insecurity, migration and the tangible impacts of climate change. ...
Yet, amidst this turmoil, the reports from Davos, and there were quite a lot of them, read like an echo chamber of platitudes on these issues, reinforcing existing beliefs on “megatrends” rather than challenging them.
j2t#541
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.