Name: Why the rise of the robots won't mean the end of work
Uploaded: 2017-12-11T02:44:03.000Z
Duration: 9 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A decade ago, robots still seemed pretty limited.

And computers don’t just win chess any more, they can win Jeopardy.

“What is the of the Elegance of the Hedgehog?”

“There are about 200 possible moves for the average position in Go.”

And it’s causing some to forecast a future where humans can’t find work.

“There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.”

I believe this is going to be one of the biggest challenges we face in the coming decades.

But if you ask economists, they tend to have a pretty different view from the futurists

Do you worry that new technologies could cause mass unemployment?

I have devoted my career to worrying about the labor market, particularly worrying about

the living standards of low and moderate income workers.

One of the reasons a lot of economists are skeptical about robots taking all the jobs

There was a spike of automation anxiety in the late 20s, early 1930s when machines

were starting to take over jobs on farms and also in factories.

This article from 1928 points out that there used to be guards who opened and closed the

doors on new york subway trains, and people who took tickets before there were turnstiles.

And I just love this quote: It says “building materials are mixed like dough in a machine

and literally poured into place without the touch of a human hand.”

Automation anxiety surged again in the late 1950s, early 1960s.

President Kennedy ranks automation first as job challenge.

“Computers and automation threaten to create vast unemployment and social unrest”

This article from 1958 is about 17,000 longshoremen who were protesting automation on the piers.

And if you don't know what longshoremen are, that’s because there aren’t many of them left.

Technology destroyed a lot of those jobs.

This chart shows the percentage of prime-age people with jobs in the US.

Ever since women joined the workforce in big numbers, it’s stayed around 80%, outside

During this period, technology displaced some 8 million farmers in the US, 7 million factory

workers, over a million railroad workers, hundreds of thousands of telephone  operators,

we’ve lost gas-pumpers, elevator attendants, travel agents.

Tons of jobs have died but work persists.

What you realize when you look through those old reports is that it’s really easy for

us to see the jobs being replaced by machines.

It’s a bit harder to visualize the jobs that come from what happens next.

New technology creates jobs in a few ways.

There are the direct jobs for people who design and maintain the technology, and sometimes

whole new industries built on the technology.

But the part we tend to forget is the indirect effect of labor-saving inventions.

When companies can do more with less, they can expand, maybe add new products or open

new locations, and they can lower prices to compete.

And that means consumers can buy more of their product, or if we don’t want any more of

it, we can use the savings to buy other things.

Maybe we go to more sports events or out to dinner more often.

Maybe we get more haircuts or add more day-care for the kids.

This process is how our standard of living has improved over time and it’s always required

The key economic logic here is automation does indeed displace workers who are doing

work that got automated, but it doesn't actually affect the total number of jobs in the economy

Warnings about the “end of work” tend to focus on this part and not all of this

-- like a widely cited study from 2013, “According to research conducted by Oxford

University, nearly half of all current jobs in America --” “47 percent of all our

jobs--” “47 percent of US jobs in the next decade or two, according to researchers

at Oxford, will be replaced by robots.”

That study assessed the capabilities of automation technology.

It didn’t attempt to estimate the actual “extent or pace” of automation or the

Now, all this doesn’t mean that the new jobs will show up right away or that they’ll

be located in the same place or pay the same wage as the ones that were lost.

All it means is that the overall need for human work hasn’t gone away.

Technologists and futurists don’t deny that’s been true historically, but they question

whether history is a good guide of what’s to come.

Fundamentally the argument is that this time it’s different.

Imagine a form of electricity that could automate all the routine work.

I mean, that’s basically what we are talking about here.

And so It’s going to be across the board.

And it is easy to underestimate technology these days.

In a 2004 book, two economists  assessed the future of automation and concluded that

tasks like driving in traffic would be “enormously difficult” to teach to a computer.

That same year, a review of 50 years of research concluded that “human level speech recognition

How many miles has google’s autonomous vehicle driven?”

“According to Recode, that’s because the company announced its self-driving car project,

which was created in 2009, has racked up over two million miles of driving experience.”

This is the textbook chart of advancement in computer hardware — it’s the number

of transistors that engineers have squeezed onto a computer chip over time.

Already pretty impressive, but notice that this isn’t a typical scale: these numbers

On a typical linear scale it would look more like this.

It really is hard to imagine this not being massively disruptive.

And as the authors of The Second Machine Age point out, processors aren’t the only dimension