How AI Will Impact the Future of Work

23:58Kara Swisher:As anyone who's gone inside an Amazon warehouse sees, they're going to be able to replicate everything. When I saw one of the things they were doing a couple of years ago, I thought, oh, they're not going to need any of these people soon. You could see where it was headed. So Martin and then Betsy, because you had brought up that idea of robotics pairing with AI. Yeah, I think that robotics are going to have a huge impact, especially in environments that are very controlled and predictable. And an Amazon warehouse is a good example of that, right? It's walled in. Amazon controls exactly what happens in its warehouse.

24:34It can separate the people from the robots so you don't have collisions. It can reorganize the flow of packages and products through the facility, right? That's completely different than the outside world where you've got to deal with chaos. And that's why, of course, self-driving cars have taken a lot longer than many people expected. But within those controlled environments, warehouses, factories, I think eventually maybe even supermarkets, fast food restaurants. I think that robots are going to have a dramatic impact. So it's definitely not just white collar jobs that are going to be impacted.

25:10It's going to be a very broad based concern, I think.

25:14Kara Swisher:Beth, you talk about this because one of the things I remember from visiting this Amazon warehouse, these robots were putting all kinds of different things in boxes and then moving them around via this system of logistics. So you'd have a book by Sheryl Sandberg next to hairspray, next to combs, next to a fleece jacket in one tub. And I asked, why are they doing that? And they said, they know where these things are going to go. And they weren't individual orders, they were larger. It was really interesting. And this was early on. So it was more efficient because it thought differently than a person would, right?

25:51Kara Swisher:So talk a little bit about this. Oh, well, I think that absolutely those jobs are going to get mechanized away. And I think that's a job where, you know, I don't want to dismiss anyone's work. Everyone's, you know, labor is valuable. But I think those are the kinds of jobs where, you know, there's other places where we need people in society. And my hope is that the increased wealth that we get from AI will mean we can pay caregivers more. But I actually want to give you a concrete example around self-driving cars. So self-driving cars are coming, but let's think about how they operate right now.

26:33They operate best in very dense cities. Why? Why? Because they're expensive capital, and therefore they work best when they can be deployed and used for a large number of hours in the day. Now, the problem is there aren't as many people wanting to go places at 3 a.m. as there are people wanting to go somewhere at 6 a.m. or at 5 p.m. And so if you have enough self-driving cars to get everybody where they need to go, even in a highly dense area, you're going to have a bunch of those self-driving cars sitting around doing nothing for most of the day. And so I think it'll be a very long time, even in a dense city, before we end up losing the human drivers because of the fact that humans are going to be much more flexible and willing to step in during the peak times.

27:22So that's one way in which you can think about capital working with humans. Now, you might say, but the human driver has a car sitting in their garage. That's true. So as long as people have a preference to own their own car and we don't all turn to self-driving cars, that will be the scenario that we're in for quite a long time. And it'll take even longer for these self-driving cars to get out to less dense areas because the cars will not spend enough time, you know, with people in it. That's a fair point.

27:53Kara Swisher:So let's pivot and talk about how government should help citizens deal with job losses or think of, you know, how to make that transition. Should the federal government take steps to regulate the use of AI specifically to prevent job losses or at least slow them down? Or would that inevitably just help, say, China beat the U.S. in AI? What is the government's role here, Martin and then Betsy? No, I definitely don't think we should have laws, you know, preventing automation. We do see that now, right? You know, the unions at the ports are opposed to automation and so forth. And that just holds us back.

28:28That, you know, holds back progress. and it certainly does make us less competitive with other countries. I think we're going to have to figure out this inevitable transition. Trying to just slow it down is not the answer. We've got to figure out how to adapt to it. Certainly, that can be in part investing in education, community colleges, things like that, so that people can pick up new skills and to the extent they're capable of it, transition into new positions. But in the long run, I think that ultimately we're going to have to go beyond that. And we really need a new paradigm. And that's why I've written a lot about, for example, universal basic income, a guaranteed minimum income, negative income tax, those kinds of approaches where we're ultimately going to need the government to directly supplement incomes.

29:19not just so that people can survive, but so they can be consumers, right? They can go out and create demand in the economy so that we can continue to have a vibrant economy. Or as Betsy suggested, you know, if Jeff Bezos is getting all the money, you know, he can't drive the whole economy just by buying another super yacht, right?

29:39Kara Swisher:Well, he looks like he's doing a good job right now. But Betsy? So, Martin, I'm going to guess that I can get you to agree with this, even though it is about slowing things down. I think the first thing we have to do is dramatically reduce taxation on labor and move our tax system either towards consumption, like goods, or towards capital. So historically, the view has been we need capital investment to have economic growth, and capital is much more flighty. If you tax it, people will just stop investing and they'll consume instead. And people will just keep working no matter how much you tax them.

30:22So we'll tax the people, the labor, but we won't tax the equipment very much. In fact, we might even subsidize the capital investments. And it's even true that we subsidize, you know, investment in technology, but we don't subsidize investment in workers like human capital, worker training programs. There's been bills on the Hill that have tried to change that, that have just gotten no traction or not enough traction. And I think the smart way to slow it down would be, wait a minute, why are we trying to discourage human labor at a time where we think human labor might be being replaced? And why are we trying to speed up that replacement by having a tax system that encourages you as a company to move away from people and towards capital?

31:12And so that's like a first step would be to change our tax system to prioritize people keeping jobs over machines.

31:24Kara Swisher:Bernie Sanders is calling for a so-called robot tax on corporations that use AI to eliminate jobs and raise money to help people affected by that technology. What do you each think of this approach, Martin first and then Betsy? I'm not sure a specific robot tax makes sense because it's going to be very hard to determine exactly what is a robot, what is AI that's displacing jobs. I think, as Betsy said, robots and artificial intelligence are capital, right? So probably it makes sense to more generally shift our taxation toward capital. But, of course, all of this is a staggering political challenge.

32:00I mean, basically all the ideas we're talking about here seem extraordinarily difficult to ever make it happen. That's it. I agree with Martin that, like, what's a robot is a challenging question. So there's an implementation question there. And I think ultimately you pass a robot tax and everything will start to count as a robot. So maybe that's just the way politically you get it done. I think that we have to figure out how we are going to switch priorities or at least put workers and machines on a level playing field. And for sure, something's got to give there.

32:40Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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34:02Kara Swisher:So, Martin, you talked about UBI necessary to replace lost income from job losses caused by AI. And Betsy, you've suggested that a digital dividend might be better. Could you explain what each of those things that are and how they're actually different, Betsy and then Martin? So when I say digital dividend, I think as an economist, I was often put off by the idea of a universal basic income. It's sort of like, I'm giving up on you. We're just going to give you an income so you can sort of, you know, bugger off and leave us alone. And what I've been trying to think a lot about is that, look, the way the world works right now is we're all born with 24 hours in the day, a brain and physical strength.

34:41And our physical strength is worth something, but not as much as it used to be. and our brain is now worth a lot, but it's going to be worth less in the future. So if our brain's not worth that much and our physical strength's not worth that much, what do we have? And what I don't want is a world in which what kids basically have is whatever their parents had. I'm really worried about us getting stuck where today's distribution of income sets up the future distribution of income for the next hundred years. And so what do we all have? We all have our data. And I know the ship has kind of sailed on this, but I really think that government needs to stop and realize that our data is the thing we have.

35:23It is something that companies value. They want it. And we should tax the use of data and give that money back to people. So it's going to sound a lot like a universal basic income. But instead of being like a handout, Now what I'm talking about is something that's based on you're contributing your data into the system and that you get a dividend from that. Another way to think about it is we could just nationalize some of our artificial intelligence and then pay a dividend on that. I think it's that the American public deserves a share of something that they have contributed to through their own data.

36:09Kara Swisher:Right. You know, one of the things that I had talked about for years was the idea of being paid for your data. I was sitting in a room with Steve Casey. He was saying that he made$50 from every customer, essentially using their system and inputting their data. And I put up my hand. I said, where's my$25? Like, why don't I get part? You know, essentially, I'm your Soylent. And so they don't think like that. These tech people think your data is their data. It's theirs for good. And in fact, so much so that even Sam Altman is saying you can opt out of our system rather than opt in or be paid for that.

36:45That's because they know people won't opt out. And it's really greedy. I hate to throw this around, but it's a form of slavery, right? It's no different than them saying, I have a right to your labor. They don't have a right to my data.

36:59Kara Swisher:Right, that's correct. They don't have a right to most things, but they take it and hope that people won't sue. But they will in this case. Martin, talk about UBI, how that compares, how Betsy's ideas are different. Well, I'm certainly open to what Betsy is suggesting. And I think that if you're going to offer people a data dividend that is the same for everyone, then essentially that's the same as a UBI. Maybe it's a better branding. Another branding is a citizen's dividend, right, which is, I think, what Andrew Yang had when he ran for president or is a freedom dividend, something like that.

37:34So it's just branding. That's fine. However, if you're going to have a scheme, and I've heard this sometimes too, where the amount of money that you would get is actually somehow tied to the value of the data that you're generating, then I think it would probably set up all kinds of perverse incentives, right? People would try to game it, try to actually go out and generate data in some way that results in a higher income. And that would essentially destroy the value of the data, right? Because data is only valuable if it actually reflects your true preferences or behavior. So that would be my only concern.

38:12But as far as if UBI is bad branding, then for sure, call it something else.

38:18Kara Swisher:But no matter how you slice it, as Betsy pointed out, the world in which a significant chunk of labor is done by AI means the companies will become incredibly powerful and their owners even more than they are today. And so if the future belongs to whoever controls AI and most of the people who control AI have publicly aligned themselves with Donald Trump, then how do we make sure that citizens still have a say in how our society functions if they can't go to dinner on the Mar-a-Lago patio at the White House? Well, I think that it will be more democratized than we think. I mean, it's true that there are a few companies that are actually building these systems, but the systems are going to be available to everyone, right?

38:57They're integrated into cloud computing. And I think that what you'll see in time is that, you know, speaking in terms of businesses, the value from AI is going to be distributed across industries. It's going to be the people that leverage it, that capture most of the value, not the people that are necessarily building it. Because you see at least now three major competitors, right? There's certainly going to be intensive competition there.

39:24Kara Swisher:Well, except they're all doing round-tripping deals with each other to move$5 back and forth. Right, exactly. And if we end up with a burst bubble, that itself will create more unemployment than direct automation, for sure. Betsy? So keep in mind that as a resource becomes plentiful, it becomes cheaper. And if AI is everywhere, it will be the cheap thing. And if you need a human in any place, humans will become the place of scarcity, and we could end up seeing the problem get solved that way. I do want to say, though, I am a huge believer in markets and capitalism, but in capitalism in its pure form, like very competitive markets.

40:14But you have to keep in mind that AI is a little bit different. Like the spillovers are everywhere. It literally couldn't train it without having taken data from other people, without turning to the public commons. So they are relying on a lot of public health. And that makes them different from your butcher, your baker, and that sort of standard competitive framework. The thing that worries me most about what's happening in the United States is we're moving even further away from a competitive market. And we're moving towards a market where the people who curry favor with the politicians get rewarded.

40:55And that does not work very well when you're in even a world where it's butchers and bakers. It's going to work even worse in a world with AI. I don't think that's good for anybody. I think that that will limit our potential. I think it could cause the whole thing to sort of implode. And, you know, the countries that have robust democratic institutions are going to get through this much, much better. And right now as the United States has every one of its institutions under threat, I think we have a lot at risk right now that is the interaction of a collapsing democratic system with a rising power in AI.

41:47And that's going to be a challenge for the United States.

41:52Kara Swisher:Yeah, I think the idea that small companies can't bubble up because they're not at the table, like pigs at the trough, is a real problem. I've used the term pigs at the trough a lot, but that's what it feels like, you know, in a lot of ways. So how should people find meaning in their ability to provide for themselves if it's no longer tied to work, Betsy, then Martin? You know, there is a concept in Japan called ikigai. And ikigai is your, like, meaning or purpose. And if you look at the societies where Japanese citizens live to extremely long ages, what you find is everybody has an ikigai. But their ikigai is not usually work.

42:32And in fact, Japan recently did a survey of the entire population. And what they found was, you know, life satisfaction is very correlated with your work or your income. But your ikigai is much less correlated with your income or your work. And in fact, what ikigai is most correlated with is your participation in civic society and volunteer groups in community-based things. So people who are involved in four or five organizations have the most ikigai. And I'm, you know, I'm the mom of teenagers, and I have spent a lot of weekends at dance competitions with my oldest daughter. You know, dance competitions are not because we're dealing with the most elite dancers.

43:21We're dealing with high school girls and boys who really like to dance, who like to compete, who have a lot of fun, and they put their all into it. And there's a lot of ikigai that comes from that. So I think there is a lot of space for us, but I want to give another warning about the United States compared to any other country, which is we have seen our happiness and our life satisfaction stagnate over the last 50 years. Why? Because we're no longer doing as many things together in civic organizations. Bob Putnam has this book that's 30 years old now, Bowling Alone, that we still bowl, but we don't do it in a league.

44:01We're not getting together with, you know, broad parts of the community. and we're not using our wealth to build a safety net, to add vacation, to do all sorts of things that can make us happier. And so I worry a lot about whether the U.S. has the capacity to respond to this in a way where we're all going to be able to find our ikigai, but it's certainly possible for people too. Martin? Yeah, it's definitely a huge problem because jobs don't just provide income, right? They provide a sense of dignity, a sense of self-worth. They occupy time. They give people a sense of meaning. And we're going to have to find replacements for all of those things in a world where people aren't working as much.

44:50One idea that I have put forth is that maybe instead of just having one level UBI, one level payment that everyone gets the same thing, there can actually be the opportunity to earn more money or to receive more money if you do certain things, right? If you, for example, stay in school and study, if you go and work in the community, maybe it should be possible to actually get a higher income. I worry especially about education. I mean, imagine that you're a high school student that's maybe struggling a bit in school. You're in danger of dropping out. And you know that when you turn 18 or 21, whatever, you're going to get exactly the same universal basic income as everyone else, regardless of whether you stay in school.

45:35I think that that's really a perverse incentive. So I would actually say people are higher income if they remain in school. So I think there are ideas to work with there. But again, it's going to be a big challenge in many dimensions. I was just going to give you one really interesting study which showed that for people in manual labor jobs, their sense of meaning and purpose in the world went up when they retired. And that's because they were able to shift away from work that didn't provide a lot of meaning to things that did provide meaning. And so I know, particularly for modern knowledge workers in the United States, the idea that meaning and dignity is associated with paid labor is very, you know, is a common thought.

46:23But I'd like to remind you that lots of women did not work in the paid labor force, and they had plenty of dignity because they had a role in society. So it is important that we remember that you have to have a role, for sure, but it doesn't have to be paid work. And it historically has not always been paid work for all people.

46:43Kara Swisher:Right. That's absolutely true. Fair point. So let's end by talking about the role of formal education in an AI-driven society. Sam Altman recently said he is envious of Gen Z college dropouts because they have mental space to build startups. And then there's the growing skepticism that college degrees are worth the time and money that's propagated by Peter Thiel. As AI becomes more advanced, what happens to in-person university degrees? Will they remain the gold standard? Martin, you were suggesting we pay for the stay in school. I've heard more and more young people say, what's the point of college?

47:16Kara Swisher:So Martin and then Betsy? I hope that, you know, college continues to be important to people. I think there's going to be an explosion of other alternatives, right? We're going to have online degrees that involve AI, tutoring people and so forth. And some of those may rise to the point where they're, you know, a reasonable alternative to going to a four-year college. But I also kind of think that especially as we look to a future where maybe there aren't going to be so many jobs, the intensely vocational bent of higher education is going to maybe shift back toward more like a general liberal arts type education.

47:56It just makes us better people, better citizens, more broadly and flexibly educated rather than trying to focus on, you know, getting a job in a specific area. So that could actually be a positive thing if that happens. And as long as we can keep people motivated to continue to be interested in education, which is certainly going to be a challenge. Betsy? I love that so much because I really hate the vocational like what is what kind of job am I going to get from this education because education is supposed to teach you how to think how to be not just a good citizen but also how to learn so that you're a really good active lifelong learner you know I love a liberal arts education so I'm going to agree with Martin on that I do think there's an issue of how do we keep people feeling motivated?

48:47Like, what are they doing in school? What are they trying to accomplish? What's their goal? And I think there's a lot of unanswered questions there. And education itself is going through a pretty profound shift because of the amount of AI use in doing assignments means that education is becoming kind of meaningless when you're cheating through AI. And so everybody's sort of trying to figure out how they're going to adapt to that. So I think there's a lot of adapting to be done both by the universities and by society in terms of how do we think about education.

49:27Kara Swisher:If you weren't giving advice then to high school students about how to plan their careers, what would you tell them? Should they go to college? And if so, what majors do you think will be, I guess, least impacted by AI? I know you hate focusing on vocation, as you said, but it's important. You know, I think understanding people is going to be one of the most valuable skills out there. So you can never go wrong with psychology. I think that also means you can never really go wrong with economics because economics gives you an analytic framework for thinking about how people make choices. I agree with Martin that this idea of a broad education is what you're trying to do.

50:04And I really push creativity. It's a great time to do musical theater, to think about art. In every society, when technology has come along to make us richer, we've found more money to pay for art. And so, you know, let's build everybody's creative side out because I think there's going to be a lot of space for creativity.

50:28Kara Swisher:Just even to amuse the rich people. Martin? Yeah, no, I agree with that. I don't think it matters that much specifically what you major in. What matters is the kind of skills that you pick up. And I think Betsy is absolutely right that you want to emphasize working with people and team building and this type of thing. Because that, of course, is what AI is not good at, at least not yet. It's not good at it. As well as genuine creativity. And it's very hard to predict anyway. I mean, you know, if you're a freshman and you decide to major in one thing four or five years from now, it could be a completely different scenario.

51:05So I think that really focusing on those core skills and talents is what's going to be important. One other thing I'd add is that not everyone, of course, will go to college. And certainly, absolutely one of the best things to do now in the face of all of this is to enter one of the skilled trades. Yeah. Electricians, plumbers. These jobs are really hard to automate. You would need C-3PO from Star Wars, right? Yeah. A very advanced robot in order to automate those jobs. So that's quite a ways off.

51:37Kara Swisher:Yeah. It seems like AI is going to force us to rethink what it also means to be a human. What do you think we'll say about how we handled the rise of AI? What worries you the most and what makes you the most hopeful? Martin and then Betsy. Yeah, the thing I worry the most about is the economic impact. I'm not so much concerned with the doomer scenario where it's actually going to wipe us out existentially. Maybe someday that'll be a real concern, but I think we're going to have massive economic and social disruption long before that. And it could come in the form of automation of jobs, as we're talking about here.

52:13I think that's inevitable, but we could also run into a problem with the AI bubble bursting. And I think that could be really devastating to the economy. So those are the two big fears I have over the next 10 years or so. But the optimistic side of this, and I think Betsy and I would agree, is that AI will be the most powerful tool we've ever had to amplify our intelligence and our creativity. And that's going to allow us, hopefully, to make enormous progress across the board in all kinds of scientific fields, in medicine, in technology. And that should, in the long run, make us all better off.

52:54But we've got to figure out how to adapt to the dangers that come with this, especially, as we said earlier, the distributional issue. How do we make sure that the benefits of this end up distributed to everyone and not just a few people? Betsy, you get the last word. So I think there's a lot of agreement there. I'm really optimistic about a lot of, you know, the medical breakthroughs we could get, the living standard improvements we could get. What I'm actually most concerned about, though, is what's going on socially and how that starts to interact with AI and how it's already interacting with AI.

53:30You know, we already have vaccines that cure the measles, and we have people afraid to get them. So we can have all the cures we want. But if we have a society where we don't trust each other, we don't trust the government, we don't trust the medical profession, we're all going to end up in silos of aggression towards each other. And that could erode all of the benefits. And that actually worries me a lot more than the job loss. I do think there's a fear of some people getting left behind in the next 10 years. But my bigger fear is the loss of social cohesion because that's already underway.

54:10Kara Swisher:Yeah, absolutely. We'll have all the good ideas, but we won't use them. We won't avail ourselves to them. I really appreciate both of you. It's a really interesting discussion. And we will get back to you in 10 years. I will look forward to my agent talking with your AI agent in 10 years. Okay. All right. Thank you, Martin, also. Thank you. Thank you.

55:02Kara Swisher:Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

55:23Kara Swisher:Thanks to Kohler Health for their support. We focus a lot on what we put in our bodies, but not nearly as much on what comes out. You get my point. Kohler Health is changing that with its Dakota tracker, which turns your everyday bathroom habits into meaningful insights about your gut health, hydration, and even presence of blood without any manual logging. Over time, Kohler Health helps you build your baseline so you know what's normal for you and you can take action when something changes. Learn more at KohlerHealth.com and use the code CARA1YEAR for a free annual membership on the Kohler Health app when you purchase Dakota.