Human Prosperity, Employment Rates and Innovation: an Interdisciplinary Analysis.

With more AI and computing power coming online every year, we are told humans will experience increased rates of under/unemployment – a revival of the Luddite’s argument of some 200 years ago. Just as frequently, we are warned of ever-higher rates of inequality in wealth because computing power/AI will be owned and controlled by a small minority. This fosters a host of questions to which our interdisciplinary toolkit is uniquely helpful: Is AI/computing markedly different from the displacement caused by textile weaving machines and the like? How do we measure human prosperity? What draws some humans to prefer equal slices of a relatively smaller pie relative to unequal slices of a larger pie? How can we factor in free or very cheaply available innovation and its impact on human prosperity? Finally, a counterintuitive topic very ripe for our interdisciplinary approach, could underemployment caused by AI lead to increased rates of innovation? Studies in primatology, history of science, and neuroscience show that “leisure time” is often when the brain flow and exchange of ideas is most common and rapid (see e.g. GI Research Fellows Isabel Behncke (Oxford) on the importance of play, Lydia Hopper (Lincoln Park Zoo) on how innovation occurs and spreads in nonhuman primates, Alex Pang (Stanford) on the daily patterns of highly innovative individuals, and Rex Jung (UNM) on the neuroscience of creativity). We want to explore whether underemployment – and the resultant additional leisure time – might in fact (holding other factors constant) result in increased rates of innovation. If Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist shows us that “ideas having sex” leads to innovation, which leads to more human flourishing and then more ideas having sex (a virtuous cycle), our focus will be on how underemployment might result in more people having time for ideas that have sex.