My impressions are largely primarily from Some Notes on Wiener’s Concerns about the Social Impact of Cybernetics, the Effects of Automation on Labor, and “the Human Use of Human Beings” (though I did spend some time looking at other sources). Do you think that other sources give a different impression?
AFAIT, all he did was write a few letters to two or three union officials, alerting them to this issue. I don't think that really counts as "networking". I also wasn't able to find any place where Wiener gave a specific time scale,
This is partially a semantic issue (what do we mean by "networking"?). One of the quotations that I pasted from the article above is
Early in the postwar period, Wiener began an active outreach to organized labor. He made contact with union leaders, but he could not impress union officials the seriousness of the challenges posed by automation. The experience left him frustrated and strongly suspecting that labor leaders had a limited view of the coming realities of automation and few tools for dealing with his larger questions about the future of labor itself.
which gives the impression of urgency (a sense that he viewed it as a high priority and time-sensitive issue).
If we assume the existence of AIs that are as capable as any human of average intelligence
Capable of what? Some tasks that previously required labor of humans of average intelligence have been automated, and others haven't been automated. There's still an abundance of jobs for people of average intelligence that pay above-minimum wage.
I think the following quotes show that this is what Wiener had in mind:
The first paragraph that you quote gives the impression that he may have (mistakenly) thought that humans were on the brink of developing robotics that are sufficiently sophisticated to replace physical labor. But robotics don't suffice to replace all desired labor that humans of average intelligence are capable of.
Do you think that other sources give a different impression?
I was reading Wiener's own writings, here and here
which gives the impression of urgency (a sense that he viewed it as a high priority and time-sensitive issue).
Wiener's own writings do not seem to give such an impression of urgency, and I note that he didn't do anything beyond contacting a few union leaders, such as lobbying directly to politicians. Here's how he described his contact with union leaders:
...To arrive at this society, we need a good deal of planning and a good deal of struggle
As a part of my work on the "Can we know what to do about AI?" project for MIRI, I looked at mathematician Norbert Wiener's predictions about the impact of automation on society, and how he acted based on these predictions.
I already wrote about Wiener's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" type concerns about the dangers of automation, which parallel MIRI's concerns and Eliezer's concerns about AI risk. But Wiener was also concerned that automation would cause unemployment.
Coincidentally, immediately after I investigated this, Eliezer wrote The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ, which argues against the position that Wiener held.
I found a recent paper titled Some Notes on Wiener’s Concerns about the Social Impact of Cybernetics, the Effects of Automation on Labor, and “the Human Use of Human Beings” which summarizes Wiener's views on automation and unemployment and how he acted based on them.
Wiener's prediction
Wiener believed that unless countermeasures were taken, automation would render low-skilled workers unemployable, precipitating an economic depression of far greater magnitude than the Great Depression of the 1930s:
What Wiener did based on his prediction
Wiener believed that the problem that he foresaw was so great that he considered giving top priority to mitigating it:
He attempted to network with labor unions so as to mitigate the problem:
Assessing Wiener's prediction
Wiener was correct that automation would put some workers out of work in the near term:
However, at a macro-level, and over large time scales, automation doesn't seem to have increased unemployment nearly as much as Wiener seems to have believed. The graph of unemployment from 1950 until present gives the impression that at the time when Wiener expressed his concerns, unemployment hovered around 6%, whereas in later decades it's hovered around 7%. It's interesting that there appears to have been a slight increase, but this could be attributable to outsourcing to foreign countries rather than to automation, and the absolute unemployment rate is very low compared with the 20% unemployment rate from the Great Depression.
As Eliezer said in his recent post
Wiener seems not to have assimilated conventional economic theory. Specifically, he seems to have been unattuned to the existence of equilibrating influences. As Robin Hanson wrote in his post on Eventual Futures:
At least with the benefit of hindsight, Wiener's predictions appear naive.
Where did Wiener go wrong?
Wiener seems to have gone wrong in relying on one relatively strong argument as opposed to many weak arguments. The argument "if machines start doing the labor that low skilled workers are qualified to do, then their employers will fire them, and they won't have jobs" may have seemed strong from the inside. But arguments that feel strong from the inside are often wrong.
Wiener could have done better by giving more weight to conventional wisdom, by trying harder to understand why others didn't share his concerns (which might have resulted in more exposure to conventional economic theory), and by doing a more detailed study of the historical impact of technological innovations on employment.
In Chapter 2 of Nate Silver's book "The Signal and the Noise", Silver describes Philip Tetlock's study of expert political judgment, and Tetlock's findings about characteristics of relatively successful political expert predictors. Two characteristics that he highlights as helpful are
If Wiener had approached the question of whether automation will lead to large scale unemployment in a more multidisciplinary and empirical way, he might have made a better prediction.