Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Rise Of The Robots 20240622

They played a slide show of the little victims and just various pictures of them and they were just so tiny, and it was so sad. And i remember seeing a teacher start to cry and i remember seeing a little kid next to her just grab her happened and squeeze it her hand and squeeze it. It was just one of those moments that you just never forget. Thank you. [applause] youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers. And this weekend on booktv on after words, Nelson Dennis talks about the history of puerto rico and its turbulent relationship with the United States. Historian h. W. Brands recounts the life and political career of americas 40th president , ronald reagan. Mark steyn takes a critical look at the evidence offered by the Scientific Community on Climate Change, and books on digital music, the National Debt bedbugs, the history of the Confederate Flag and much more. For a complete Television Schedule visit booktv. Org. Booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors. Television for serious readers. Now on booktv, Silicon Valley entrepreneur martin ford looks at the impact of technology on jobs and the economy. Martin ford is an author and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in computer design and Software Development. His writing has appeared in fortune, forbes, the atlantic, and he is a frequent keynote speaker and guest on radio and television on matters of technology. Hes author of two books and joins us to discuss his latest, the rise of the Robots Technology and the threat of a jobless future. Its a book about the future of work and a world which may with handed over may be handed over to technology. What are longterm consequences of the seemingly inevitable rise of the machines . That will be the topic of tonights lecture. So please join me in offering a very enthusiastic welcome for our guest tonight, martin ford. [applause] thank you very much and thanks for coming. Its really a pleasure to be here. I should say right off the bat that i noticed in the program the title for tonights presentation is how to stop robots from stealing jobs, and i have to tell you honestly that i dont have an answer for that. [laughter] i believe that its probably inevitable that technology is going to displace more and more workers and take over more work in the economy, and the challenge for us is really to figure out a way to adapt to that and to inshower that we still have insure that we still have or have continued broadbased prosperity in the future each as that unfolds. And thats really the main point of my book. What im trying to do is to contribute to or maybe even you might say initiate a conversation that i think is going to be critically important for all of us probably over the next couple of decades. I would say that its a pretty good bet that we may well be on the leading edge of a massive disruptive wave thats going to unfold maybe over the next 20 years or so, and its just going to put a terrific amount of stress on society and on the economy. And the central idea here, of course is that machines and robots and smart algorithms are increasingly going to take over more of the work in the economy. Theyre going to start doing the things that people now do, and perhaps most importantly theyre going to start taking over the things that people are now paid to do. And i think that that could ultimately create a big problem for us. There have been a number of attempts to kind of quantify all of this. Mostly theyve been undertaken by people in the academic world and theyve set out to try to come up with some kind of a reasonable estimate to just how many jobs might ultimately be threatened. And the numbers that theyve come back with are pretty frightening, pretty alarming really. Depending on the country theyve looked at or the particular assumptions theyve made, estimates have come back in the range of 30 to 60 of all the jobs in the economy. The most high profile study done here in the United States was undertaken by some researchers at Oxford University and the number they came back with was about half of the jobs in the United States could be susceptible to automation over roughly the next two decades. So thats a pretty scary number. And the approach that they take or the assumption that they make when they make these estimates is to start by saying if a job is on some level fundamentally routine and repetitive and predictable, then ultimately it seems likely that robots or an algorithm or some kind of machine, some kind of technology is going to be able to automate that job. And the word that is very often used the describe the jobs that are going to be susceptible to automation is routine. And i think that can be kind of misleading because it implies very often a job thats rote repetitive. And yet if you look at the technologies we have even now already, its pretty clear theyve gone far beyond simply automating Assembly Line type repetitive work. Were already well beyond that. I think that a better descriptive word is really predictable. If a job can if the types of things that you do can be predicted based on what youve done in the past, then that job is likely to be susceptible and that sort of captures the tiein with what is maybe the Central Technology thats driving all of this, and that is Machine Learning. Machine learning is essentially about having an algorithm imchurn through data, and it might be Historical Data or realtime data, but basically that algorithm goes through this data and learns from it. It figures out how to do things. The idea is you give an algorithm an outcome you would like it to achieve and it essentially figures out for itself how to get there. Ins sense, you could say its a way for a computer to program itself as opposed to having a person sit down and program it step by step. And thats obviously, you know, an important change from what weve seen historically. So one way to sort of think about it in terms of whether a particular job might be susceptible to this is to ask yourself could another smart person if they had a very detailed record of everything youve done in the past, eventually figure out how to do your job . Or could they figure it out by watching you work . If the answer to that is yes then i think theres a good chance that a smart algorithm may also be able to do the same thing. If im going to if on the other hand youre michelangelo and creating something new every time, at least for the foreseeable future, your job is relatively safe. But the thing is that those kinds of jobs and especially the number of people that are paid to do those kinds of genuinely creative jobs is really very small. Its a very, very small fraction of our work force. So that doesnt can necessarily offer us a safety net there. So if you really sit down and think about what it would mean for anywhere from 30 to 60 of the jobs in the economy to sort of evaporate over a period of perhaps 20 years, its really hard to imagine too many things that would have a bigger impact on society and on the economy than that. And the things that you cant imagine are uniformly bad things like wars and plagues and big asteroids and so forth. I mean, this is a big issue. Its something i think is well worth giving a lot of thought to its well worth having a meaningful public conversation about, and i think we really need to start to wrestle with this and figure out if, indeed, this is something thats really going to to happen, what are we going to do about it . I think thats going to become a really critical question for us. So i thought where i would before i get into talking about the book itself, let me tell you just a little bit about my background and how i came to start thinking about this and writing about this. Back in the early to mid 1990s i started a very Small Software company in Silicon Valley, and by small i mean it was just me in my apartment. I basically wrote a program in the First Software product was a tool for windows programmers. This was at the time when Microsoft Window cans was just windows was just taking off. So as i ran this Little Company one thing i discovered really quickly is running a Small Business back then was actually quite a laborintensive process. Software was shipped on physical media, on cdroms. If you were going to sell a commercial Software Product then people expected it would be accompanied by a prints instruction manual. Printed instruction manual. So there was a lot of manual, sort of routine work in producing this stuff and also when a customer ordered it, we would need to pack it in a box and ship it out. Eventually as the business got bigger, i ended up outsourcing that work to a company that specialized in fulfilling software for Small Businesses like mine. And they hired all kinds of people at not necessarily high skill levels who did that type of work. They would pack up the software and ship it off and handle calls from customers and all that type of thing. And so there were jobs there for average people. But as a it turned out, those jobs really werent there for long. Within just a few years the business basically changed dramatically. Obviously now software is primarily delivered over the internet if its delivered at all. In many cases Software Products respect really delivered theyre just hosted in the cloud, and customers will access them remotely. So what happened was that business that i had outsourced that type of work to actually went out of businessn pretty short order. So b the early 2000s much of that work had really kind of evaporated. And so i had an opportunity to see that unfolding in my own little business and, of course i was also very close to the technology, and i saw how computing speed was accelerating and how Software Development was changing and it was getting easier and easier the develop more and more sophisticated products. And as i saw all of that, it sort of became obvious to me that what i was seeing in the Software Business was really kind of a preview for what was likely to unfold in the broader economy as technologies like robotics and Artificial Intelligence really got more powerful and as technology and machines and computers started taking on more and more of work throughout the economy. And, of course, we saw the same thing in other industries that were susceptible to this digital onslaught as well, Industries Like music and journalism and so forth were heavily impacted. But i came to the conclusion that that was eventually going to become much broader and that it was going to impact the whole economy. So at that point i was motivated to write my first book which turned out to be a first a selfpublished book, and the title of that was the lights in the tunnel. And that title referred to sort of a thought experiment that i used in the book that was intended to sort of demonstrate the impact that automation could have on the economy. And although that book was selfpublished, over a period of five years or so it got a fair amount of attention especially as this issue itself started to get more attention. And so eventually that led to the opportunity to write this book which is, of course, traditionallypublished book. I do think this is a critical issue. Its dramatic, its been very dramatic how its really gotten on raw daughter. When i started writing about this back in 2009, this was really considered still at that point to be kind of a crazy issue, not many people were paying attention to it at all. Obviously, that has changed quite dramatically. I mean, you cant open a newspaper or look online today without encountering stories about robots, and very often stories about robots and technology and how theyre impacting jobs. So this is an issue that has really gotten a lot of attention, and i think thats a good thing it is something that we need to wrestle with. So this is a book that i think covers a fair amount of material. I think that if you read it, you hopefully wont come away with the impression that its one of those books that could have been a Magazine Article and was kind of stretched out. [laughter] i think theres a fair amount of stuff in there. So what i want to do here is just touch on a few of the main ideas and just give you some of the highlights of the things that i think are most important. And one of the first things and maybe the most important thing i do in the book is i try the take on the question that is really central to this, and its the question that comes up more often than just about anything else, and that question is why would this time be different . Because this whole idea that technology can displace workers and potentially create unemployment is a concern that goes back at a minimum 200 years. It goes all the way back to the luddite revolt in england in the early 1800s. And since then its been raised again and again. Its come up, you know, many times. And each time it has turned out to be a false alarm, so there is a long record of this alarm being raised and ultimately it always turns out to be false. So i think that there is a lot in common with this and the story of the little boy who cries wolf. In that story, you know, people eventually become very skeptical because the false alarm keeps getting raised. They become very complacent. In the end, of course, the wolf does show up and then it doesnt go well for the people who are skeptical. I think that this issue could end up in more or less the same way, and thats the primary concern that i have here. Clearly, this is an issue that kind of sits at the intersection of technology and economics and economists never like to hear that this time is different. Theyre always very very skeptical of that. Whereas with technology this time is always different. Thats the whole point of innovation that youre always creating something new youre always going to a place that no one has gone before. And so perhaps one of the most basic questions we can ask is, is this really about economics, or is it about technology . I think, ultimately, its going to be about technology. I dont think theres any fundamental law or the universe or even of economics that says people have to be in the loop, people have value to the production process. I think that theres quite a bit of evidence for that already. If you look at the new types of products and services that people are demanding that they want to spend their time with things like spending hours on facebook or twitter or playing video games or i think in the near future theyll be standing who knows how long in Virtual Reality environments. Those are all services that are delivered, essentially without people being in the loop. I mean, theres a role for people in their initial creation and the creation of the content, but once the content has been created, then delivering that service, there simply isnt any labor content to it. Its all big computing facilities that are essentially doing the work. And i think that really offers a preview of, you know the way that things are going. So i dont think theres any rule that says people always have to be essential to your production process. I think its entirely possible that at some Point Technology can reach the point where, you know there really isnt much role for human labor anymore. And its understandable that people are very skeptical of that because it has never happened. But there are certainly instances in history that you can point to as well. Theres a new book out right now about the Wright Brothers which is selling very well, i know, and if you read that youll learn that at the time of that first powered flight people were enormously skeptical. There were very, very smart, very prominent people who said is, you know, anything an airplane was never going to be feasible, it would never happen. Some people said it would never happen in a thousand years and there were others that said even if it was accomplished, it would never be good for anything. It would never be a Practical Technology and, obviously, that turned out to be dramatically wrong. And yet its really hard to be, you know, its difficult to be hard on people who made that assumption back then because there was an enormous amount of data and evidence to suggest that it simply was never going the happen. There was basically all of Human History that said that, you know people dont get into heavier than air contraptions and fly through the air. And there were plenty of failures often spectacular failures, to support the idea it simply wasnt going to happen. So i think that, you know, that sort of offers sort of a preview of the way things are likely to unfold this time around. I think that eventually we will get to the point where technology is capable of doing the vast majority of things that the average person is doing. And thats going to have a really dramatic impact. But in terms of really articulating whats different this time, i think one thing you can do is you can look at the example thats cited most often by the skeptics, and that is agriculture. Used to be in the United States the vast majority of people worked on farms. Now almost no one works on a farm. Its actually less than 2 of the work force works on farms. And clearly that hasnt turned out to be a bad thing at all. Food is much cheaper than it used to be. People did move on to other roles, more fulfilling jobs they enjoyed more, and it sort of turned out to be a good thing. The skeptic will ask, isnt that just going to happen again . And if you look back at what happened at agriculture, clearly, that was a very specific mechanical technology. It impacted the Agricultural Sector not the entire economy. What happened was that millions of people did, in fact lose their jobs on farms but then they moved to other sectors. Economy, first to manufacturing and later on to the service sector. And the interesting thing the note is that the fundamental nature of the work they were doing didnt change much. They were doing relatively routine, repetitive work on farms, and then later they were doing routine, repenttive repetitive work in factories, and nowadays people do relatively routine work in the service sector. So you might have had someone working on a farm in 1900 and then in a factory in 1950, and today theyre at walmart scanning bar codes or stocking schells or Something Like that shelves or Something Like that. All of that is going to be susceptible to these technologies Going Forward. So you can point i think really to three things that defines Information Technology today and makes it fundamentally different from the things that came in the past and the first thing, of course, is that weve got this acceleration going on. Moores law is the most famous example of that. But in general, on a fairly broadbased basis in Information Technology, its accelerating very rapidly and its been doing that for decades. And what that means is that, you know, as you continue to double something again and again and again and you keep doing that over a period of decades can you get to the point where youre moving in absolute terms at an extraordinary rate and thats where we are now. And thats why things are often you know, developing, i think, at a surprising rate. Because weve been going through this doubling process for so long that the amount of absolute progress that we now make is quite extraordinary. So thats the first thing the acceleration. The second thing is that this technology for the first time really on some level encapsulates Machine Intelligence. Its not like the tractors and the plows and the harvesting equipment. These are technologies that on some level can think. They can solve problems. They can make decisions and most importantly, they can learn. They can look at data and actually learn from that. Thats very different from the mechanical technologies that transformed agriculture. And then third and, i think, most importantly is the fact that its so broad based. This is really a general purpose technology. Its not specific to any one sector of the economy the way that Agricultural Technology was. Its everywhere. Its going to invade every sector every business every organization, you know every industry. And that includes everything that exists today and perhaps more importantly it includes all of the industries and all the new businesses and new employment sectors that are going to evolve in the future. And so what that means is that people will talk a lot about Creative Destruction, the fact that, you know, old things are destroyed and new things are created, and thats absolutely true. But i think that theres a lot of evidence to suggest that while there certainly will be new industries created in the future and you can think of what those are things like nanotechnology, synthetic biology, Virtual Reality im sure theyll all be very important in the future. But its really hard to imagine any of them are going to be very labor intensive. I dont think that any of those industries will, you know employ huge numbers of people, and we see that happening already. So the real risk that we face Going Forward is that this process of Creative Destruction the destruction is going to fall on our tradition allay boarintensive industries which right now are areas like retail, fast food hospitality, all those areas that now employ huge numbers of workers the jobs there will get destroyed and then new things will appear in the future, but they wont employ many people. So well over time, find it harder and harder to employ our whole work force. Those are the reasons that i really hi this time could be different although, certainly, people remain skeptical of that. The second hinge that i think is really important that i focus a lot on in the book is that our conventional view of which jobs are likely to be automated is not quite correct. The traditional view has always been that the robots come after the relatively unskilled jobs and that the solution to that then is to send people back to school and give them some more training because they can move up the skills ladder and do a job that requires more of an intellectual input. So very often you might have a person who loses their job in factory or in a warehouse and then you send them back to school and perhaps they can find a job in an office and thats the way it is supposed to work. The problem is that what were seeing quite clearly, i think is that many of the more skilled jobs are actually at least as easy to automate and in many cases may be even more susceptible than the lower skilled jobs. And thats especially true when they are midrange knowledgebased jobs the kind of job where you sit in a cubicle in front of a computer doing some relatively routine form lawic analysis formulaic analysis producing reports, that type of thing. Those jobs are going to be highly susceptible to this, and the reason is theyre fairly easy to automate. It only takes smart software. You dont need mechanical contraptions or robotic arms. All it takes is software, and programming that software or using a Technology Like Machine Learning to figure out how to do those jobs is, in many cases quite straightforward. On the other hand, many of the lower skilled jobs really rely on things like visual perception and texer thety. Dexterity. And building a robot that comes close to replicating what a human being can do in terms of dexterity and the ability to perceive an environment visually and then muppet that environment is manipulate that environment is still really in the realm of science fiction. Were Getting Better and better at it, but there are still many jobs that are far beyond what we can technically accomplish. Some of those are good jobs. An example would be nursing. Nursing is a good bet, i think because it requires a tremendous amount of dexterity and mobility. And also it requires a high skill level and problem solving and so forth. On the other hand to, a lot of the jobs that are difficult to automate are not that good, and a good example of that would be someone who is a home health aide, for example to assist an elderly person or to assist an older person with their personal care. There are going to be a lot of those job ises. Theres a tremendous need for that service because of the demographic shift thats going on. So it would be really great actually, for us if we could automate some of that work. But the reality is that building an affordable general purpose robot that could really help an elderly person take care of themself is really at this point still science fiction. It just requires a tremendous amount of dexterity and flexibility and mobility and so forth. And so those jobs are relatively protected, but, you know, theyre not great jobs. Theyre very low paying. The government says that many of those jobs dont even require a High School Education for those workers. So thats kind of the paradox that i think were going the face in the future is that often the better jobs and many of the jobs that College Graduates would ultimately want to take are actually relatively susceptible to this while a lot of what we would think of as lousy jobs are the ones that are going to be more difficult the automate. And so looking forward, we can kind of see that automation could potentially impact in kind of a topheavy way where its actually some of the better jobs that disappear. And that creates a real problem, because it up ends our conventional assumption about what, you know, the solution to all this is. In terms of convention always to address the issue of automation, there is really only one tool in the tool box, and that is ever more education. You know thats really the only policy that there is out there. And the idea is that you continue to have people moving up the skills ladder. But as i point out in the book i think that, you know the problem with skills ladder is that its not really a ladder at all, its really more like a pyramid, and there are only so many of those jobs at the top. There are only so many of those really high skill, creative type jobs up there. Its never been the case that weve had an economy where enormous number of people have been engaged in that kind of work. Weve always had an economy where most people have done relatively routine, predictable work. And for that reason, the work thats been available and demanded by the economy has been a relatively good match with what people are capable of. But what we see now is that, you know basically that type of work is going to start disappearing on a whole scale basis, and the idea that we can somehow train everyone and cram them into that little region at the top of the pyramid which is occupied by the genuinely high skilled creative jobs, i think is pretty unrealistic for a number of reasons one being that people obviously have a range of talents and capabilities, and not everyone is capable of being trained to be a rocket scientist. That i really third thing i focus on in this book is as jobs are automated, it is really not just an issue of the impact of personal economic security. Obviously this is something that can have a dramatic impact on individuals and the fabric of society, there can be a huge social problem if people become unemployed or wages fall so low it is difficult to survive in the economy but beyond that there is more general economic issue and the point is you have to have consumers who are capable of buying products and services produced by the economy. That is ultimately what drives the economy, ultimately driven by consumption. You have to have people out there that can buy what you can produce and theres already evidence to suggest that in the quality is making that less and less feasible. A good example is someone like bill gates. He has an infinite amount of purchasing power. He can buy anything you wants but the reality is he doesnt want to buy anything he wants. King wont buy thousand pause for a thousand smart phones and is not going to sit down and eat a thousand restaurant meals. If you in affect take purchasing power or income from a thousand average people and concentrate it into the hands of one person, that is what is going on in our economy. Clearly that takes something out of demand. It undermines the economy. Wheat move viable consumers who are capable of buying products and services and that is critically important because those markets drive the economy drive Economic Growth and an important driver of innovation. You can for example think of someone like steve jobs has become an icon for innovation but if you take steve jobs and drop him on an island buying cocoanuts just like anyone else, his particular talents wouldnt have any real value, he wouldnt have the market. He wouldnt have would essentially be unable to leverage his particular talents and that is one of the risks we face Going Forward, the Consumer Market that has been driving prosperity since world war ii there is a brisk that prosperity is going to be expected and the risk that we could enter a downward spiral. You need to imagine as demand weakens and weakens, respond to that by a deflationary scenario piling downward. If you look at europe, there is deflation. Economist like mary summers talking about secular stagnation which is that phenomenon where there arent enough productive Investment Opportunities in the economy, people sit on cash and ultimately that relates directly to lack of demand in the economy. If you think of feeble out there with plenty of money to spend who are clamoring to buy products and services it stands to reason there would be plenty of Investment Opportunities, people building factories or investing in research and development for new products, but the fact that there isnt this vibrant demand is part of the problem. We see that more and more across the world. Clearly that is not the only thing that is going on but is probably part of it already and as in the quality gets more extreme, that is absolutely something we can expect, every reason to worry it is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. The bottom line with all of this is in the future we face a fundamental choice. It is easy to imagine that this doesnt have to be a bad thing at all. You can think in terms of a technological utopia. You can imagine a world where machines and technology do all the work or at least they do all of the unpleasant work so perhaps in the future no one will have to do a job that they hate. Everyone will have a lot more time. They will have more opportunity far for the leisure, more opportunities to spend with their family more opportunity to do things they find genuinely fulfilling or to pursue Educational Opportunities to help them to grow. And sound terrific. And people live very gungho on technology. I dont think it is wrong, but the problem is in todays world historically jobs and incomes are a package deal. If you lose your job no matter how unpleasant that job maybe you are going to lose your income too and that is the real problem. The risk we face, more and more inequality, is the quality on steroids we already see all of the growth in the economy is being moved by the top 1 . A study i saw recently said in 17 states, it is actually 100 of Economic Growth, all Income Growth went to the top 1 , top 1 and the bottom 99 of people in 17 states literally got nothing to in terms of participating in the growth of the economy. It is already extraordinarily extreme and theres only reason to believe that it will become more so and beyond the fact of inequality itself, more important is the issue of economic insecurity. It implies for a lot of people it will become a struggle to hold on to anything approaching a middleclass kind of lifestyle. We are going to see more and more of the good solid middleclass jobs, especially in areas like offices that people rely on in the middle class, often they will be replaced with gauges in the demand economy driving from uber is one of the better ones are selling stuff on ebay or doing all kinds of things that those opportunities nearly take on a winnertakeall distribution. A few people do very well but most people will really struggled. Very often it is hard to generate a meaningful income at all from those still a lot of people have a hard time holding onto their middleclass life style and i think for some people, it could be worse, may have a lot of people who genuinely as a threat to their basic economic security. An extreme example would be someone like a homeless person who in fact has a laptop or some kind of device that allows them to go to a place that has wifi and access all this digital abundance out there and all the things to talk about, that our Information Technology has created, free information and so forth but at the same time, this individual does not have access to what we consider the necessity of life and there is the wheel risk, more people will be in that situation or start to worry about it. A lot of things offered basic security you expect in an advanced economy like the United States are starting to disappear. Ultimately this is going to require a decision on our part to adapt to this. I dont believe you can simply say the market will take care of this because it wont. The market is driving this to be worse and worse. Capitalism is better than any other system we have seen but i do believe it requires essentials and at that station. We have to modify it in order to have it continue to work in this new reality and i essentially what i think has to be done is we have to decouple jobs from income, if you want an income to survive economically you have to have some kind of job or traditional income, otherwise you are on the street. That is particularly important in the United States. We dont have the kind of social safety net me other advanced countries have. It is a real problem here because we are both on the forefront of the Technology Curve and at the same time we dont have a good social safety net so this is something that will impact quite have a. Ultimately it will require fairly radical solution of one kind or another. The solution that makes the most sense is some guarantee or basic income and that is not a new idea. It is something that has been advocated by people across the political spectrum in the past and most notably by some conservatives, libertarians thought it would be a great idea to have a guaranteed benefit and ultimately it is inevitable that that is the direction we have to move in but at the same time it seems almost politically unthinkable in terms of todays political environment and things you see out there. That is the paradox we face. How do we get to a place we need to go when it seems virtually impossible in terms of todays politics, the most conventional things even if we thought education would work and i dont think it will work in the long run. If we think it will work, we could do that either because the political system is just so polarized and become so dysfunctional. When i was done we learned about checks and balances. That was one of the great attributes of the american system but it has become all checks and balances in our system today and it is discouraging in the near term hard to imagine how we will move forward and my hope is by initiating a conversation and talking more about this and getting more people involved we can hopefully get this on the radar and start to talk about it and alternately moveultimately move towards a meaningful solution. I will thought there, thank you. Happystop there, thank you. Happy to answer any questions. Use the mic so we capture that. Thank you for that summary of so many difficult things. Full disclosure. I am of home care worker who has a ph. D. In history. The ph. D. Came first. I fell into it in some respects but i came to reevaluate my situation. I dont think i went down. I went down economically but i did not go down spiritually. I find the work i do with old people some people do it with disabled people is the most clearly valuable work i have ever done. I always wondered, that other work i did evaluation of federal programs, teaching in college and so forth did that really help anybody . Now i am pretty sure. I think your insights are valid about the basic work robots can do or wont do for a long time. That suggests that perhaps what needs to happen is something much like a major reevaluation of how we think about that. Did you talked about. Maybe we need to insert the pyramid not so much physically but in our minds. Maybe that is one of the keys. How do we do that . I think one of the things we keep doing is going about this individually, separately and if we are going to have real results and Real Solutions it will come from a collective effort. I know this sounds like socialism, doesnt it . We believe in consultation and dont support socialism. We do believe in a thing we call the village for house which would balance those who have more than they need with those with less. Something joy been tried and tried at the end of labeled as socialism but we need to have a serious consultation because the wolf you talked about the old cry wolf the bulls is us. It is not external. We are doing this to ourselves. And we can then decide how we are going to be. We dont have we are not helplessly on of train taking us to a destination. We can do this differently. I think that is what you are advocating in large measure. Our assumptions, we are caught up in our assumptions about capitalism, about individualism, and it is going to be pulled out of our hands if we dont start voluntarily letting go of some of our katie beers we are clutching to for security. I think that is the message i take out of your book, that we need to do some really serious rethinking. I think that is the main deck and i agree with a lot of what you said and the idea of some kind of minimal guarantee income ties in. You made the point that you get a lot of fulfillment and meaning from your work. My guess is if you had some kind of guaranteed floor in your income you wouldnt stop doing what youre doing and said on the couch all day. A more dynamic situation where a house of justice local or regional or whatever would be evaluating our situation and helping us. They wouldnt be judging us and saying you are bad you are poor, you are this or that and if it was a real support to people, that would give them the confidence to take risks, things that dont seem economically sensible but might be satisfying or could be creative. They might do some risktaking. Entrepreneur real risk taking. That is the point i make. A wellknown phenomenon that i talk about in the book, what it says is if you have more of a safety net you will take more risks. This has been observed in lots of places. Documenting automobiles when they put more safety like seat belts in cars it didnt actually result in fewer accidents because people took more risks. In childrens playgrounds they are really spongey floor is the kids still injured themselves at the same rate because they are climbing on the outside of the structure and jumping and things like that. I think the same is true in the economic arena. If we provide any essential safety net not necessarily something extraordinarily generous but a floor, people will do things on top of that. They will take entrepreneur risks, choose to work in areas that give them meaning and for the first time be able to afford to do. There are a lot of people out there who are locked into a job they dont get much meaning from or much fulfillment from because they need the income and a lot of those people might be willing to shift. It would be an enormously positive thing for society. I dont think guaranteed income will create the slacker society where everyone surround and does nothing. Consulting together, a better result than one individual or group goes after the air particular thing. One last thing. And the environment. The crisis you mentioned, might be beneficial it will bring us up short and make us think about the accelerating more slot approach we have taken which is similar to cancer. The question is can we be a cancer on this planet and get away with it . Probably not. That kind of inadvertant slowing or disruption that may be caused by technology might give us an opportunity. And whether to get to zero growth. Make sure you are asking your question in the form of a question and not having a conversation with [applause] pickup technologies like digital recognition and talk about which jobs and which technologies will replace the impact as you might expect. If you look at Machine Vision, the example i give bent the book a company in Silicon Valley called industrial perception, and a Machine Vision system, the videogame, without the need for any controller and essentially what as opposed to moving and controlling the video game that. Microsoft and it created this technology which is extraordinary affordable which is a 150 product. And there are all these researchers at the university. And 3dimensional Machine Vision. Theres a cross fertilization driving the field, the system can load and unload boxes, 6 seconds for a human worker. And things like that. The same kind of Image Recognition is used and examining tissue samples. Inevitably radiology, it requires unfold amount of training and medical school in years of residency. It is broad base. In japan population is declining rapidly. Will the productivity of robots, at issue the declining population. Interesting thing you talk about in the book. Susan vix and you may expect those things to offset each other. There are people out there to make predictions we will run into a worker shortage in the future as people leave the work force. The thing that is a key, the same tissue that i focus on throughout the book, and workers are also consumers village as people age and dropped out of the workforce they will start spending less. They are their consumption is skewed toward health care. What you see, to some extent those things are awash i think. Is an extreme case of this phenomenon. We ought to be able to look at japan and get a preview of what is coming and what is going to happen in the United States and in japan you really dont see any broad base worker shortages in japan, you see shortages in specific areas. And caring for the elderly where we expect them. What you see in japan is deflationary, prices and wages have been falling for decades. If you have a worker shortage across the board you expect wages to the increasing. That is clearly not happening. There are things, a societal guilt when it comes to automation and the resulting job losses when it comes to not necessarily pragmatic means but a pseudo ethical idea, could be guaranteed minimum income, the increase the efficiency of the nation even at the loss of jobs . Sure. I dont think anyone feels guilty because someone loses their job on the loading dock. By all accounts that is a miserable job. If you do that job long enough you are almost guaranteed to get injured. It is easy to say it is good that robots will take that job. We all pretty much agree with that except the people who do that job do it because they have to. They rely on that income and if we get rid of that job we need to give them an alternative. If we do there is no reason to feel guilty and it is the great thing. I skimmed through your book before the talk. You said in the past there has been you dont feel such a thing would be a factor in business. But you spend a fair bit of your talk talking about how this time is different in so many ways and i agree. In the case of the light stuff a lot of that was this is workers in a small, in one field where there were plenty of other areas that we are open to move into. These circumstances youre describing to come to pass that doesnt seem like that would necessarily be the case. If so, things that cause the 0 original luddites to collapse and all might those circumstances no longer hold and if so might a new such movement and actually be more successful . I think we definitely will see people opposed to technology as this unfolds a you are right. That was my primary point. This is a broad based technology, it is not like the mechanical looms of the law dates and there is no new sector of the economy to absorb these workers. That is fundamentally what is different. Will there be another revolt or movement. And occupy wall street was not focused on this issue, it is not demonstrated there is concern out there about the general issue. If it were a Movement Toward limiting technology, i continue to believe technology is clearly the only thing that is better off. A middleclass person today is better off than a wealthy person. What we want to do is adapt to it and to continue, if we make the right agitation it probably will accelerate, we might make it move even faster. If we dont adapt we will have all kinds of problems. There is the headline in the satirical newspaper of note the onion that reads chinese factory workers fear that robots may never take their job. There is kind of an old marxist saying that if members of the capitalist class meaning owners of means and production had to mine coal they would quickly that work for them if they with the ones being forced to do it. I guess my question is sort of along the lines of this income inequality we are talking about has been happening for some time and people advocating for zero work movements and why not automate the undesirable work . This is not an undesirable idea. The social forces that are contesting that prevent that from happening we have the basic income right now why isnt that possible . Question is kind of do you think the Movement Towards social radical change we are talking about will that be possible without some kind of radical social forces contesting social upheaval and a further question what do you think the last human job will be . [laughter] i will delay that second one. As to whether it will be social upheaval there are good reasons to expect it. History seems to show we are not very good at taking on big problems unless theres a crisis. There are many examples we can point to where we think logically and solve problems. That doesnt seem to be how it works. And concerns about a crisis. It is not so much in the idea that the plutocracy will start to worry about miserable jobs everyone is doing but rather they might come to realize what they need consumers out there. If they eventually come to understand that and realize they need a market if they want to continue to have Economic Growth they have hope the elite, the people who have the power may begin to move in the direction of this. On the other hand you could argue about Climate Change, the plutocracy will also realize the danger from Climate Change and want to move aggressively to do something about that too and obviously that hasnt really happened. Perhaps i am being night even suggesting that. I do think will have a crisis before it gets the attention it deserves. Maybe the last job will be something in healthcare, something that involves into the relationship with people in a while the human condition but if you think about what is happening with these technologies and think far enough into the future 30 years from now, 50 years from now a hundred years from now is hard to think of any job you can say with certainty would be safe. Thank you very much martin, for this important work and initiating this dialogue. I havent had a chance to read all of it but i notice you have a section in here dealing with singularity, the point when technology more particularly computers and Machine Intelligence reaches that change where it exponentially grows causing an extreme destruction to our lives in many respects including economically bleak years ago i interviewed turner finished and he didnt even know if it would be a slow run up for a fast run up. Do you consider what we are seeing here to be part of the lead up or precursor to the slow runup kind of concept with regard to the singularity . It is possible. I try not to make too many predictions about the singularity. What he said initially when he got the idea of the terms and joy larry from a black hole a black hole is something you cant see beyond it is dark. That is what the singularity is like. If we reached the point where things are moving so rapidly did no one could understand what is happening, it is impossible to imagine or to stay with any certainty what happens beyond fad and that is where i am a bit at odds with people like ray kurzweil his seems to think they can predict beyond that and suggest how it is going to unfold. I am agnostic on the singularity. I think it is possible we could achieve that kind of rapid acceleration in the future but i think if we do that is probably about all you can say about it, the fact that it will happen and it will be extraordinarily destructive. Beyond that is unknown. Is also possible the singularity is something that is not going to happen. More of a sciencefiction concept and only time will tell which it is. In hearing about this i am struck by the prediction canes made in the 30s that by this time we would all be working 15 hours a week base and increase productivity, but that is not the case. Since despite having a much larger work force than we did then we are working more hours on average. Do you think this is a case where the pace of automation is going to increase faster and it has been up to this point or the we are going to suddenly realize we are doing a lot of unnecessary work . We do have a problem with not having enough. That is in part because of the choices we make and in part because of the system imposed on people. If you are a lowwage workers in the economy, working of 15 hour week is unimaginable. You have got to work off two or three jobs you string together just to have the minimal lifestyle. Canes didnt anticipate that. He sort of assumed society would reach a point where it becomes satiated and that is not how it worked out. I dont think we are automatically going to get to a point where everyone decides enough is enough and people will be able to work 15 hours at the prevailing wage and survive. I think it will require some sort of Financial Action on the part of government to make that happen. We will be guaranteed income and perhaps Something Like got formal Work Sharing Program or something to make that happen. Without it i dont think capitalism by itself will be in that direction. Thank you for your talk today. Your whole book is premised on the idea that robots and the like left Jobs Available land in the last six use in the United States it seems there have been millions of jobs created according to the Mainstream Media so how do you one important thing to understand about this is the fact that the robots are coming online and becoming more important does not mean the Business Cycle goes away. We will still have a Business Cycle, we still have recessions and we still have recovery. Right now we are in a fairly robust recovery though it has taken years and years to get to this point. People that look at this and say all this stuff about robots is nonsense is kind of silly. That would be the same as me saying when the next inevitable recession comes along and jobs are lost if i were to get up here and say look, it is the robots taking all the jobs. That is clearly not going to be the case. It will be the Business Cycle so one way to view this is in the way it is like the stock market chart. If you imagine what a chart of the stock market looks like, we are perhaps in a bear market for jobs. And this goes down in that Straight Line peace and values trending downward overall. That is the same case with the job market. Can you give us a solid blue print how to proceed to get the basic income going at the federal level or whatever. That is a question for someone who is more politically oriented and i am or more politically astute than i am, my hope is by initiating this conversation and getting more people talking about it that we will eventually get more people involved and as people get more involved that will include people who are very politically oriented and perhaps have the necessary skills and talents. One thing that will be fascinating will be to see if this issue pops up at all in the election that is coming up. It will be interesting if it does. I am doubtful because i think it is extraordinarily toxic. I dont any politician will touch this because there is nothing positive in it at all. It will be really interesting to see what happens. Perhaps some journalists will ask the question at some point and that will be fascinating. Your book mainly focuses on the u. S. Economy. I am wondering what the trend of automation will impact a more developed economy like china or india. Especially if they dont have accumulated wealth as the u. S. Does. And the economy. I talk about that to some extent. We talk about robots as the poster child for this. In the United States the primary impact of all this is in the service sector. We tend to relate robots to manufacturing, not many people work in manufacturing in the United States anymore so the impact is not that important. The situation will be different in china. Actual robots and manufacturers have a more dramatic impact in china than they do here. I think it may ultimately make it difficult for china to do the one thing they need to do which is balance the economy toward domestic consumption. The economy relies on exports and especially investments. Roads and bridges and buildings what is powering the chinese economy. Eventually have to have a self sustaining consumer economy and in order to do that raise incomes for people in the economy and need jobs for that. If robots have a destructive impact on chinese factories and there is evidence that is happening it is harder for them to get more income into the hands of the consumers so the