Dull, Dirty, Dangerous

very complex issue. I'm not an expert, but one way or another, the ultra rich who did extremely well based on AI or other reasons, I think somehow need to help the people who are under privileged or even victimized by technology. The exact mechanism I don't know, but if we don't do it, redistribution is going to be a serious matter for our social stability. It's not actually a

underprivileged minority, it will become an underprivileged majority. The benefits of the AI revolution will not be evenly distributed, and according to Kaifu, automation will replace fort of jobs worldwide in the next fifteen years. The second part is how do we help people whose jobs have been displaced find the new beginning? We ask the question what can AI

and automation not do? That is the central question this episode, as AI and Automation displays more and more jobs, What will be left for us to do and who will be qualified to do it? Today will explore the automated economy and the changes it will bring. Im as Velashen Welcome to Sleepwalkers. So, Carol, when I hear Kaifou talking about jobs being lost to AI, my mind goes immediately to driverless cars and self driving cars replacing taxis, um,

long distance trucking, that kind of thing. Yeah, but there's also you know, agriculture, like combine harvests, like robots who are picking fruit. Um. Washington State actually announced that next season they're going to be rolling out these vacuum harvesters that use AI to identify and pick only ripe apples. Wow, so not only picking the fruit, but also being smart about which fruit it picks. That's right, the ripe stuff,

the stuff. And there's actually this raspberry picking robot in the UK that was funded by some British supermarkets and those robots can pick twenty five thousand berries a day versus a humans fifteen thousand in an eight hour day, and also remember this, eight hour days for human being is a long day for a robot. A robot doesn't know what a long day is, nor does it know

what a short day is. And it can work into the night right and when we force ourselves into comparison with these robots, that kind of creates very realistic expectations for workers can do. Interesting is not just jobs that require mechanical skills that Kaifu thinks will be lost to automation. And AI actually doesn't distinguish between white collar and blue collar jobs. So any job that has a routine element, whether it's underwriting loans or telemarketing or researching, you know,

this is a lot of work. The first AI podcast may not be too far off. Um. It actually reminds me the episode we did about AI and creativity that algorithms that can write poetry and music and screenplays are already here. This is not some robot apocalypse in the distant future. Job displacement is with us. Julian, You've got in touch with somebody who's seeing this play out in real time. Yeah, it did. His name's Wild Kankowski and he lives in Florida, all around the city whatever direction

we're gonna go. We know where every every McDonald's pretty much is on the did a job well. A lot of the people know us because we go in there all the time. A lot of them know me because not too many people get a medium coffee with twelve creams. Yeah, as what is taking a huge number of creams and his coffee? What? He owns the pool screens and repair business in Orlando, Florida. His job takes him all around town, but every morning starts the same way Adam McDonald's and

recently what he has seen a change. They just started to show up, probably about a year or so ago. That way, when we go to a counter, people are getting mad because they want you to go to use the key off and I'm walking up to the counter wanting to get my coffee and get on on our day. They're like, oh, you got to use the kios so and then they want me to hit the screen. The screen says, go to this thing, go to beverage. Okay, what kind of beverage? Well, okay, go the coffee, but

what do you want? Ice coffee? This? That? And then instead of me saying twelve cream and she hears me. Now I get to hit the machine like twelve times that that that that that that that that that that twelve times to get it, because that's how many times I get to hit it to get to twelve. The thing is knocking someone out of a job. We've all been wally stuck at a self checkout or yelling at an automated phone menu that refuses to understand what we're saying.

But those interactions are not just frustrating for us. They're real world examples of jobs being displaced by technology, and they don't only affect the people whose jobs are threatened. We're in a lot of different McDonald's and I probably recognize every single person in there. Some people I've known probably ten fifteen years, and they know who I am. You know, they're friendly enough to make you feel a

little special there. That way, I guess we might be walking through a store and then I'll see those people and I'll go over and them say, yeah, you're for McDonald's or that, and then they'll be like, yeah, I know who you are. Then you actually get them meet and greet someone and make a conversation for a minute or two. That way, why would human contact when you talking to a person for a second and getting my food and paying them in another two seconds. There shouldn't

have been nothing wrong with that process. So, Julie, how did this come about? What made you want to include Wally story in the podcast? Well, for one thing, I love Wally, but these are also familiar stories, right, I mean, and while he's been able to see this one play out over time, where you can see how just changing one part of one task the way he orders a coffee has actually had this ripple effect that also follows

him around as he goes about his day. Yeah. I was especially struck by Wally story because it's easy to talk about automation and job displacement as these big abstract ideas, but here's somebody who's actually felt it. Even though it's not his job that's been lost. Is something that affects

the whole community. You know, I don't mean to be super nestar algic, but a lot of great movies and great young adult novels have you know, the teenage girl who's angsty and you know works at the Friar and you know, now it's just like you're gonna have like an angsty data scientist, you know, mulling over the express

checkout crouched over the screen. Well, those those golden arches, they are very enduring symbol for America UM And earlier this year, McDonald's acquired an AI company for three hundred million dollars. It was their biggest acquisition for twenty years. And it's all about predicting what people might order before they even arrive at the store. So even the days of Kiosks maybe numbered, maybe we'll be nostalgic about them in twenty years, but nonetheless, this AI acquisition could ultimately

lead to a better customer experience. And it's important to remember that the AI revolution doesn't need to be just about displacing jobs. It can also be about augmenting us and our experience. One person working on human machine partnership is Gil Pratt see EEO of the Toyota Research Institute. Many of our colleagues at other companies are really focused on building only the self driving car, where you replace

the driver with an AI system. But we also have this other track of building something that we call the Guardian, which is meant to safeguard a human being when they drive, to avoid accidents and to avoid crashes. I think the Guardian approach has been at odds because of money. The economic desire to replace the driver in a taxi is very large, and a lot of companies are sort of going after this attractive idea of automating out the human

being from driving taxis. But you know, Toyota is first and foremost a car company, which means that we have this business of making cars. We also want to make cars a lot more safe, and we also want to make them a lot more fun. Gil makes an important point today, our innovation is driven by the market. Companies like Uber in tested to keep their valuations high by promising their investors that they will be able to do

better business in future by replacing human drivers. Toyota is actually an investor in Uber, but it's primary business is car manufacturing, so there that is on enhancing the abilities of human drivers rather than replacing them, making driving more fun and Gil's humanistic approach to technology is also being

applied to other problems at the Toyota Research Institute. We want to allow people to age in place with dignity, and in particular, we want to help them by amplifying their abilities to make up for what was lost, rather than replacing their abilities. And make them feel as if they're elderly. It's a subtle difference, and it's very easy

to get it wrong. It's very easy to build a technology that is ostensibly going to help some someone, but it's what it's really doing is offloading work from them and making them feel they can't do it and therefore they're old and they should just sit in a chair. It's much harder to figure out a way, particularly in the robotics field, to continue to engage the person so that they feel like they can do it themselves. And that's a little bit of a difference in how we

try to do things. There's one that we've recently started to show, which is a machine called the Buddy, and this idea is one where older people have a lot of difficulty reaching down low to pick up things from the ground and difficulty moving heavy things, and so we're working on a machine that still has the human in the loop, but makes it much easier for them to

do that task. But it understands that no matter how much robotics may be able to help solve the practical challenges of life as an older person, it can never replace a human cab provider. Just to be very very clear, we don't want to replace people as companions. We think it what human beings want most of all in a companion is another human being, so companion. This brings us back to what Kaifu was saying right at the top of the episode, what can AI and automation not do?

So Yeah, Gil acknowledges that no matter how much progress is made in the field of robotics to help elderly people, nothing's going to make up for human contact. I actually was able to talk to Sherry Turkle, who's a professor at m i T who talks a lot about human beings and their relationship with technology, and she talks about this fluffy seal robot called Pero, which is used in

nursing homes to soothe Alzheimer's patients. And it can simulate this like affectionate little animal, and it can be really effective at drawing people out of their shells when they're otherwise hard to reach or feeling disoriented. On the other hand, and this is Sherry's argument, it becomes really easy for family members to be like, well, you know, my grandpa has this, you know, seal at home. I don't need

to go visit him all the time. And I know that sounds extreme, but it's more of the idea of the fact that we're using these robots to make us feel better about calming people who we could otherwise have strong relationships with. Yeah, and I think it also normalizes the idea of interacting with robots or technology instead of real people. And that's painful. That's what wal he was really talking about. Yes, it's frustrating to have to use the Kiosk when you want twelve creems with your coffee.

But more important, Leader Rhodes Community bonds. It's no wonder that a company like McDonald's is spending a ton of money on this. It makes them more efficient and profitable if they don't have to pay people. Yeah, and it's hard to turn back the clocks. You know. Donald Trump talks about bringing back the cold jobs, but jobs that have been lost are very hard to recreate. It doesn't make me think about Kaifu's comment at the top of

the episode about the underprivileged majority. Uvell know Harari, who's coming to join us later in the series, talks about a useless class. When we come back, we look at what this means for the people at the sharp end the people losing their jobs to automation, and at some

of the proposed solutions. According to an OXFAM International report published earlier this year, the twenty six richest billionaires in the world have as much wealth as the poorest three point eight billion people, and many of those billionaires made their fortunes from technology. Jeff Bezos is the world's richest

person thanks to Amazon. Meanwhile, Amazon is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in automating their supply chain, in other words, attempting to cut out the labor force who made the business possible. It's a bit like Uber's investment in self driving technology. So what jobs might be safe from the relentless march towards automation, I asked Kai Fu Lee. My general feeling is that these will be the human interaction jobs, the compassion and empathetic jobs, the jobs that we expect

a human and refused to work with a robot. That would doubly ensure these jobs are safe as one AI can't do them now, and too, even if AI got better, customers don't accept it, then those jobs will become the right areas to retrain people to move into so jobs like nurses, Nanni's elderly care, high end jobs like psychiatrists and doctors, because the future it will be different. AI can do the analytical part, but the doctor will still need to provide the warmth and the human contact that

the patient expects during the worst period of vulnerability. What we may move more towards ordering from kiosks and help menus, or not even needing to order at all. Kaifu agrees with Gil, will still need to human touch in a range of industries, many of them senters around care and human services, and it's striking to hear these two pioneers of new technology. Kaifu and AI and Gil in robotics agree, both arguing that automation might increase the value of what

is uniquely human. Guilt terms the history. To back up his argument, he looks at how our understanding of our own value as humans shifted during the Industrial Revolution away from the ability of our bodies towards the ability of our minds. You know, if you go back in history and you say, how did people earn a living back in the days of mechanical work, There wasn't you know, steam engines, no use of gasoline or oil or anything

like that. And the answer was that the economic capital that a human being would have just by being born was primarily mechanical. So our muscles made us worthwhile at a minimum level, and machines effectively took over most of the mechanical work that we do, and so we now are valued mostly what we can do with our minds, assuming that this next stage of AI occurs where most of the mental labor that is done is displaced. What I think we need to think about now is what

will we do then? And we need to think about it even if this next stage of A doesn't come for a while, because we went from mechanical to mental. Is there something next? Is there something next? That is the trillion dollar question? According to Guilty, industrial revolution led us to place more value on the mind than the muscle. Now that a I can increasingly perform mental labor, but we find a new source of value. And could it be like CAIFU hinted at as well, some emotional connection.

When I read a story to my son, it matters a whole lot to him. When I read a story to my mother, it's very much the same thing. So could we actually decide to increase the value that we pay for social work. There's many, many different jobs that really should be paid much much higher than they are now, jobs of teaching and helping so forth. And so I'm an optimist that we can find an answer, but I think we need to realize the difficulty in order to

move towards that answer. The difficulty is huge because as of now, excepting the luxury, the market does not reward the kind of human contact that Kaifu and Gil allude to. And while we, like Wally may wish for our food orders not to be automated, how much more would we pay for human contact? How much more could we afford to pay. Part of the problem is that automation is

exacerbating the gap between rich and poor. Technology companies can increasingly create wealth without needing to pay the wages of additional employees. That's the secret behind that word you hear so often scale, which is why Kai Fu Lee proposes

a radical solution. If we start to redistribute the income that is taking away the power of the ultra ridge, If we start to give the people who are stripped of their current jobs a new job that has not only income but also meaning, I think um people would be more fulfilled, their children at least would have a chance just to pause. Kai Foo Lee is a hugely successful international investor arguing that we need to overturn and one of the most fundamental assumptions of American society that

the market should be allowed to set the price. And Kaifu is not alone. Others in Silicon Valley are calling for a so called universal basic income as SI pen pay to all citizens to acknowledge an increasingly broken relationship between labor and value. Today, we're nowhere close on either of those ideas, but a growing course of inside voices is acknowledging that automation will bring further disruption to society, and others have even greater fears. You may remember Ian

Bremer from our episode on China and Surveillance. He's a political scientist and the author of Us Versus Them, The Failure of Globalism. I am less worried about just jobs going away, then I am about technology facilitating the creation

of completely different types of human beings. What happens when you have the ability to actually provide comp copletely different sets of cognitive skills to human beings that have access to certain types of new technology ian sphere is that as technology improves, the rituals simply reproduced their privilege through elite universities and professional networks, they may start to upgrade their very hardware, making social mobility even harder for those

who can't afford the same modifications. Better memory retention, better pattern recognition, more ability to link to real time information, and the global net I mean, ability not to sleep for longer periods of time, all of this sort of thing. Right, The danger is that I don't care how much money, how much wealth in society, and when you start creating that kind of differentiation, everything we know about human history is that that doesn't end well. Those other people that

aren't as capable get treated like animals or worse. And I am very deeply worried that the speed of technol logical transformation, coupled with the speed of this new industrial revolution, makes it much more likely that large numbers of people in our own societies, not in other countries, but like right here, are suddenly not going to have that capacity, and we're going to treat them as different types of humans,

maybe not even as humans at all. This is the truly dystopient future that we will fear carat this concept of a two track humanity facilitated by technology, where some people have value and others don't. Yeah, you know, this is the dark version of trans humanism, which we're going to talk about later in the series. But you know it's not some sci fi fantasy. Our favorite pre super villain Elon Musk, founded Neuralink, which aims to create brain

computer interfaces. Like why do we need that? Well, I guess because in today's economy, being smart is seen as the most important differentiating factor. But we're not talking about being an intellectual, like, we're talking about being cognitively enhanced by a computer or by technology. And Elon Musk isn't the only person who's noticed how important it is to

be cognitively enhanced, shall we say? Last year, the World Bank announced the program called the Famine Action Mechanism to get relief to famine hit areas faster, and they explicitly said one of the reasons they're doing this is that because people who are malnourished in the womb may have cognitive issues later in life and thus be unable to compete in the new economy. You know, I found it really interesting that this program is actually powered by AI.

It draws on data like social media, food prices, rainfall, and then automatically assigns funds so that money gets where it's needed before it's too late. It's a textbook case of what AI can do and we can't, which is to notice these patterns and correlations between different types of data sets which are so big as to be impossible for us to compute, and as so often in Sleepwalkers, and it's an example of technology being a double edged short.

On the one hand, it may be widening the gap between rich and poor, but on the other hand, it can potentially feed the world. When we come back, we explore other ways AI and robotics can revolutionize food production. We've looked at how AI and robotics could exacerbate the gulf between rich and poor, and how this new industrial revolution could put a new value on human connection. But

could we use automation to actually decrease global inequality? One key factor is access to quality nutrition and roboticist George Kantor gave a talk last year at south By Southwest called AI will help feed a growing planet. I wanted to learn more, so I called him for a conversation from his office at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon.

A lot of people when they think about robots and technology being used to assist agriculture, think about robots driving around and picking grapes or plowing fields and things like that. But despite being a robotics expert, George is currently focusing on crop genetics. The way plant breeding works, you have a bunch of parents. Uh plant breeder very carefully uses all his or her experience to figure out which parents will make the best potential children. They make those crosses.

They then do these field trials where they grow the child varieties and they measure them and see how they do, and then the winners go back in the pool and the losers they weed out. One of the crops we work with is sorghum. It's grown all over the world.

They're like forty different varieties of it. In particular, the grain sorghum variety is a staple crop in places like Sub Saharan Africa and India, parts of the world where population is growing more rapidly than the rest of the planet's populations, and the predictions for the impact of global warming are are pretty high. Jewles uses technology to make the work if human plant breed is dramatically more efficient.

But this work is completely invisible to consumers. So we have built a robot that goes out to a breeding experiment where a breeder has grown a thousand different varieties of sorghum are robot goes through and takes all these detailed measurements about how the plants are growing throughout the year, and then the breeder can use those measurements to make better decisions. The end user of this process I'm describing

won't see any technology at all. They will get a seed that looks just like the seed they get now, except it will be a little bit better because the breeder improved it using our robots. These invisible changes to the food production system can have huge consequences. Better seeds mean better yields and could ultimately lead to a better nourish world. But George isn't only thinking about how to

make heartier, better plants. He's also thinking about another problem, how will we efficiently feeded global population who increasingly live in cities and not on the farm. Imagine every building in a city had a little greenhouse hanging off the side of it, or a little growing room in the basement, and now you've got these indoor growing systems that tend to like generate more heat than they need, so one

of their big problems is venting off the heat. Well, buildings have to pay a lot of money to heat the buildings. So if you had this sort of sim the artic relationship between the people in the building and the plants in the building, they can exchange heat, and

they can exchange atmosphere and all kinds of things. If you take that idea and you scale it up to like a city scale, where now you have dozens or hundreds of buildings that all have these different energy needs and different agricultural needs, and they're all sort of sharing. You have some sort of overarching AI that controls what energy gets moved where. Um, you can imagine that there

are big efficiencies that can be gained. George's outlining a vision where robotics and AI help us tackle one of the world's most enduring sources of inequality food access, and doing so could also make agriculture more energy efficient and thus begin to address another huge problem that will disproportionately affect the world's poorest people, climate change. So yes, automation will take jobs away, but it can also potentially raise quality of life and the quality of the global environment.

And as far as George is concerned, the type of labor being replaced is not exact the work that maximizes human potential. We call them dull, dirty, dangerous, so jobs that people don't want or are dangerous to do, or people are getting injured in. When I go visit the Great industry in California and I see the laborers, they're out there, they're stooped over under trees, They're doing this

extremely backbreaking labor. There are high incidences of repetitive stress injuries, and so it's just not a very pleasant environment to be working in. When automation comes into an industry, it takes away some jobs that were there, but it creates other opportunities. So for example, most orchards, you know, they'll have sort of a year round staff of maybe a dozen people, and then at certain busy times of the year they'll bring in maybe a hundred laborers to come

in and help with the harvest. I think everybody would be better off if that orchard had a year round staff of twenty people that were productive all year long. And we're able to use technology to even out these bumps in the labor demand. And so those people, those twenty people are going to need to be higher skilled, but they're also going to get paid more, and they're also going to have more comfortable jobs, and overall they will produce more per person than they would in the

other system. Of course, the lingering question is what happens to the eight people who no longer have a job, and who gets to enjoy the fruits of this more efficient system. Technology has improved lives all around the world and lifted millions out of poverty, but it is also dramatically enriched an extremely small number of people. We mentioned Elon Musk's neural link earlier, and he's not alone in

the Silicon Valley elite investing in transhumanist technologies. That should give us pause, remembering what Ian Bremer said about cognitive differentiation. So there's much to fear, and there are no obvious solutions in sight, and yet people like Kai Fu Lee and Gil Pratt, people who are leading the field, remain optimistic. I wanted to know why there is a strong belief that thought leaders should do the best they can do to project a possible future and strive towards it and

encourage other people to help make that a reality. Because whether we point at the future that is an utopia or dystopia, if everybody believes in it, then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. So I'd like to be part of that force which points towards more of utopian direction.

Even though I fully understand and recognize the possibility and risks of the negative ending, we will want to believe in that utopian direction, honesting automation to help feed the world without stripping ourselves of community interaction, because man cannot live on bread alone, and we need to make sure to balance gains inefficiency with preserving the fabric of our society. In the next episode, we travel from the farm yard

to the battlefield. We meet some of the people pioneering the use of AI and robotics to wage different kinds of wars, and we speak with Arti Pravaca, the former head of Darper, the agency that created the Internet, about how technology is revolutionizing the military. I'm oz veloshin see you next time. Sleepwalkers is a production of I Heart Radio and Unusual Productions for the latest AI news live interviews and behind the scenes footage. Find us on Instagram,

at Sleepwalkers podcast or at Sleepwalker's podcast dot com. Sleepwalkers is hosted by me Oz Veloshin and co hosted by me Kara Price. We're produced by Julian Weller with help from Jacopo Penzo and Taylor Chikoin. Mixing by Tristan McNeil and Julian Weller. Our story editor is Matthew Riddle. Recording assistance this episode from Walter Kowski. Sleep Workers is executive

produced by me Ozvaloshen and mangesh had Tigella. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.