Transcripts For CSPAN2 Martin Ford On Rise Of The Robots 20240622

He is a frequent radio and television on to discuss his latest, rise of the robots sub to technology and the threat of a jobless future about the future work in the world in which the number of jobs can be handed over to technology. The robots or machine intelligence. The longterm consequences of the inevitable rise of the machines will be the topic of tonights lecture so pleased i may in a very autistic enthusiastic welcome for our friend martin ford. A. [applause] thank you very much and thanks for coming. Its really a pleasure to be here. I should say right off the bat i noticed in the program the title for tonights presentation is how to stop robots from stealing jobs and i have to tell you honestly i dont have an answer to that very i believe it is probably inevitable that technology is going to replace former workers and take over the economy and a challenge for us is really to figure out a way to adapt to that and to make sure that we still have continued broadbased prosperity in the future even as that unfolds and thats really the main point of my book. What im trying to do is to interview two or maybe even you might say initiate the conversation that i think is going to be critically important for all of us probably over the next couple of decades. I would say its a pretty good bet that we may well be on the leading edge of a massive disruptive way thats going to unfold may be over the next 20 years or so and its going to put a terrific amount of stress on society and on the economy. And the central idea here course is that machines are robots and smart algorithms are increasingly going to take over more of the work in the economy. They are doing things that people do and perhaps most importantly they are going to start taking over the things that people are paid to do great i think that could ultimately create a big rovlin for us. There have been a number of attempts to quantify all of this mostly undertaken by people in the academic world and they have set out to try to come up with some kind of a reasonable estimate to just how many jobs might ultimately be threatened in the numbers that they have come back with our pretty frightening, pretty harming really. Depending on the country they look at are the assumptions they have made the estimates have come back in the range of 30 to 60 of all the jobs in the economy. The most highprofile here in the United States was undertaken by researchers at oxford university. The number they came back with was half of the job that the United States could be susceptible to automation over roughly the next two decades of thats a pretty scary number. And the approach that they take or the assumption that they make when they make these estimates is to start by saying if the job is on some level fundamentally routine and repetitive and predictable than ultimately it seems likely the robot or an algorithm or some kind of technology is going to be able to automate that job. The word that is very often used to describe the jobs that will be susceptible to automation is routine and i think that can be misleading because it implies very often a job that is repetitive. If you look at the technology we have already its pretty clear we have gone far beyond simply automating Assembly Line type work. We are already well beyond that. I think a better descriptor word is really predictable. If a job the types of things you do can be predicted based on what you have done in the past than that job is likely to be susceptible and that sort of captures what is the Central Technology that is driving all of this. Machine learning is essentially having an algorithm shone through data and that might be Historical Data or Realtime Data from something thats happening right now in the real world and basically the algorithm figures out how to do things. The idea is you given al gore the man outcome that you would like to to achieve and it figures out for itself how to get there. In essence you could say its a way for computer to program itself as opposed to having a person sit down and program at step i step. Thats obviously an important change from what we have seen historically. One way to think about it in terms of whether a particular job might be susceptible is to ask yourself cut another smart person if they had a very detailed records everything you have done in the past eventually figure out how to do your job for the could they figure it out by watching you work . If the answer to that is yes i think theres a good chance a smart algorithm may be able to do the same thing. If on the other hand you are michelangelo and creating something generally knew all the time at least for the foreseeable future, i would say never i would never say never but i would say your job is relatively safe. Those kinds of jobs and the number of people paid to do those gentlemanly creative jobs is a very small fraction of our workforce. That doesnt necessarily offer us a safety net though. So if you really sit down and think about what it would mean for anywhere from 30 to 60 of the jobs in the economy to evaporate over period of perhaps 20 years its really hard to imagine too many things that would have a bigger impact on society and on the economy than that and the things you cant imagine are uniformly bad. There are things like wars and plagues and this is a big issue and something well worth giving a lot of thought to and well worth having a meaningful public conversation about. I think we really need to start to wrestle with this and figure out if indeed this is something thats really going to happen and what we are going to do about it. That has become a really critical question for us. So i thought before i get into talking about the book itself let me tell you what little bit about my background and how i came to start digging about this in writing about this. Back in the early to mid1990s i started a very Small Software company in Silicon Valley and by small i mean it was in my apartment. The First Software product was a tool for windows or grammars and Microsoft Windows was just taking off. As iran this company one thing i discovered was running a Small Software business back then was a laborintensive process. Software was shipped on physical media on cdrom. If you are going to sell a commercial Software Product and people expected it would be accompanied by a printed instruction manual. There was a lot of mandible routine work involved and when the customer ordered a software you would pack all the this stuff in a box and ship it out. Eventually as the business got bigger i ended up outsourcing back to another Small Company that specialized in Billing Software for Small Businesses like mine. They hired all kinds of people not necessarily high skill levels that did that kind of work to ship it off and handle calls from customers and that type of thing. So there were jobs for average people but as it turned out those jobs arent there for long. Within a few years the business basically change dramatically. Obviously now software is primarily delivered over the internet. In many cases Software Products are just posted in the cloud and customers access them remotely. The business that i helped source that work to actually would not dismiss by the early 2000. Much of that work had evaporated so i had an opportunity to see that unfolding in my own business and of course i was close to the technology and computing speed and how Software Development with changing and how was getting easier and easier to develop more and more sophisticated products. As i saw all of that it became obvious to me that what i was seeing in the very often stories about robots and technology and how they are impacting jobs. This is an issue that has gotten a lot of attention and i think thats a good thing. Its something that we need to wrestle with. This is a book that i think covers the fair amount of material. If you read it you hopefully wont come away with the impression that its one of those books that could have been a magazine article. There is a fair amount of stuff in there so what i want to do is touch on a few of the main ideas and some of the highlights of the things that i think are the most important. One of the first things and maybe the most important thing i do the book as i try to take on the question that is central to this and its a question that comes up more often and that question is why would this time be different . This whole idea that technology can displace workers and potentially create unemployment is a concern that goes back at a minimum 200 years. It goes all the way back to the revolt in england in the early 1800s. Since then its been raised again and again. It has come up any times and each time it has turned out to be a also alarm. Theres a long record of this alarm being raised and ultimately it always turns out to be false. I think there is a lot in common between this and the story of the little boy who cries wolf. In that story people eventually become very skeptical because the false alarm keeps getting raised and we become very complacent. In the end of course the wolf does show up and it doesnt go well so i think this issue could end up more or less the same way. Thats the primary concern that i have here. Clearly this is an issue that kind of sits at the intersection of technology and economics. Economists are very skeptical of that. Whereas with technology this time its always different. Thats the whole point. You are always going to place that no one has gone before. One of the most basic questions you can ask is if this about economic sources about technology . Ultimately its going to be about technology. I dont think theres any other mental law of economics that says people have to be people are essential to the production process. I think there is is quite a bit of evidence for that already. If you look at the new types of products and services that people are demanding that they want to spend their time with, things like spending hours on a smoker to it or playing video games and in near future they will be spending how who knows how long and virtual reality. Those are all services that are delivered essentially without people being in the loop. There is a role for people in their initial creation and the creation of content. Once the content is being created than delivering that service or simply isnt any labor content to it. Its all computing facilities essentially doing the work and i think that offers a preview of the way that things are going. I dont think theres any rule that says people always have to be essential to the production process. Its entirely possible that at some Point Technology can reach a point where there isnt much of a role for human labor anymore. Its understandable and people are skeptical because that is never happened but there are certainly instances in history that you can point to as well. Theres a new book out that selling very well and if you read that you will learn at the time of that first people were enormously skeptical. They were very smart and prominent people who said anything and airplane was never going to be feasible. Some people said it would never happen in a thousand years and others said even if it was accomplished it would never be practical. Obviously that turned out to be dramatically wrong. And yet its really difficult to be hard on the people who made that assumption. There was an enormous amount of data and evidence to suggest that simply was never going to happen. Basically people dont get into heavier than air contraptions that fly through the air. There were plenty of failures, spec secular failures to support the idea that simply wasnt going to happen. I think that sort of offers a preview of the way things are. Eventually we will get to the point where technology is capable of doing the vast majority of things that the average person is doing and that will have a very dramatic impact. In terms of articulating whats different this time one thing you can do is you can look at the example that is cited most often by the skeptics and that is agriculture. It used to be in the United States the vast majority people worked on farms. Now almost no one works on a farm. I think its less than 2 of the work wars works on a farm. Clearly that hasnt turned out to be a bad ring at all. Food is cheaper than is to be a people can move onto other roles, more fulfilling. It turned out to be a good thing so the skeptic will ask isnt that just going to happen again to . Yet if you look at what happened in agriculture clearly there was a very specific technology that impacted the Agricultural Sector and not the entire economy. What happened was millions of people did in fact lose their jobs on farms but then they moved to other sectors of the economy. They moved her stew agriculture and then to the service sector. The interesting thing to note is the fundamental nature of the work they were doing didnt change much. They were doing relatively routine repetitive work on farms and later they were doing routine repetitive work in factories and nowadays people do relatively routine work in the service sector. You might have someone working on a farm in 1900 factory in 1950 and at walmart scanning bar codes or Something Like that. Fundamentally thats the routine and repetitive work and all of that will be susceptible to these technologies Going Forward forward. You can point to a think really three things that defined Information Technology today and makes a fundamentally different than the things that came in the past and the first is acceleration. In general on im a fairly broadbased basis Information Technology is accelerating rapidly and its been doing that for decades. What that means is as you continue to double something again and again and you keep doing that over period of decades to get to the point where you are moving in absolute terms at an extraordinary rate and that is where we are now. That is why things are often developing at a surprising rate. We have been going to this redoubling process that the amount of progress we make is the second thing is that this technology for the first time on some level encapsulates machine intelligence. Its not like the tractors and plows and the harvesting equipment. We use technologies that on some level can think and solve problems and make decisions and most importantly they can learn the data and learn from that. Its very different from mechanical technologies that transformed agriculture. Third and most important is broadbased. Its not specific to any one sector of the economy the way that Agricultural Technology was. Its everywhere and its going to invade every business and every organization every industry and that includes everything that exists today and perhaps more importantly it includes all of the industries and businesses and employment sectors in the future. What that means is people will talk a lot about Creative Destruction and the fact that old things are destroyed in new things are created and thats absolutely true but i think theres a lot of evidence to suggest while there certainly will be new industries created in the future nanotechnology synthetic violet shade virtualreality which will all be very important future but its hard to imagine any of them are going to be laborintensive. I dont think any of those industries will employ huge numbers of people. We see that happening already so the real risk that we face Going Forward is processing Creative Destruction and the destruction will fall on her laborintensive industries which right now is in areas like retail, fast food hospitality all those areas that employ huge numbers of workers. Jobs will be destroyed in new things will appear in the future but they simply wont be laborintensive. Over time they will find it harder and harder to employ the work horse. Those are the reasons why i think this time could be different although certainly people remain skeptical. The second thing i say thats important that i focus on a lot in the book is that our conventional view of which jobs are likely to be automated is not quite correct. Attrition traditional view has been that the robots come after relatively unskilled jobs and the solution to that is to send people back to school and give them more training so they can move up the skills ladder and do a job that requires more of an intellectual input. Very often you might have a person who loses their job and a factory or warehouse and they send it back to school and perhaps they can find a job in an office and thats the way things are supposed to work. The problem is what we are seeing quite clearly is many the more skilled jobs are actually at least its easy to automate and did many cases more susceptible to automation than the more skilled jobs and thats especially true when they are what you might think of as midrange knowledge type jobs the kind of job where you sit in a cubicle at it computer doing some relatively routine formulaic analysis producing reports and that type of thing. Those jobs are going to be highly susceptible to this and the reason is they are fairly easy to automate. It only takes software to automate those jobs. You dont need mechanical contraptions are robotic arms or any of that expensive stuff. All it takes is software and Programming Software using Technology Like Machine Learning to figure out how to do those jobs is in many cases quite straightforward. On the other hand many of the lower skilled jobs rely on things like visual perception and dexterity and building a robot that comes close to replicating what a human being can do in terms of dexterity and the ability to perceive of environment visually and manipulate that environment is beyond science fiction. We are Getting Better and better at it but there are still many jobs that are far below on some of those are good jobs. An example would be nursing. Nursing is a good bet. I think it requires a tremendous amount of dexterity and mobility and also it requires a high skill level in problem solving. On the other hand about the jobs are not that good in a good example would be someone who is a Home Health Aide for example to assist an elderly person or to assist an older person with personal care. There are going to be a lot of those jobs and people need that service because of the demographic shift is going on so degraded that could automate that work but the reality is that building an affordable generalpurpose robot that can really help another layperson take care of themselves is really still science fiction. It just requires a tremendous amount of dexterity and flexibility in mobility and so forth. So those jobs are relatively protected but they are not great jobs. They are very lowpaying. The government says many of those jobs dont even require a High School Education for those workers. That is kind of the paradox that we are going to face in the future. Often the better jobs and any of the jobs that College Graduates would ultimately want to take a relatively susceptible to this a lot of what we would think of as lousy jobs are the ones that are going to be more difficult to automate. Looking forward we can see that automation could potentially impact in a topheavy way where some of the better jobs disappear. That creates a real problem because of pens conventional assumption about what the solution to all of this is and in terms of conventional ways to address the issue of automation theres only one tool in the toolbox and that is ever more education. That is really the only policy that is out there. And the idea is to continue to have people moving up the skills ladder. As they point out in the book i think the problem with the skills ladder is that is not a ladder at all. Its more like a perry and there are so many jobs of the top. There are only so many of those really highskilled creative type jobs up there. It has never been the case that we have had an economy where an enormous number of people have been engaged in that kind of work. We have always had an economy where most people have done relatively routine predictable works of for that reason the work has been available and demanded by the economy has been a relatively good match with what people are capable of. What we see now is basically that type of work is going to start disappearing on a wholesale basis and the idea that we can somehow train everyone and cram it into that region at the top of that. Med will be an realistic for a number of reasons one being that people obviously have a range of talents and capabilities and not everyone is capable of being trained to be a Rocket Scientist scientist. Its also the case that machines are coming for a lot of those jobs and a lot of them are essentially going to disappear. Even if we could in fact train everyone for those jobs i think its unlikely there would be enough of them. I think the implication of that Going Forward is this conventional idea that education is simply not going to work out so well. We will have to ultimately move toward a less conventional and more radical solution to all of this. That is the main problem that we are here to face. So the second thing or the third thing that ive really focus on is that as jobs are automated its really not just an issue of the impact on personal economic security. Obviously this is something that can really have a dramatic impact on individuals and on the very fabric of society. It can be a huge social issue and social problem if people become unemployed or their wages fall so low that they find it difficult to survive in the economy. Beyond that there are more general economic issues. The point is that we have to have consumers who are capable of buying the products and services produced by the economy economy. That is ultimately what drives the economy and its ultimately driven by and consumption. You have to have people out there that can bide what you produce and there is already evidence to suggest that inequality is making out less and less feasible. A good example would be someone like bill gates. He hasnt kerry got an infinite amount of purchasing power. He can buy anything he wants but the reality is he doesnt want to just buy anything he wants. He is not going to go out and buy 1000 cars. Hes not going to buy 1000 smartphones and obviously not going to sit down and eat 1 million restaurant meals. So if you would affect take purchasing power and you come for 1000 average people and concentrated into the hands of just one person and thats essentially what has been going on in our economy clearly that take something out of demand. It undermines the economy. Eram is viable consumers who are capable of buying the products and services. Talking about secular stagnation that is a phenomenon where there is not enough productive Investment Opportunities in the economy. Alternately that relates directly to a lack of demand in the economy. If you think of people love plenty of money to spend you stand to reason there is plenty of Investment Opportunities with research and development. But that there is not a vibrant demand is part of our problem as we see more and more across the world clearly that is not the only thing but i would argue it is part of it already and has inequality gets more extreme absolutely that is something we can expect there is every reason to worry it will be a bigger problem. I think the bottom line with all of this is in the future we face a fundamental choice it is easy to imagine this does not have to be a bad thing think of a technological utopia in the world where machines and technology to all of the unpleasant work no one has to do a job that they hate everyone has more time, more opportunity for leisure, to do things that they find genuinely fulfilling or educational opportunities. That can sound terrific and this is a scenario very often pointed out from those that are gungho on technology they often point out the scenario. I dont think it is wrong but the problem is in todays world and historically jobs and incomes are a package deal if you lose your job now matter how unpleasant, did you lose your in, as well and that is a real problem. The risk we face we will see more and more inequality on steroids we already see literally all the growth in the economy from the top on to study recently said in 17 states it was 100 percent of all Income Growth could to the top 1 percent the bottom 99 literally got nothing in terms of participating with the growth of the economy already i would say is is it is extraordinarily extreme and i take it will become more so. Beyond just the fact of the equality itself is the issue of economic insecurity that for a lot of people it will become a struggle to hold onto anything approaching a middleclass lifestyle. Of more solid edge middleclass jobs in areas like offices that people rely on and off to end replaced with the demand economy to sell things on ebay but those opportunities is the winnertakeall distribution and. It is hard to generate so people will have a hard time to hold onto their lifestyle you may have a lot of people whod genuinely face economic security. An extreme example is a homeless person who has a laptop with a device to go have wifi to access said digital abundance so we talk about all of these things that technology has created but at the same time the individual does not have access that is considered the necessities of life. Because those that have the basic type of security they are really starting to gear disappear. This will require a decision on our part. I dont think it will happen automatically to say it will happen because it wont. That is the evidence. It is certainly better than anyone other system for sure but but to modify to have it continue to work with this new reality. Ultimately we will have to decouple the jobs from the income so to survive economically you have to have some kind job for traditional and come income. That is important in the United States we dont have that social safety net that other countries have it is a real problem here. We are on the of forefront but we dont have a good social safety net so potentially this could impact quite heavily and ultimately it will have a radical solution of one kind or another that makes the most sense of guaranteed basic and tom. In, that is along the political spectrum and by libertarians that thought it would be a great idea to have the security of minimum and come but ultimately it is the direction we have to move and that at the same time it is almost unthinkable with todays political environment but that is the paradox that we face how to make it to a place we need to go where it seems virtually impossible especially with todays politics. Even if we thought education would work and we dont in the long run, we could not do that either because our political system is to become so dysfunctional we learned about checks and balances one other great after parents of the american system is all checks with no balance. It is discouraging in the nearterm hard to imagine how we will move forward but my hope is by initiating a conversation and to talk more about this to get more people involved we can begin to get this on radar and start to talk about it and move toward a meaningful solution. I will stop there. Thank you. [applause] and i am happy to answer any questions. Please use the microphone. Ag for that wonderful and . Summary of so many different things. Full disclosure i am a home care worker who has a ph. D. In history. That came first. [laughter] i fell into which in some respects but i have come to reevaluate my situation. Went out economically but not spiritually. I find the work i do with old people toward disabled people is the most clearly by able worker have ever done i always wonder about the evaluation of federal programs said teaching and college has a really help to anybody but now i am sure. Your insights are valid about the basic work for a long time so that suggest that perhaps what needs to happen in Something Like a major reevaluation of how we think about that pyramid that you talk abontz. Maybe we need to infer that not physically but in our mind. How do we do that . I think we do this individually and separately and if we have real results and Real Solutions it will come from a collective effort i know this sounds like socialism but we believe in consultation and Regional Support socialism but we do believe the Village Store house that would balance those that have more than they need with those said to have less mismanaged by local officials so there are possible answers. They have not been tried or they have been tried badly in they have been unable socialism but we need to open this up again for serious consultation because the wolf is us it isnt external we do this to ourselves and then we can decide how we will be. We are not helplessly on a train we can do this differently her troy think that is what you are advocating in large measure but our assumptions we are caught up with capitalism and individualism and it will be pulled out of our hands if recall voluntarily start to let go of our teddy bear for security. That is the message i take from your book we to do serious rethinking. Edits the main point i agree with a lot of what you said. The idea of a minimal guarantee floor ties in closely with that. You make a point you get a lot of fulfillment from your work so my guess is if you hatta a guaranteed floor you would not just up and sit on the couch all day. Or a house of justice would be evaluating our situations to help us not to judge to say your bag or ur porter and if that was a real support then that would give the confidence to take a risk for those that might be satisfying or could be creative. Exactly. That is the point that i make there is a wellknown phenomenon i talked about in the book and says if you have more of a safety net you will take more risk and it has been proven in lots of places and documented with automobiles with more safety stuff like seatbelts it did not result in fewer accidents as they took more risks. Now on the of playground you see the spongy floors but they still injured themselves at the same rate because they climb on the outside. So with the economic arena week it doesnt have to be generous but a floor, people would do things on top of that manchus to work in areas that give them meaning or the before the first time they could afford to. A lot of people are locked into a job they dont get meaning from because they need the income. So i think that would be enormously positive. I dont think guaranteed income will create the slacker society river by bases around. We will probably come up with better results. Someone is behind me but you have not mentioned sustainability about the environment i am thinking some of the collapse are the crisis might be beneficial because it would bring us up short to make us think about the accelerating approach we have taken. The question is can we be a cancer on this planet and ba and get away with it . So that disruption caused by Technology May give us an opportunity. It isnt automatic but give us a chance how to get to zero girls to make it work without being unpleasant. Please make sure you ask your question in the form of a question and not having a conversation. [applause] could you pick a couple of technologies that are emerging and which jobs each technology would potentially replace . Give it is broadbased if you look at the example in the book there is the industrial perception a company that focused on building boxes is they check the technology from microsoft kinect if you have not heard of that it is the Machine Vision systems to hook up to a video game that allows you to play video game around the room without a controller so it could watch you to see the way that it moves and microsoft developed this to create this technology that is extraordinarily affordable. Theyve really stick with the purpose to enhance your video game and within one month there were all these researchers using this technology and robots to get a threedimensional vision. It is a cross fertilization to guess somebody industrial perception build a system that can load and unload boxes and move them at the rate of one every second or every six seconds for a human worker saw was system like this will not get injured or file Workers Compensation claim. Is inevitable it will displace a lot of people but that is at the lowend. At the high end the same type of Image Recognition Technology Used to take on the work would be done by radiologist to examine in tissue samples and medical imagery and at some point it is inevitable that radiology is up and told amounts of training with years and years of residency but that could be done entirely by machines that is the extraordinary broad base. It is japan the population is starting to ruth decline rapidly and given your perspective is that a bad thing . Will the productivity of the robots offset the issues of a declining population . It is an interesting question i talk about in the book that you make expect those to offset each other. People make predictions about the future has people leave the workforce. What is key to focus on this is the same issue that i focus on that as people age and dropped out of the work force eventually they died. [laughter] even as their older the consumption is geared more to health care. Saudia may have any concrete with fewer workers but also fewer consumers so those are a wash. Japan is the most extreme case of this phenomenon so we ought to look at japan to get a preview of what is coming of what will happen in the United States and if you look there you dont see any broad based worker shortage in specific areas like caring for the elderly that we would expect in fact wheezy is deflationary with prices and wages have been falling for decades. If there were a real worker shortage you would expect the wages to increase and that isnt happening so i am skeptical that demographic will outweigh automation. With the societal guilt when it comes to automation and the resulting job loss not necessarily for pragmatic things but the pseudo ethical idea and the system of guaranteed minimum income to feel that could offset the guilt that comes with the increased efficiency of the nation even at the loss of jobs . I dont think anyone feels guilty because someone loses their job on the of loading dock. That is a miserable job and almost guaranteed to be injured. We can pretty much agree with that except the people who do that job do it because they have to end if we get rid of it then what is the alternative . The there is no reason to feel guilty. It is a great thing. I skimmed through your book through the crack talking and i thought you said in the past there has been a lot of movements posted that is right you dont deal with those factors and the distance yourself but you talked about this time it is different in so many ways and i agree but a lot of that was workers in one field where there were plenty of other areas but the circumstances if they come to pass that does not seem that would necessarily be the case. If so is it things that would cause them to collapse unless those circumstances no longer hold and a new such movement could be more successful . I think we definitely will see people approach it as it unfolds it is my a primary point. It is not like agriculture but it will come every where there is no new sector to of sorbate so that is what is different. Will that lead to another revolt . It is possible resaw of hints of that with wall street also was unfocused there but it demonstrated there is is a concern about the general issue out there. I would not think it would be a good thing. If it were a movement geared toward technology and would not want to see that happen because i believe technology is clearly the only thing that makes us better off than people who live 100 years ago. A foreperson today is better off of a wealthy person because of technology and you dont want to stop that but adapt for it to continue and with the right adaptation retrieve and accelerates but if we dont we will have all kinds of problems. There is a headline in the satirical newspaper the idea that every chinese factory workers here that robots may never take their job. [laughter] there is an old saying that if members of the capitalist class had to mine coal than there would quickly create robots to do that work for them. So my question i guess it is along the lines of with this income inequality if that was a trend through the 60s and 70s people were advocating and why not automate the undesirable work . But it seems there are social forces that contests that from happening we could have a basic income right now without the need to automate in the first place but why isnt that possible . So do you think a Movement Toward that social radical change that you talk about will be possible without a radical social forces contesting . And what do you think the last human job will be . [laughter]. [laughter] i will delay the second. But if there will be social upheaval there are reasons to expect that. Were not very good to take on big problems in a crisis. There are not many examples where everythings logically and solve problems i do have some concerns of a crisis. If there is hope not that hypocrisy will do the jobs but they might come to realize there will buy this stuff they are selling if they come to understand that that i think there is some hope that the people that move fin the direction is a hopeful but on the other hand, you to make the same argument about Climate Change to realize those dangers but that has not happened so were all so naive to suggest that but i do think there is of very high risk to have a social and economic crisis before this gets the attention and the solution that it deserves. As for the last job . Maybe something in health care. Probably something that involves into relationships with people in a way only a human being can do although if you really think about what happens with these technologies and far enough into the future 30 years or 50 years from now it is hard to think of any job you could say with certainty would be safe. Thank you very much for this important work and initiating this dialogue. I have not had a chance to read all of it the you have a section dealing with singular where technology and computers and intelligence reaches the stage it has grown to cause disruption to our lives. Years ago interfered a guy who did not know if it would be faster or slower. Do you consider what we see here to be part over a the debt for a precursor to that slow run up . It is possible. I try not to make too many predictions with security initially he got the idea of the term from a black hole it is something you cannot see beyond. Is darken that this singularity that if we really reached a point if we were moving so rapidly nobody could understand what was happening then it is impossible to imagine or say with any certainty what happens beyond that and so i am at odds when people who can predict will be on that or to suggest how it unfolds so i am a gnostic to think we could have a rapid acceleration but if we do that is about all you can say is that it will happen to be extraordinarily destructive and beyond that is unknown. I also think singularity is something that will not happen. All the time will tell. Obviously that is not the case so is this the case it will increase faster are that we will do unnecessary work . And that is the same case with the job market. Could you give us a more solid it cooperage to proceed to get that at the federal level . Benitez primarily a question for someone who is more politically oriented. ni to eventually get more people involvednrnr that includes people that are politically oriented but one thing that is fascinating it will be interesting if it does but i think it is extraordinarily toxic. [laughter]nr but perhaps some journalists will and that will be very fascinating. And with those developed economies like china. Todays bill still build off those economies . Cry a talk about that to some extent but in the United States with the private with robots to manufacturing so the impact is not that important it will have bigger impact in china pavane here and especially a with investment that powers the chinese economy to have us so sustaining consumer economy and create jobs for that. And there is some evidence to get more into come into the hands of the consumers. The other thing i would focus on is it is a problem for countries that are not as far alone as china. Says impoverished countries become wealthy through low wage manufacturing jobs. Liked south korea with lowwage factory workers it is hard to see how those four countries are going to find a way to get on that path to prosperity. You said earlier that technology has been improving allies. But at some point there has to be a point of diminishing returns were really doesnt help any more . Are it will start becoming so slow it will slow down . Could this go on forever and ever . I dunno about forever but for the economy. There are issues that there is a lot of talk some technologies we developed to contribute like Facebook Gore twitter. Are they hoping or detracting . [laughter] those are valid concerns. With robotics and injured Artificial Intelligence that we have robots to take over the zero worked in the warehouses potentially a much bigger thing than have people waste time on social media so we could move to where we solve the problem that it is a speculative question. Fate you very much. [applause] and