But I Already Have Deep Ken (Rogoff, That Is) Right Here...

Ken Rogoff muses on whaat he sees as the near-singularity to come. Via Mark Thoma:

Economist's View: Rogoff: Artificial Intelligence and Globalization: Ken Rogoff wonders if replacing people with intelligent machines, e.g. pocket economics professors complete with holographic images instead of university professors, will be a bigger factor than globalization and outsourcing in explaining changes in global job and wage patterns in coming decades:

Artificial Intelligence and Globalization by Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate: Today's conventional wisdom is that the rise of India and China will be the single biggest factor driving global jobs and wages over the twenty-first century. High-wage workers in rich countries can expect to see their competitive advantage steadily eroded by competition.... But I wonder whether... another factor will influence our work lives even more: the exponential rise of applications of artificial intelligence.

My portal to the world of artificial intelligence is a narrow one... chess.... Chess has long been the centerpiece of research in artificial intelligence. While in principle, chess is solvable, the game's computational complexity is almost incomprehensible.... For most of the twentieth century, programmers were patently unsuccessful in designing chess computers that could compete with the best humans.... Then, in 1997... IBM's "Deep Blue"... stunned the world.... Proud Kasparov, who was perhaps more stunned than anyone, was sure that the IBM team must have cheated... computer programmers no longer find beating humans a great challenge....

[W]hen I played professional chess 30 years ago... I could tell a lot about someone's personality by seeing a sampling of their games.... I could certainly distinguish a computer from a human opponent. Now everything changed like lightning. The machines can now even be set to imitate famous human players -- including their flaws -- so well that only an expert eye (and sometimes only another computer!) can tell the difference.... From my perspective, today's off-the-shelf computer programs come awfully close to meeting Turing's test. Over the course of a small number of games on the Internet, I could not easily tell the difference....

What's next? I certainly don't feel safe as an economics professor! I have no doubt that sometime later this century, one will be able to buy pocket professors -- perhaps with holographic images -- as easily as one can buy a pocket Kasparov chess computer today....

[T]he vast body of evidence suggests that technological changes were a much bigger driver in global wage patterns than trade. That is, technology, not trade, was the big story of the twentieth-century economy.... Are we so sure that it will be different in this century? Or will artificial intelligence replace the mantra of outsourcing and manufacturing migration? Chess players already know the answer.

From my perspective, Ken Rogoff is wrong. For I already have what is (nearly) a pocket Ken Rogoff in my office. It is called Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff (1996), Foundations of International Macroeconomics (Cambridge: MIT Press). The real near-singularity happened nearly six centuries ago, with Gutenberg.