Federico Pistono: Robots Will Steal Your Job, but That’s OK (Full Transcript)

By the year 1984 they were employing 145,000 people and in 2012 they had a net worth of negative $1 billion 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, the digital photography company the same year, 2012, they had 13 employees and they were sold to Facebook for $1 billion. 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 a 0.01 megapixel digital camera. But they thought it was a toy and they didn’t pay attention so that’s what happens with exponentials: we don’t pay attention.

So let’s play a little game with you, let’s be 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, OK. How about if I take 30 steps exponentially? 2, 4, 8, 16… where do I get? Where? Outside? Actually I get to the Moon. By the way, this is not the scale, the Moon is much further away and back and I still have enough steps to circle the Earth 8x. That’s what exponential means. How do I know this? I just asked WolframAlpha.

Foxconn, the world’s largest manufacturer of electronic components, they make pretty much anything. So if you’ve got something on your lap or in your pocket, that makes noises and it’s blinking and bright and it’s probably tweeting right now, they made it. Not just Apple, they make anything. It’s a multinational corporation worth $100 billion which employs 1.2 million people. What are they doing? They are automating, of course. In fact, they are 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 corporations in the world, employs 2.1 million people, what if they automate? Well, they can’t, right? They don’t have the technology to do that, most certainly they 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 are 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 that drives itself without a human driver. 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, 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 US alone work driving, meaning they drive for a living. That’s 2.6% of the population. Austria and Europe they have very similar numbers. I think these people might be affected by this kind of technology, don’t you? So accounting, retail, manufacturing, translations, no one is safe. Journalism — as the Wall Street Journal puts it software is eating the world.

So what do we do? Should we despair? How about putting taxes on 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 famously said by Voltaire: “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.” He said that in 1759. 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 will 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 it’s pretty damn hard. In fact, according to Deloitte’s Shift Index that says as much as 80% of the people hate their job. 80%, that’s 4 out of 5 spending most of their useful lifetime 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 little mad? Little bit? So we are in kind of 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 what the economy allows us to perform and the sad reality is that most jobs unfortunately are 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 are going to be automated very soon and I suspect within our lifetime. So we are screwed. That’s the end of my talk, bye. No, I think there’s light in the tunnel, because I spent a year 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, TEDxVienna. Would you like to know?

OK, 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 purpose of life is not and the purpose of life cannot be to work, produce, and consume more and more and more.

So here’s 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, considering it comes from legendary author and futurist Arthur C. 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 that 1 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 in some kind of drudgery or another because according to Darwinian-Malthusian theory they must justify their right to exist. And so we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.

The true business of people should 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 of economic system. That might be true. Good thing they are not my words, though, but that of genius futurist Buckminster Fuller interviewed in 1970 by New York Magazine.

Now, OK, this is all very nice, but look, we have got to face reality, OK? Tomorrow — got to go to work, well, tomorrow is Sunday, but on Monday we got to go to work. Buy food, pay the rent, pay the bills, look, we can’t just 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 multiyear plan that involves lots of people and everyone has a different plan. So it’s pretty complicated, I’m 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 unrest. Not too nice.

To the right we still have exponential technologies and limited resources, we can’t 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 innovators, self-sustaining communities I think this will redefine the idea of work by letting go the idea of infinite growth and labor for income, we can use our ingenuity instead of finding 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 more resilient system.

Ah ha! You, sir, are a techno-utopian! 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, isn’t possible, exponential technology will help you get there exponentially faster to these awful results.

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 a dawn of a new civilization but we can only evolve as a society if we are ready to accept that some of the assumptions that we most hold 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 instant-nity. It was meant to make our lives better.

By the way, this isn’t anything new. People have been talking about this for ages. Aristotle, 2300 years ago, said exactly the same thing. So why hasn’t this happened in 2300 years? Well, I believe you need three conditions satisfied 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 the 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 exponentially 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: runaway climate change, increasing inequality and massive unemployment and I believe we can solve all 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’, it 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.

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 see 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.

 

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