June 13, 2019 • 30 mins
Robots are coming for our jobs, and not just in factories. Artificial intelligence doesn't distinguish between blue collar and white collar work, which means that the economy of the future will look very different. And as it changes, we'll need to make big adjustments. But A.I. is also being used in the fight against world hunger. This episode, we speak with roboticists, inventors, and a fast food regular about how we'll put food on the table.
In this episode: Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group, Kai Fu Lee of Sinovation Ventures, Gill Pratt of the Toyota Research Institute, George Kantor of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institue, and Walter Kankowski.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Sleepwalkers is a production of I Heart Radio and unusual productions.
AI will make phenomenal companies and tycoons faster, and it
will also displace jobs faster than computers and the Internet.
It's already happening. That's Kai Fu Lee speaking, the former
(00:27):
head of Google China and the so called oracle of AI.
I think there are at least two issues involved. One
is how to do income redistribution, and that is a
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
(00:50):
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
(01:11):
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
(01:32):
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
(02:05):
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
(02:26):
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
(02:49):
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
(03:11):
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
(03:31):
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
(03:54):
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,
(04:15):
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
(04:38):
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
(05:01):
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
(05:22):
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
(05:44):
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
(06:05):
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
(06:25):
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
(06:46):
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
(07:08):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:33):
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
(08:55):
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
(09:15):
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
(09:36):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:17):
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
(10:39):
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
(11:00):
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,
(11:22):
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
(11:42):
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
(12:05):
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
(12:28):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:12):
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,
(13:34):
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
(13:54):
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
(14:18):
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
(14:40):
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
(15:01):
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
(15:23):
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,
(15:44):
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.
(16:04):
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.
(16:26):
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
(16:49):
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
(17:11):
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
(17:32):
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
(17:52):
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
(18:13):
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
(18:35):
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
(18:56):
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
(19:17):
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,
(19:38):
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
(20:00):
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
(20:22):
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
(20:46):
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
(21:08):
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.
(21:29):
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,
(21:50):
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.
(22:12):
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
(22:34):
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.
(22:55):
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
(23:15):
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
(23:37):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:25):
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
(25:48):
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
(26:11):
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
(26:31):
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
(26:52):
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
(27:12):
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
(27:35):
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.
(27:58):
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
(28:19):
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
(28:42):
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
(29:02):
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
(29:30):
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
(29:53):
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.
Sleepwalkers is a production of I Heart Radio and unusual productions.
AI will make phenomenal companies and tycoons faster, and it
will also displace jobs faster than computers and the Internet.
It's already happening. That's Kai Fu Lee speaking, the former
(00:27):
head of Google China and the so called oracle of AI.
I think there are at least two issues involved. One
is how to do income redistribution, and that is a
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
(00:50):
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
(01:11):
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
(01:32):
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
(02:05):
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
(02:26):
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
(02:49):
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
(03:11):
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
(03:31):
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
(03:54):
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,
(04:15):
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
(04:38):
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
(05:01):
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
(05:22):
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
(05:44):
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
(06:05):
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
(06:25):
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
(06:46):
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
(07:08):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:33):
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
(08:55):
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
(09:15):
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
(09:36):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:17):
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
(10:39):
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
(11:00):
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,
(11:22):
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
(11:42):
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
(12:05):
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
(12:28):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:12):
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,
(13:34):
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
(13:54):
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
(14:18):
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
(14:40):
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
(15:01):
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
(15:23):
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,
(15:44):
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.
(16:04):
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.
(16:26):
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
(16:49):
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
(17:11):
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
(17:32):
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
(17:52):
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
(18:13):
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
(18:35):
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
(18:56):
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
(19:17):
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,
(19:38):
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
(20:00):
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
(20:22):
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
(20:46):
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
(21:08):
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.
(21:29):
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,
(21:50):
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.
(22:12):
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
(22:34):
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.
(22:55):
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
(23:15):
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
(23:37):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:25):
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
(25:48):
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
(26:11):
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
(26:31):
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
(26:52):
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
(27:12):
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
(27:35):
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.
(27:58):
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
(28:19):
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
(28:42):
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
(29:02):
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
(29:30):
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
(29:53):
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.
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