Lessons for us about AI from the horse apocalypse

Larry Kummer, Editor

8 years ago

Summary: Artificial intelligence has arrived. The mid-twentieth century horse apocalypse shows us what it might do to employment. It is history’s rebuttal to the pollyannas about tech. This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post — Films show us how smart machines will reshape the world.

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
— Attributed to Roy Charles Amara as paraphrased by Robert X. Cringely.

Once there were ten million plowhorses in America.
Most lost their jobs.
Many became glue or dog food.

The next and largest wave of automation is slowly becoming visible. But the coming of this revolution were visible to some people long ago. One of the first was James Blish, as described in his science fiction novel A Life for the Stars (1962), the second of his Cities in Flight series. This passage describes New York City in the late 21st century, where most jobs have been automated.

The cab came floating down out of the sky at the intersection and maneuvered itself to rest at the curb next to them with a finicky precision. There was, of course, nobody in it; like everything else in the world requiring an I.Q. of less than 150, it was computer-controlled.

The world-wide dominance of such machines, Chris’s father had often said, had been one of the chief contributors to the present and apparently permanent depression: the coming of semi-intelligent machines into business and technology had created a second Industrial Revolution, in which only the most highly creative human beings, and those most fitted at administration, found themselves with any skills to sell which were worth the world’s money to buy.

Fifty-five years later this era has begun. Algorithms have already replaced many in a few skilled jobs, such as bank credit officers. Tools to automate aspects of many more skilled jobs are being tested — such as radiologists and journalists — so that (like horses) their numbers employed will drop precipitously during the next generation or so. This is only the beginning. This will reshape the world. What happened before shows us how.

The horse apocalypse.

The great mid-twentieth century horse apocalypse is described by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (both of MIT) in “Will Humans Go the Way of Horses?” in Foreign Affairs, July/Aug 2015 — “Labor in the Second Machine Age.”

“For many decades, horse labor appeared impervious to technological change. Even as the telegraph supplanted the Pony Express and railroads replaced the stagecoach and the Conestoga wagon, the U.S. equine population grew seemingly without end, increasing sixfold between 1840 and 1900 to more than 21 million horses and mules. The animals were vital not only on farms but also in the country’s rapidly growing urban centers, where they carried goods and people on hackney carriages and horse-drawn omnibuses.

“But then, with the introduction and spread of the internal combustion engine, the trend rapidly reversed. As engines found their way into automobiles in the city and tractors in the countryside, horses became largely irrelevant. By 1960, the United States counted just three million horses, a decline of nearly 88% in just over half a century. If there had been a debate in the early 1900s about the fate of the horse in the face of new industrial technologies, someone might have formulated a “lump of equine labor fallacy,” based on the animal’s resilience up till then. But the fallacy itself would soon be proved false: once the right technology came along, most horses were doomed as labor.

“Is a similar tipping point possible for human labor? Are autonomous vehicles, self-service kiosks, warehouse robots, and supercomputers the harbingers of a wave of technological progress that will finally sweep humans out of the economy?”

This insight was made first by Wassily Leontief (1973 Nobel Laureate in Economics) in his famous “Long-Term Impact of Technology on Employment and Unemployment“, National Academy of Engineering (1983). He describes the great wave of job extinction — of horses. Cutting their wages could not save their jobs, nor will it save our.

“Any worker who now performs his task by following specific instructions can, in principle, be replaced by a machine. That means the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors. The general theoretical proposition that the worker who loses his job in one industry will necessarily be able to find employment, possibly after appropriate retraining, in some other industry is as invalid as would be the assertion that horses who lost their jobs in transportation and agriculture could necessarily have been put to another economically productive use.

“Reduction in the price of labor — that is, in the real wage rates — can and in certain instances did postpone its replacement by machines for the same reason that a reduction of oats rations allocated to horses could delay their replacement by tractors. But this would be only a temporary slowdown in the process; improvements in the efficiency of tractors and other inanimate means of production can be expected to proceed without any limits, while reductions in feed rations or wages have definite limits.”

See a longer excerpt here from this great paper. It is well worth reading.

Some prefer their eyes closed.

The need to adapt is not obvious to everybody. In her (otherwise excellent) 1989 book In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power Shoshana Zuboff does not even use the word “unemployment” — or mention the potential for massive job losses.

In their 2004 book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane discuss fields where “computerization should have little effect on the percentage of the work force engaged in these tasks.” They list truck driving as one such field. Only 13 years later that prediction looks foolish. Imagine what another 13 years will bring.

In January 2016 Elizabeth Garbee at Slate wrote “This Is Not the Fourth Industrial Revolution” — “The meaningless phrase got tossed around a lot at this year’s World Economic Forum.”

Conclusions

Automation will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century. While fantastic, it is no more dangerous than other challenges we have successfully surmounted. But it could cause devastating social turmoil before we successfully adapt. The sooner we start to prepare, the less traumatic will be the transition. Don’t listen to the people who say that because AI revolution has been predicted for so long, it will not come.

“On September 23 {in 1066 William the Conqueror’s} fleet hove in sight, and all came safely to anchor in Pevensey Bay. There was no opposition to the landing. The local fyrd had been called out this year 4 times already to watch the coast, and having, in true English style, come to the conclusion that the danger was past because it had not yet arrived had gone back to their homes.”

— From A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill.

For More Information

The new industrial revolution has begun. New research shows more robots = fewer jobs. Also see the famous book by Wassily Leontief (Nobel laureate in economics), The Future Impact of Automation on Workers (1986).

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