9. Brainstorm ways AI might affect economic activity
There is a numbered list of areas of economic activity below (remember that this can include any sort of goods or services people enjoy, whether money is involved or not). Figure out which one you have been assigned in the “9 activity” column of the assignment spreadsheet (link removed). Use one or more LLMs to brainstorm ideas about how some aspect of this activity may well be transformed in coming years as a result of AI.
The file you submit should begin with a 2-3 paragraph summary (written by yourself or an AI or collaboratively) of how some aspect of this area of economic activity may be transformed in coming years as a result of AI. Make sure that you include some thoughts about how the prediction might go wrong. After this summary description, you should copy and paste any relevant conversations you had with LLMs in developing this idea.
Some things you might mention in the description
- What specific aspect of this broad area of economic activity are you discussing?
- What sort of AI system(s) will cause the transformation you are imagining?
- Will ordinary people have more or less access to this sort of good/service as a result (e.g., will it get cheaper)?
- Will the quality of good/service most people have access to be higher or lower than it is now?
- Will more or fewer people do this as part of a job for pay?
- Will the people who do it for pay need to have skills that current workers don’t, or will lower-skilled people be able to take jobs that used to require higher skills?
- Will other people spend more or less of their life doing this activity without it being their job?
- Are there other areas of social/economic/political life that this particular transformation might have major effects on?
An example
An (abbreviated) example of one paragraph someone a century and a half ago might have written about how industrialization would transform one aspect of agriculture:
“One industrial system that will transform an aspect of agriculture is how refrigeration will transform the production of fruits and vegetables. With refrigeration, ordinary people will have much greater access to fresh fruits and vegetables - instead of just having access to the fruits and vegetables that grow in their location that are currently ripe, they will have access to fruits and vegetables from all seasons from all over the world. The quality of produce will be lower, because it will be optimized for shipping instead of taste, but it will be so cheap and abundant that most people don’t notice. The number of people involved in growing fruits and vegetables will rise, because a single harvest can now aim to supply enough to eat all year, but most non-farmers will spend less time on home gardening because they can get cheap fruits and vegetables at stores whenever they want.”
How to work with the AI
When you work with the AI, you should have at least one conversation where you start fresh and just try to help the AI brainstorm a large number of different sub-parts of the area of economic activity you are considering, without telling it that you will eventually ask how AI will impact these areas. Make sure to help it think about many different aspects of this area of economic activity - not just the parts that are currently bought and sold by companies, but also the parts people do as volunteers, or as a hobby, or for fun with friends, and also aspects that are too difficult or expensive for anyone to do right now but that might become easier.
Once you have a list of sub-aspects, you might help it brainstorm whether different types of AI system might be relevant to some of these aspects. Maybe it will be AI classification or recognition systems, recommendation algorithms, generative AI, AI that “does” things; maybe it will be embodied or disembodied systems; maybe it will be agential or tool systems; maybe symbolic or neural systems; maybe other categories are relevant.
Make sure that your brainstorming considers both how the same amount of work might be done with fewer people, but also how the decreasing cost of the product might increase demand for it so that more people do the work. (Jevons Paradox.)
Broad areas of economic activity
- Childcare
- Elementary eduction
- University education
- Religion
- Live music
- Theater
- Recorded music
- Film and video
- Lighting (home/office/streets/elsewhere)
- Competitive sports
- Recreational sports
- Fitness
- Routine healthcare
- Cancer treatment
- Therapy
- Firefighting
- Mining
- Energy production and distribution
- Agriculture
- Food preparation (at home or restaurants or elsewhere)
- Clothing design and manufacture
- Haircare/nail care/tattoos
- Pets
- Housing
- Hotels
- Intercity/international travel
- Local transportation for commute or daily life
- Household cleaning
- Criminal law
- Intellectual property law
- Elections
- Banking