Robots Will Steal Your Job, but That's OK | Federico Pistono | TEDxVienna

hello everyone hi welcome so how are you doing today good yeah it's a wonderful day isn't it well let me fix that for you I'll talk about jobs can I have please a quick show of hands raise your hand if you either work or if you know somebody close to you who works in any of these areas how about driving that's trucks delivery buses taxes anything raise your hand how about janitors housecleaning cashiers or no one no one knows anyone who works ok good secretaries real estate accounting retail manufacturing journalism ok I'd say about 70% of you good good robots will steal your job laughter ridicule contempt this is always greeted by the establishment of economists about four years ago when I first started thinking about these issues at the time I helped start an organization called The Zeitgeist movement and we were thinking of ways on how to build a better society now at the time nobody took us seriously but things have changed now what changed well very few people laughing 2009 Martin 4 comes out with lights in the tunnel where he paints a picture of an increasingly automated economy lots of jobs are being replaced by machines and very few new jobs have been created 2011 to MIT economies they have pretty much the same thesis so let's look at the evidence for this shall we Kodak the ones undisputed giant of the photography industry they had a 90% market share in the u.s. in 1976 by the year 1984 they were employing a hundred 45,000 people and in 2012 they have a net worth of negative a billion dollars when they went bankrupt why because they failed to predict the importance of exponential trends when it comes to technology on the other hand Instagram a digital photography company the same year 2012 they had 13 employees and they were sold to Facebook for a billion dollars now this is kind of ironic because Kodak pioneered digital photography they actually invented the first digital camera when they came out in 1975 with the point oh one megapixel digital camera but they thought it was a toy and did pay attention said that's what happens with Exponential's we don't pay attention so let's play a little game with you let's be a more interactive school 30 steps now imagine I take 30 steps linear that's one two three where do I get if I get to 30 about the end of the stage right there okay how about if I take 30 SEC spinelli 2 4 8 16 where do I get we're outside actually I get to the moon by the way this is not to scale the moon is much farther away and back and I still have enough steps to circle the Earth eight times over that's what exponential means how do I notice I just ask the Wolfram Alpha now Foxconn the world's largest manufacturer of electronic components they make pretty much anything so if you've got something on your lap or on your pocket that makes noises and you know it's blinking and bright and probably tweeting right now they made it not just Apple they make anything it's a multinational corporation worth a hundred billion dollars which employs 1.2 million people what are they doing they're automating of course in fact they're about to deploy an army of 1 million robots to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency Canon is doing the same going fully automated very soon lots of other companies are following now what if Walmart follows biggest multinational corporation in the world employs 2.1 million people what if they automate well they can't write they don't have the technology to that we most certainly do Amazon knows this very well so this is a graph made by a fellow author Andrew McAfee from MIT we pretty much agree on the analysis as you can see profits investments they're all going up and up and up for corporate investments and multinational corporations but the red line which is the employment-to-population ratio is going down and down and down and we both agree that when it comes to automation we ain't seeing nothing yet this is the Google autonomous car you know the futuristic car drives itself without a human driver yeah by the way it's as cool as it sounds I was inside this is me at NASA a few months ago and it's a pretty neat piece of technology they have all sorts of sensors and lasers and GPS and machine learning algorithms drives itself it's safer better than any human driver doesn't get tired follow every Street rule never crashes never breaks any rule whatsoever basically it just works and it's better than humans problem is 3.6 million people in the United States alone work driving I mean the drive for a living that's 2.6 percent of the population Austria and Europe they have very similar numbers I think these people might be affected by this counter to this kind of technology don't you so accounting retail manufacturing translations no one is safe journalism as The Wall Street Journal Journal puts it software is eating the world so what do we do should we despair how about putting taxes and technology or impose more regulation or maybe do some education reforms basically find any clever ways to get everyone a damn job that's what these guys are proposing that's what the presidential campaign is all about and it sounds reasonable enough after all fit famously said by Voltaire is the sentence work saves us from three great evils boredom vice and need he sat down in 1759 but is that really the case today in this society I think we might be missing a big opportunity it was Confucius who said that if you choose a job you love you never have to work a day in your life brilliant I agree problem getting a job you love one that is fulfilling and that allows you to follow your moral code today I don't know about you but pretty damn hard in fact according to what shift index as much as 80% of the people hate their job 80% that's four out of five spending most of their useful life time doing something they don't particularly enjoy now in 2012 with this kind of technology at our fingertips guys but doesn't that make you a little mad a little bit and so we are in a current of a work paradox because we work long and hard hours on jobs we hate to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like genius and so we have to adjust to what the economy allows us to perform and the sad reality is that most jobs unfortunately uh neither fulfilling nor do they create any value for society and I don't think I have to name which jobs I think you know which ones by the way they're going to be automated very soon and I suspect within our lifetime so we're screwed that's the end of my talk by now I think there is light in the tunnel because I spent here researching this problem and I think I might have cracked it I might have discovered what the purpose of life is and I'm going to give it to you right now TEDx Vienna would you like to know okay here it goes the purpose of life is to have robots steal your job all right let's be serious I suppose I don't know my purpose let alone your purpose or that of anyone else but I'm pretty sure what the purpose of life is not and the purpose of life cannot be to work produce and consume more and more and more so here is a radical idea the goal of the future is full unemployment so we can play that's why we have to destroy the present political economic system this is no light statement consider it comes from legendary author and futurist articie Clarke you see I think we must do away with the absolutely spacious notion that everybody has to earn a living it is a fact today the one in 10,000 can create the technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest and so the youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living and so we keep inventing new jobs because of this false idea that everyone has to be employed at some kind of drudgery or another because according to Darwinian Malthusian theory they must justify their right to exist and so we have inspector miss pectoris of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors the true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living I know what you're thinking these are naive words words of a young mind oblivious to the intricate and complex fabric of society and economic system that might be true good thing they are not my words though but that of genius future is back mr. fuller interviewed in 1970 by New York magazine now okay this is all very nice but look we gotta face reality okay tomorrow gotta go to work well tomorrow's Sunday but on Monday we gotta go to work we buy food pay the rent pay the bills look you can't just you know leave everything so how do you solve this problem now as I said I spent years researching this problem so here is the short answer there is no short answer that's why I wrote a book to explain this and I spent the last years traveling some 20 countries I went to NASA I studied at singularity University and I spoke with some of the greatest minds on this planet to tackle this problem as it turns out you need a plan and not just any plan you need a multi-year plan that involves lots of people and everyone has a different plan so it's pretty complicated and kind of short in time and they told me to keep it simple the TED guys so I made a picture of two possible futures to the left we've got exponential technologies and limited resources I think that's a fair assumption to make we add the need for growth and labor for income that's the basis of every society today to me in a few years that equals to mass unemployment runaway climate change resource depletion starvation worldwide violence and civil arrests not too nice to the right we still have exponential technologies and limited resources we not really change that unless we obliterate the human race or break the laws of physics but what we can change is our attitude our goals and our purpose open-source DIY innovator self-sustaining communities I think this will redefine the idea of work by letting go of the idea of infinite growth and labor for income we can use our ingenuity instead of finding your clever ways to get everyone a new job maybe useless we can use the same ingenuity to work less have more free time have more fulfilling lives restore global resource balance and generally have a more resilient system so uh-huh you sir are a techno you tow peon you believe technology solves everything that's what everyone tells me to the contrary I believe technology is merely a facilitator of your intention look back to the picture if you subscribe to the idea that we have infinite needs that require an infinite amount of work and infinite growth to be satisfied which by the way is impossible exponential technology will help you get there exponentially faster to these awful results okay but we've been living like this for thousands of years are we supposed to just give that up isn't that against human nature well we had slavery for thousands of years we gave that up I believe we are at the dawn of a new civilization but we can only evolve as a society if we are ready to accept the some of the assumptions that we most oh dear we have to let go of them technology was never meant to increase productivity and growth so we can work longer hours anywhere anytime on any device that's in stanity it was meant to make our lives better and by the way this isn't anything new people have been talking about this for ages Aristotle 2,300 years ago said exactly the same thing so why is that hasn't this happen in 2,300 years well I believe you need three conditions in order to achieve massive social change you need the vision the resources and the technology to fulfill your dreams so in the past we had the vision and the resources but we didn't have the technology and now we have the resources for a little more still and we certainly have the technology but we've lost their way I believe we are fighting a lost battle we can't win against nature and its limited resources we depend on nature and we certainly can't win against robots and AI and their exponential increasing intelligence but we can win with them so ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters comrades and friends we have many challenges ahead of us as a species among which run away climate change increasing inequality and massive unemployment and I believe we can solve all of these challenges and more if we change our vision our perspective our focus what drives our lives and so I wrote this book which is called robots will steal your job but that's ok and it can be more than ok can be marvelous I believe every human being is an invaluable masterpiece from the moment they're born and we as a species we are meant for great things greater than we can even conceive right now with our limited brains and compulsory work for the sake of survival is an obstacle that prevents us from achieving these goals and so since then I started giving speeches and talks around the world and I co-founded a benefit corporation with other three extraordinary individuals from NASA and singularity University that I hope will inspire people to do just that to make this world a reality to express their full cognitive and intellectual potential and then I look back to my past and I realize I'm 26 years old almost 27 I'm getting old and then I look at the future and I say this and I would really love to create a future that I can be proud of to create a future where one day my kids will grow in thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 240,936

Rating: 4.7428002 out of 5

Keywords: journalism, tedx, robots will steal your job, science, community, ted, Austria, ted x, ted talks, english, ted talk, social change, Federico Pistono, tedx talk, TedxVienna, technology, tedx talks, business

Id: kYIfeZcXA9U

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 08 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/noxbl]

What he really should've been saying is "we should automate everything, give goods and services to everyone for free and get rid of the monetary system"

I'm curious if that is possible though. I see zeitgeist claiming the technology is there, but I haven't seen the evidence. They should get a load of inventors and scientists to build a 'free city'.

[u/splashback]

This presentation is extremely poor, and is not worth your time to watch. The presenter wastes a lot of time teasing the audience: "I've figured out the scret. Do you want to know? I will tell you. Right here, right now, at TEDx Vienna." Great, get to the point.

It's cute, but the main point is: "yeah, robots are going to take your job. Buy my book."

[u/falser]

This talk is clearly ripped off from Andrew McAfee's much better TEDx talk

http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs.html

[u/donotclickjim]

The truth is we are experiencing the next industrial revolution. It will be a painful process as not everyone will buy into others ideas of what the next civilization will be. We also have to fight over who is going to clean the toilets, pick the vegetables, and do all the other work no one wants to do until the machines can replace the worker. Until that day comes someone will be need to do the work no one wants to do and as robots replace workers and unemployment goes up the wages for labor will go down. So, in conclusion, if you don't want to do crappy work be the person who works on the robots to do it for you!

[u/mrhatestheworld]

Ha, jokes on them. I fix robots for a living. Stupid robots won't be stealing my job.

[u/ckosuth]

This guy just is not getting any reactions. Such a let down of a TEDx audience for such an interesting topic!

[u/Cognoggin]

Hello, I'm selling this book!

[u/chickenbutt4000]

Who has read his book "Robots will steal your job but that's OK"?

[u/Transceiver]

Had a good discussion with my friends about this topic, and we ended up making a list of jobs where we prefer a human over a robot. Note that we are comparing a human who's good at it, vs a robot who's also good (so think Morgan Freeman vs Robot Morgan Freeman).

• Actor / actress
• Teacher
• Babysitter
• Therapist
• Tour guide
• Scientist
• Philosopher (moral philosophy)
• Judge, jury
• Doctor, nurse
• Author, singer, DJ, dancer, any sort of artist
• Sex worker, prostitute, porn actor
• Party planner (robots don't know how to have fun)
• Chefs, bartenders.

These jobs are safe, for an indefinite time. There will always be a demand for that human-human connection. But how much demand can there possibly be for actors and nurses and authors? At today's consumer culture, not much; billions will be out of work. Today, we want mass-produced things, whether it be gadgets or entertainment. We want it because that's how huge companies make the most profit.

The solution for the problem in this video doesn't come from policy makers and governments, but from a shift in our demands as consumer. As long as we keep spending money on things made by robots, there will be more robots. We as consumers create the jobs; supply and demand is a loop, not a top-down distribution network.

So try to envision a future where 80% of the jobs are for entertainers, and most of the entertainment will be created for a small audience: a personalized play, song, story, fantasy. Sites like Etsy and Deviant Art already connect people to the artists / makers directly. There will be a lot more sex workers; people pay a lot of money for a private cam show already. How about professionals who will help you with your social life: a dating coach, someone to take you to cool parties, a friend-for-pay.

The future will be fun, but we have to guide it ourselves. Don't spend so much money on the next mass-produced gadget, the next cheaply-made, disposable, planned-obsolete, Walmart-retailed thing, and start paying other people for experiences. Go out to restaurants and bars; go watch a local play, a concert; go to a dance club, a basement rave; give money to street performers. Your money is your vote. Which future do you want?