Will robots steal our jobs?

As it turns out, we've had quite a few listeners and viewers of Forward Thinking ask us to cover this topic. It's it's one that's had a lot of coverage in the media, and so we're looking at robots and jobs right well, specifically the question will robots steal our jobs? Right? Right? Yeah? I mean, which is kind of a terrific headline, which I think is part of why it's so popular in

the media. But but I mean it captures our imagination in a very specific way, because I mean, we are all seeing all of this autumn nation that we've never seen before kind of come up and and influence our workforce in very interesting ways. Yeah, not just in uh, in the ways that have been traditionally depicted like in manufacturing, you know, heavy manufacturing, but in ways that affect you know, white colored jobs as well. And we're going to cover

all this kind of stuff. But uh, let's let's look down memory lane, because Joe, you pulled up something fascinating, something I had heard but never looked into, and you really found some information that that taught me some stuff. Well, I want to get to the core of what we're talking about, which is not just robots in the sense of the way we picture them, which is a thing with legs and arms. You know, it's vaguely human basically, right,

I go with Robbie the robot, But that's that's classic. Generally, we're talking about all automation, any any way in which a machine can do a job that previously could have only been done by a human or an animal. Maybe. Uh so, how about the Luodites. You all know the Luodite. It's not just a term we call each other when we, like, you know, accidentally sent a text message to the wrong person or something like that. It's actually a historical group.

And of course you know who they were, right, Well, well I do now because you did the research, Joe. Well, they hated machines, right, that's the that's the whole thing. That's the way I the way I've always heard it used is yeah, it's people who just dog on it can't either grasp technology and therefore they hate it because of that, or they just outright think that new stuff is bad for some reason. I assumed it was people who had some kind of aesthetic or religious opposition to

technology in general. And turns out I was being a total nano rod because that is not what the Luddites were. So the original Luddites were a movement of textile workers in England in the early eighteen hundreds, and they were not against technology in general. They were famous for like burning factories and smashing factory machines, but not because they believe machines were evil. In fact, they were more or

less a labor movement. Uh. They were probably workers who used machines themselves in their jobs, and they arose from conditions of economic trouble and unemployment in Great Britain that was part of a depression during and following the Napoleonic Wars in the early eighteen hundred. So they were seeking better employment, more work, better wages, but part of the

problem they perceived with the labor market. Then it was the so called labor saving devices and machines, which often meant that the same manufacturing job that used to require a skilled crafts person could be performed by a machine, or for a lower wage, by an unskilled worker paired with the machine. So in a kind of certain qualified since machines took their jerbs and they weren't happy about it.

And you can understand why. We've heard the same story, the the apocryphal story that sabotage comes from the sabo thrown into the cogs of the machine. From this but similar story easy like uh and we Joe, you and I had had a brief conversation before we came in to record the podcast. We were just kind of talking about the subject, and we mentioned that this this complaint was again about the loss and jobs, not necessarily technology. If in fact the manufacturers had found a super cheap

source of labor, the same problem would have existed. It wasn't just that it was a machine. Yeah, if you could have just found people who would do the same jobs cheaper and take those jobs away from these workers. I found a really easy way to train horses to do it. Are horses are terrible at weaving, but uh, you know they they just like all manual dexterity. But in economy in England, it would have had to be rabbits, right, they have a factory, they would have factories of rabbits

weaving cloth. I think it would be hairs actually sorry, but uh, in economics we call we call this this process substitution, where we use a machine to substitute for uh, human labor. Uh. And there's another idea called complimentarianism complimenting. So we're gonna be talking a lot about substituting versus complimenting in this podcast. But as long as humans have

been innovating, we've had this issue to some extent. I mean, if you look at agriculture, and we'll talk a lot about agriculture, uh, you know, just the advent of the plow made a lot of of changes because now you didn't need as many human workers howing the fields as you did before. And so this is not a new idea by any extent. It goes back, you know, centuries, but we see it uh accelerated in the era of

technological advances and development. Yeah, and so I think a good place to start with the most recent modern incarnation of this worry that that machines, automation, robots will take our jobs is this pretty optimistic article that Kevin Kelly wrote for Why, aired in December, is called better than Human Why Robots will and Must take Our Jobs? Um, and Kelly says this, two hundred years ago, seventy percent

of American workers were farmers. By about a hundred years after that, it was some yeah, I read in another article entirely, but I wanted to toss that in. Yeah, that that that that particular term that two hundred years ago seventy of American workers were farmers showed up a lot in our research. Joe did an amazing job of gathering tons of articles on this subject, and I must have read that one statistic at least six or seven times. The people on the internet sometimes use the same sources,

it might be or each other. Well, it's the startling figure because apparently, according to Kelly, only one percent of those previous farming jobs remain today, and that's because of automation. So automation all of these jobs that used to require humans or animals to be done on land have pretty much all been replaced by machines now. But but Joe, what happened to all those people who formerly had been

working on farms? Now they have other jobs, or I mean some of them might be unemployed, but the ones who are employed have found other jobs to do, either other jobs using the equipment that has created automation on farms. So now they can drive a tractor or or or help marator build a tractor, do maintenance on the chicken milking machine whatever it is. Yeah, or maybe they work in it, or maybe maybe moved to a city and yeah,

I did something else. So in other words, we see job creation as well some innovation and uh which again necessity mother of invention, right, sure, But Kelly goes on from that to claim that over the next century, So in the next like ninety years, the same trend will continue, seventy of today's jobs will be replaced by automation. And if that, obviously that's just a speculation which we can't know for sure. But if that's true, what does that

mean for the world? Right? Will we continue to see the same sort of of of progression where new jobs get created that are totally either dependent upon the fact that we have robots or or just totally new that people then will enter into. And I mean it's it's a very exciting thing to think about, but also a little bit terrifying. Yeah, sure, right, Well, nobody wants to lose their job. And your job, your job is you

in many ways. It's a huge part of your identity, and it's how you make your money, which is how you do everything else that isn't your job exactly right, I mean, without your job, you're in big trouble. So we all like to think that our jobs can't be replaced by robots. There is no way a computer program or an autonomous robot or some other kind of machine could do my job, right right, Well, I don't know

about that. There are some people who have made I think, pretty convincing cases that yes, your job will be replaced by a robot almost no matter what you do. The chances are, whatever you do, it's probably going to be done by a machine before too long. Now, the before too long does require a little more examination because some

some jobs are more easily automated than others. Right, So, so jobs, for example, that have a repetitive action that must be done over and over, those are prime candidates to be replaced by a computer or by a machine, and we've seen that happen already things like Amazon's warehouses, where they're depending more and more heavily upon robots, including robotic shelves that will zoom over to the packaging line whenever someone orders a specific item and then zoom back

to where they were supposed to be, so instead of a worker going out to retrieve something from a shelf,

the shelf comes to the worker. Right. On the other hand, jobs that require a lot of flexibility, where you're constantly moving from different kinds of tasks to other ones, those are going to be harder to automate, right, But we shouldn't be able to count on them being indefinitely difficult to automate, or at least to divide up among many other automated machines that can do the different parts of

the tasks. Um, So I think we should look first at h There was a book that came out called Race Against the Machine by Eric Brynjolfson and Andrew McAfee, and they have made the case that, yeah, technology is very much going to be replacing jobs. Now. They might have a spin on it, says that's not necessarily a bad thing. But what's their case. Well, you know, they do say the sort of things we've been talking about already, that technology has always replaced jobs and that this is

something that we've seen throughout history. But they claim that also, you know, this current era we're in is a little different from others uh that we've seen. We're seeing more of the replacement and more automation and uh quote less of the complimenting and creating of new jobs end quote.

So in other words, there was an era early in the two thousands that were still in where we saw a dip in the number of jobs that were available, but an increase in productivity, which was kind of unprecedented, where where we didn't see the jobs rebound, we saw the productivity hold steady, but we didn't see new jobs being created. And there's a potential that this could be uh, you know, a long term trend, not something that is

a little you know, just blip, yeah. Yeah. Andrew McAfee gave a ted X talk in Boston in June where he showed, as part of his presentation the data on the Great Recession where where it seemed okay as things started getting better towards the end of the Great Recession. Uh, we were seeing GDP come back up, we were seeing profits come back up. It looked like from a zoomed out level that the economy was doing better again, except the number of people employed did not rebound at the

same time. Uh. So you may be experiencing a situation here where the economy as a whole might be doing fine, but lots of people aren't. Yeah, and well, it also depends on how you're defining how well the economy does. If you if you're talking about total wealth generated, right, if you're looking at it as a measurement of the number of people employed or percentage of employment, that it's

not doing so well. Right, right, Well, I mean there's this is a multi factor issue, of course, partially related to how hard you can convince people to work, uh for a lower amount of money. But yeah, yeah, certainly, Uh, and that's got to compete with automation also, right, I mean, and like, would it be cheaper to hire somebody to work for a really low wage or to just pay up for the robots to do it for us? You know, it's a calculated decision that the the employer must make.

Can you compete with increasingly efficient automation. That's a tough decision. But anyway, Uh so McAfee said pretty much, Yes, the droids are definitely coming for our jobs. Uh even the jobs of knowledge workers, he claims. So it's not just the three point five million truck drivers in the United

States should be worried about the Google autonomous car. They should, but it's also that, for example, finance writers should have their eye on algorithms that can already write perfect journalistic reports on stock performance based off of the daily data that comes into You can send this program some numbers and it will generate a completely perfect report on the stock performance in English that can be read by humans.

There are plenty of other examples of this too. There are, in fact, lots of trading algorithms that that stock traders are depending more and more heavily upon. In fact, we talked about that in the previous episode. Yeah. Yeah, it used to be people crunching numbers, and now it's computers

crunching numbers way better than the people really could have. Now, I don't want to give the wrong impression about McAfee, because he's revealed in other places and uh, he's basically an optimist about the overall implications of technology for human existence. You know, we can do good things with it, but they're there are different paths that we could take from here, and some of them might not be good, right, uh, And almost all of them are going to involve the

droids taking our jobs. That's that's going to be hard to escape at this point. Right. Again, it's a question of time scales, right right. And also the thing where in here in in in America are jobs have not really increased in UH an alignment with automation. But that's

not true for all countries, is it. No, Well, for example, the i f R, the International Federation of Robotics, they found a piece where they were drawing attention to a study showing that in some countries rates of employment grew

alongside increased use of industrial robots. But then at the same time i I I found an interesting observation made by a piece UH in April in the m I T Technology Review, where they pointed out this study cited by the International Federation of Robotics, which by the way, is a trade organization for robotics, so they sort of have ah UM pointed out that this study they're referring to is talking about dangerous and stupid robots that are not very versatile, like the ones that are cutting out our

car bits, maybe not the ones that are potentially handling our children exactly right, So the effect could be very different when a smarter, next generation robot shows up that can more effectively replace human workers without needing so much handling. Now that being said, David au Tour of m I T has actually expressed some skepticism that machines will take

over most jobs for the foreseeable future. And now he doesn't say that it's uh, you know that we're always going to have people in these jobs and that's that's going to be the fact forever and ever, but rather that this may be a longer timeline than what some people might have you believe. He points out that we've made machines that are really good at handling those repetitive, predictable tasks, but they aren't, like we said, as good at flexible ones, uh and responding to situations that have

dynamic conditions like a human interaction. So, in other words, like if you've ever had to call into any kind of of tech support where you get the automated menus. The automated menus are really good at channeling you to the specific person who can help you. They're not so good at being able to handle the actual problem. I don't know if they're always even as good at the first thing you make. And I've been like, none of

the options you just listed are what I want. Well, that that's that is again another limitation on the system, though, right. I mean, if it were a person that you were talking to, they could at least respond by saying, oh, well, then the best place to funnel your problem is to

this person. Uh So that's kind of his point is saying that, you know, machines are not that great at those kind of tasks, and there's no reason to believe that artificial intelligence is going to reach a point that will make them comparable to human performance in terms of things like problem solving in common sense, Yeah, common sense, critical thinking, that kind of thing. That that sort of stuff is largely going to be in the human domain

for the foreseeable future. Not that machines will never have a stab at this kind of thing, but that it's not as uh, it's not as imminent as something like the automation of routine like the dangerous dirty uh job that a lot of of robotic experts talk about, you know, these machines taking over for us. The experts in general are really divided on how they think all of this

is going to play out. I mean, you know, it's it's easy for us being relatively uh amateurish in our opinions, and you know, you know, but but these people who work in this industry every day can't really agree whether this is leading to a utopia or a dystopia. It's

a coin flip. Well, yeah, it almost is. Because there was a Pew survey released in augusteen that pulled almost two thousand experts in relevant fields like robotics, or economics or AI about the effects of robotics and AI on our economies, and the results were that fifty two per cent of these experts predicted a quote optimistic path, which entailed quote a future in which robots and digital agents do not displace more jobs than they create unquote, and

at the same time, forty percent of the x or it's predicted a pessimistic outcome in which robots quote will display significant numbers of both blue and white collar workers and many of the experts expressed concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order.

That's that's what we would call a a bad outcome. Yeah, it would be chaotic, it would be uh and we'll talk more about that kind of dystopian outcome in the a little bit later in the episode. Yeah. Now, some people, I guess would argue that it's not so stark that a robot will either just completely do your job, like replace you outright, but the more robots may sort of enter the workforce in middle roles. You know what I mean. This is that complementary approach to the idea that we

will have machines that will complement what we do. Yeah, construction is a really good ample of how this is working today because you know, we've got a lot of machines that do the heavy lifting and the precision cutting and stuff like that. But this this work does in fact complement, not replace, skilled construction workers who can do the planning and the physical control in the in the

moment judgments. Right, it's that flexibility we mentioned that the workers themselves have that the robots don't have I mean, a robot is really good at doing one thing over and over, but it can't walk around the site and you know, figure out what's the next job that somebody needs help with. Right. Robot surgery is another great example. The robot surgery tools are tools. They are extensions of

an actual human surgeon. The human surgeon uses a device that allows him to or her to make control the incisions, and you know, you have the robotics that are able to translate those movements into actual actions against the patient. So you could have larger movements being trans lay it into very precise movements on the robotic scale. Yeah. Yeah, Together the machine and the human can be more precise

than either would have been able to be alone. Right, So the human can make human decisions, the robot can translate motions into very precise movements, and you get the best of both worlds. But again, it's it's complementary, it's not substitution. Now, I guess the question is, but how long will that be the case, Because as robots get smarter and more agile and more flexible, they're going to increasingly be able to do these things that Right now,

we're feeling like few only humans can do them. Well, yeah, I mean, let's let's go back to the driverless cars as an example. We talk about that in a positive sense, about how the cars are able to sense changing conditions much more quickly than humans are. So, for example, our our human reaction time means that when something happens, there's a delay between when we perceive it and when we can take any action. That delay is much much shorter for a robotic system that can react almost I mean

to us it seems instantly. Uh, they can react to changing conditions. So when we look at the example of the driverless cars, like Google's driverless cars, they've been involved in two accidents, neither of which were caused by the car, right and at least not the driverless car system. They were both human error. I think one was when a human operator was operating the car under manual control exactly. Yeah, yeah,

neither of them were the actual robotic system. So we can already see that at least in that in that kind of test scenario, because of course that's not a wide rollout, but we can see within that controlled test scenario that it appears the robots have the edge on us in that field. Already, so it stands to reason that we will see this continue in other disciplines over time. Obviously, some are gonna take a lot longer than others, because

some tasks are more innately human than others. Yeah, So I think a theme I'm seeing immer ridge and the question of will robots take our jobs? Is the people who are optimistic about it aren't usually saying no, robots will not take most of our jobs. They're saying, yeah, they will, but it will be okay for one reason or another. Yeah, it seems to be most people agree. Yeah, robots are going to take a huge portion of our

jobs that exist today, maybe eventually all of them. And so if they do take our jobs, the next question is will this necessarily be a bad thing? And I want to revisit or earlier I mentioned that Wired article from twelve by Kevin kelly Um and his whole point is that though robots and automation might eliminate old jobs, they will create new jobs, and the new jobs will be better jobs. So I want to read a quote from part of his article that I think sums this

up pretty well. He says, in the coming years, robot driven cars and trucks will become ubiquitous. This automation will spawn the new human occupation of trip optimizer, a person who tweaks the traffic system for optimal energy and time usage. Routine robo surgery will necessitate new skills of keeping machines sterile. When automatic self tracking of all your activities becomes a normal thing to do, a new breed of professional analysts will arise to help you make sense of the data.

And of course we will need a whole army of robot nanny's dedicated to keeping your personal bots up and running. Each of these new vocations will in turn be taken over by robots later. And so this sort of leads to where he proposes there's like a seven stage cycle of automation, and then automation anxiety, and then finally automation complacence, where first it seems like a robot could never do what you can do. Then you say, well, okay, it can do some of what I can do, but it

can't do everything I can do. Then it says it can do everything I can do, but it needs me to take care of it when it messes up or breaks down, which all the time. So this this would be like the copy machine jamming yet again. Yeah. Then he says, oh, well, okay, so it operates flawlessly on the routine, but I still need to tell it what to do. I need to train it for new tasks, he says. Then after that, okay, can just have that job. I didn't want it anyway because it's that job was

not a good job for humans to do. And then the next stage is wow, quote wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more fun and pays much more. And then finally I'm so glad a robot and computer cannot possibly do my new job, and so the whole thing begins again. This actually reminds me also of what Dr Henrik Christensen said when uh I did the the Um for Thinking video episode from Georgia Tech and we talked about Robotics Week and we looked at the various robots that they have

in their in their labs. We only saw a few of them. They were really fascinating, and he talked very much in the same kind of sense, the idea that that robots are taking over the three DS, the dull, dangerous and dirty jobs. And then uh, you know, we'll see that continue and then we'll see it grow into the next round. But each time it's like we're just a little bit ahead, like you know, they they the robots catch up to us, and then we find the new thing to do. And people might ask, well, what's

the new thing to do? And the honest answer is, we can't anticipate that. If you had looked back two hundred years ago, before we got into the real industrial Revolution and ask people, you know what, what do you foresee, Like if you explain to them this job that you have is not going to exist in another decade or so,

they wouldn't have been able to anticipate. Sure. And this is also part of the problem with advancing technology and robotics and AI, because it seems that the gap between the creation of new jobs and the creation of robots that can do them better than human it's closing or or shortening at any rate. Yeah, that certainly could be the case. In fact, in response to that article by Kelly I was just talking about, Gary Marcus wrote an

interesting response in The New Yorker. It was also in December, and Marcus argued that these new professions that Kelly claims will be created by automation or will actually be taken over by robots just as easily and just as quickly. Uh, And of course Kelly says eventually they will be. But I think the idea is that there's no reason to think they'll lag behind all that long to be taken up by humans for any significant period of time in

the meantime, you know. So as examples, he points out that there's already such a thing as the robots sterilization expert that uh, that you know, Kelly claimed would be done by humans, and that there are already forms of

automated trip optimization. And this is a quote. With advances in both hardware and software, the time between the invention of a job and it's automated replacement is getting shorter, right, So that we're getting our our machines are getting better faster, and that eventually there's not going to be much of a gap between when a new job is created and

when a robot can do it. Pretty well. Yeah, now, this seems to me to be based upon the assumption that this this will be a continuously accelerating trend, very much the way we look at Moore's law. How Moore's Law has meant that we see a doubling, effectively a doubling and computer power every eighteen to twenty four months, depending upon when you consult Moore's law. Um, And I

don't know that it's safe to make that assumption. Software development is a different It takes a different pathway than uh, the ability to cram more discrete components onto a square inch of silicon wafer. But but I do see where he's getting at. And I it's not that I have the data right in front of me to to dismiss it or to disagree it. Just something to me says that we don't, hite have the evidence to prove that this this trend we're seeing right now is going to

be continuous. I think that we're I think we'll continue to see advances. I just don't know that it will always be at the same accelerated rate. So it maybe that we're in a golden age of of development right now, But then things might hit a wall and slow down. We don't we don't have a way of knowing. Maybe they won't, maybe they will continue the way he has predicted. But yeah, yeah, again, like like the incredible features, incredible and unknowable. Um, so so either way, Uh, we have

a couple of options for for dealing with this potential situation. Right, So we've been talking a lot in you know, kind of hypotheticals. But let's say that you are genuinely a person whose job is going to be eliminated because of automation. Put yourself in this scenario. You are you come into work one Monday morning and your boss says, I just bought a robot that does exactly what you do. Yeah, you are no longer needed here. We wish you well

on your future opportunities. Um. So, the the options are really one of two things. You can either go and look for another job you can do that isn't already being automated by other devices, which uh, you know, depending upon your education level, you would you might have some limitations there. Or you go and pursue further education so that you can get a better job one of the

one that has not yet been automated. Uh. Those are really your two and most of the robotics experts that I've seen talk about this issue, uh tend to say that that's the path they hope people all take the idea to to educate yourself to better yourself so that you can end up getting a better and more fulfilling sure, which is a lovely idea, except the part where you're asking someone who's unemployed to somehow pay for education and

also food us get a new degree. It's one of those things that's really easy to say because you're talking about it, like, you know, the idea on paper, and then when you start getting into okay, let's avoid the whole paper subject. Let's talk about this as if it's a real event. I've just lost my job, I no longer have income, I still have outstanding UH bills to pay. How do I do this thing? You're from? Ye, yes, yes, some of us are. Some of us may still be

carrying those student loan debts. Um, yeah, it's it's you know, when you get into those specifics, it gets to be a real issue. But the thing to keep in mind is that people on like robots, we are flexible. We have that capability to switch gears. And then I made a joke about if your mechanical robot, you might physically be able to switch gears, but I'm talking the figurative switching gears. We have the option of being able to say, you know, this is not working out for me, or

the say is no longer an option for me. I need to pursue something else. And while it's easy to say that, I mean, obviously personal circumstances might limit what your your real opportunities are, but that's still more opportunities than a robot. A robot is built to do a specific task. Uh. We don't have any general purpose robots that can do anything. So and we probably well and we I don't think we're going to within a century.

I honestly don't think we're going to get quite that far. Um. I think we will get there, but I think it's a harder problem than what a lot of the discussion has kind of led up to. Yeah. Um. The aforementioned David Autor of of m I T stresses how much we human laborers need to be training for and supplying

tasks that will be complimented by automation, not substituted by it. Um. He calls this Polanis paradox, after the mid twentieth century philosopher Michael Polani, who said, we know more than we can tell um. And to to to illustrate this to yeah, yeah, to to fall back on kind of our favorite example of machine learning here on this podcast, the cat identification problem. Okay, any toddler can identify a picture of a cat or

most of them at any rate. Um, but it took a network of sixteen thousand processors to figure out the same thing in computer terms. Um, So what does the toddler know that all of those computers had to learn? And Okay, in this particular example, we've enumerated the answers multiple times here on this podcast. Um but and it was a lot a lot of things, was basically the answer. But in a lot of other cases the answer is

we're not sure. Yeah, yeah, A lot of it has comes down to just the fact that the wiring of the brain is so different from the classical computer. And we've talked about machine learning and neural networks and how they are a fraction of the complexity of an actual brain. I mean, they they work on the same principle, but they are a tiny, tiny, you know, a minuscule example how a brain works. Because to produce anything that would operate on a brain's level would require a huge amount

of electricity and a lot of processors. But yeah, it's it's that's something to keep in mind. So, so it's a very optimistic view, or a relatively optimistic view compared to some of the other that that what forty percent of of naysayers out there who think that things are going to be potentially terrible? Um, but is it a possibility that eliminating these jobs for humans would be okay? Yeah, that's another option we haven't so we've talked about. It

could be bad. It could lead to uh just massive unemployment, social unrest, and the breakdown of society, dogs and cats living together. It could be okay in that Well, we'll just keep creating new jobs people. There will always be jobs for us even as we replace the old ones. What if it's the case that we replace all the jobs, there are no jobs for people, and that's still okay. So we've eliminated the need for labor. Could it be possible that we live in a world where labor is

no longer necessary and we still are able to be people? Right, So there's this idea that you can create more wealth for everyone. You've probably heard this phrase make the pie higher, al right, instead of making it bigger. Ringe. Well, okay, so the idea goes like this, Yes, replacing human workers with robots puts humans out of the job, but it could also create just a starkly enormous amount of wealth. Uh, the reason humans are being replaced by robots is that

the robots are more efficient. They do the job better, they can do it faster, they can create more of something, create more product or value you in a shorter amount of time, and putting aside the cost of maintenance and procurement, you don't actually have to pay the robots. They're they're creating new wealth. So if this leads to societies that are flush with surplus money and value, it could quote make the pie higher. Everybody's little slice gets bigger without

taking any more from anybody else. Now, if that could happen, that would be great, but that's not a guaranteed. That's not something that we oh, sure, if we just eliminate all the jobs and have lots of robots, everybody will be happy. Because, for example, the economist Paul Krugman pointed this out in a New York Times column in December, where he said, quote smart machines may make higher GDP possible, so higher gross domestic product, but also reduce the demand

for people, including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owned the robots. So that yeah, and by a robot guys. Marcus also pointed this out in his New Yorker piece, So what do you do if you have a society that's creating ridiculous amounts of prosperity but most people can't get work

of any kind or enjoy that prosperity at all. Yeah, And so here's where I think we might earn some hate mail, But we're going to have to say it because I think it's the logical conclusion. Could it be that advances in automation will make some really major form of wellthree distribution or socialism necessary in the future if we want to have a stable society. Yeah, I think that's possible. And even if you're very, very opposed to socialism currently, you might not be in this scenario because

I want to highlight a few things. People are usually opposed to socialism because they believe, for one thing, it discourages productivity. You know, if you are sure that you can get help and that you always have a net to fall act on, it gives you less incentive to work hard at your job and create wealth. Well, this doesn't really matter. If you have a robotic workforce, you

don't need an incentive to work harder. There's there's no there's no where to work harder in the first place, right, right, What about the argument that it's not fair to take

hard earned money from from workers. Yeah, I mean that that could make sense to a lot of people today, But at the same time, it doesn't really make sense sense anymore if you're imagining a society where more than of people literally cannot make money through labor, and the society is replete with extra wealth, so there's just tons and tons to go around, and most people have no

way of getting it themselves. Yeah, and then on top of that, let's talk about a world where because we might imagine a dystopian future in which you've got this this tiny elite that owners robot owners, they control all the wealth, and then everybody else if everybody else is genuinely unemployed, as in there is no way for them to earn income, then you have no consumers. You have

no customers. Know, when buying all of the products that the robots are making so industriously right, So there's no reason for robots to make anything because there's no buying power to purchase the things. I mean, unless you're making the three families that the roots trading stuff. So unless those three families just want to see the rest of the world whither away. It it makes it's it's not a supportable system. It ultimately would crumble in on itself.

So at some point some sort of redistribution is absolutely necessary because otherwise you have no consumption. Yeah, redistribution or other ideas that make people uncomfortable in the same way, like a sort of centrally planned economy. Uh, you know, examples of which would be things like communism. But this

wouldn't be like communism. It would be the fact that well, I guess we would call it something like we have collected of ownership of our robot workforce, and the proceeds of what these robots generate or split up equally among everybody in the country. Yeah. One other issue that I thought was interesting was the psychological burden that this place

is on people. The idea that you get some sense of purpose from your job, and you know, I guess that that depends upon each individual, right, I mean, it all depends on who you are and what job you have. I know, I get a lot of satisfaction out of my job and I find a lot of purpose in it, and the thought of not having that, certainly is one of those where you start to question what would you

do to give yourself purpose? And this is another one of those areas where I think we would say, you know, we don't know, we're we're inventive people, and it's very possible that we would have Uh. Each individual comes up with his or her own purpose and becomes a you know, something they define for him or herself, and uh, I kind of like that idea. I don't know if that's actually realistic or not. I mean, not being in that world,

it makes it very difficult for me to draw a conclusion. Well, the only examples that we have of anything this this stark is science fiction. I mean stuff like Star Trek, for example, has this kind of utopian society in which it's a it's a post post economic world at least post scarcity. Right, we should do an episode all about Star Trek and the economics. Guys. That should be the very next episode we do. The Star Trek economy. I totally agree, and it's really convenient because we already have

notes typed up for it. I guess that wraps up robots for today. But join us next time where we're actually going to tackle something that's been asked for multiple times by fans. Uh, the star trek economy. Now does it work? And can we put it in place? And boy was that a fun one to research? So yeah, this this was a really fascinating topic and I mean it is one that clearly is important and obviously it has has a real impact on real people. Uh. And

I think that there's still room for optimism. I I kind of side with the of that of that Pew study, but I think it's one of those things that we do have to keep in mind in order for that optimism to remain realistic. Absolutely. Yeah, if if we were replaced by robotic podcasters, would you guys go all letite on them? I mean, would you destroy those robots? Um? I mean, to be fair, I've suspected Josh Clark of

being a robot for like the last five years. There is no robot on earth that could equal the badness of your puns. I that's true, job is saying that's that is an extremely human feature. Yet I did make the entire Have you ever read where the robots tried to write jokes? They're so bad there not as bad as yours. The editorial department as a whole groaned at one of my puns last week. So that was a proud day for me. People. It was it was great. I don't remember what it was, but it was beautiful.

I remember specifically. I'll tell you after the podcast. So we're gonna wrap this up, guys. If you have any suggestions for future topics. I mean, this was a listener suggestion and it was so much fun. If you have a suggestion, send us an email our addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are f W Thinking at Facebook. Just type in fw thinking and the search bar will

pop right up. Leave us a message, let's know what you think, and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, I visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places