Let AI replace you

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0:57Great prices. That's why you rack. It has taken a job that would take months to do, and it can basically do it in an hour. And I said, we've got to get food delivered by a robot. My name is Jake, but perhaps better known as RizBot. It's nice to meet you.

1:21Jonquilyn Hill:When you were a kid, did you daydream about the future?

1:28Jonquilyn Hill:I thought it was going to look like the Jetsons. Flying cars, video phones, robots to do our grocery shopping.

1:39Jonquilyn Hill:Well, we're still waiting on those flying cars, but video phones are here. And so are the robots. In Austin, Texas, they're sort of everywhere, rolling down the sidewalk on their way to deliver food. You'll also see autonomous cars on the street. And AI is even showing up in city government. Us being able to better have an idea of where we need to deploy our, you know, firefighting assets, as well as being able to get warnings to people about, yes, fire, but also the smoke patterns that can go much bigger and broader than the actual fire does. Daniel Collada works for the city's Department of Organizational Excellence.

2:22Jonquilyn Hill:And he says AI is cutting through red tape and making things way more efficient. I think we put across 27 different departments and on average people saved, you know, between four and like 12 hours a week of productivity time. So I think that's really exciting that across the board we can see applications of this all over the city. So that's AI operating on a large scale. But what about the labor we do in our day to day lives? it has the ability to transform that too. And so what happened is my mother became, or she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And so those robots allowed me to stay with her and meet her needs, but also still get those supplies from the store.

3:08This is a resident named Snow White. If she got up and I wasn't there and she slipped and she fell and she wouldn't be able to get up till I was there. I mean, for me, for that specific time, it was really needed.

3:21Jonquilyn Hill:and it helps so much. She says those little delivery robots really came through for her. And there was a time daily I was using the AV robot, sometimes two or three times a day. So yes, it's convenient, but then for me, it was just something that was essential. I'm John Glyn Hill, and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, what if the AI revolution actually gets it right? If AI helps us make better use of our resources and handles all our busy work, maybe it could give us the one thing there never seems to be enough of. Time. Honestly, if I had a lot of free time, I would work on myself. I would start taking up gardening.

4:09I would try to educate myself on things that are important to me. I would absolutely dedicate all of that time to rescuing cats, feeding cats and housing them after they had been in some of the high kill shelters in the city. I think a lot of the loneliness or the almost intense pressure to the point where I just want to give up of trying to schedule things, especially with kids, would just be released.

4:39Jonquilyn Hill:There's actually a name for this best case scenario. It's called AI abundance. If everything goes well with AI, and I should say that is a big if, then AI abundance essentially carries the notion that we could all be so much more wealthier than we can even imagine today. That's Anton Koronek. He's an economics professor at the University of Virginia and one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in AI. AI and robots and so on will be able to produce a lot more goods and services than when we have in today's economy and would make us essentially an order of magnitude wealthier and better off.

5:23Jonquilyn Hill:So tell me how we would end up better off. There are two types of positive outcomes depending on what your relationship to work is. Some people who really like their work, they predict a world where you have a lot more exciting work yet than today, maybe with a little bit less time intensity. and then folks who are not that crazy about their job they're predicting a world where we will have to work a lot less and can still sustain the kind of wealth and well-being that we have in today's world you can see this in lots and lots of pronouncements by like business people who say oh we need more skilled workers and that essentially encapsulate this notion that if we only had more workers, we could produce so much more.

6:17And yeah, the thing with AI and advanced robotics is that those wishes may actually come true and we may enter a world where they can just press a button and they have one more AI worker or press another button and they have one more robot and those can all perform work on their behalf and essentially expand our economic opportunities.

6:43Jonquilyn Hill:We keep hearing that a change of the scale is unprecedented. Is it actually? You know, I think it's the first time of this particular nature. But if you want to go into like history and look for any parallels, I think the closest parallel would be the industrial revolution. So you would have to go back some 250 years for anything that comes even close to what we are about to experience this time, I think.

7:16Jonquilyn Hill:Coming up, what steam engines can teach us about the AI revolution.

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10:30Jonquilyn Hill:It's Explained It to Me. I'm JQ. And the International Monetary Fund estimates that AI could impact 40 % of jobs around the world. And that number looks more like 60 % in what it calls advanced economies, like here in the U.S. If that turns out to be true, what will the future of work look like? UVA's Anton Koronek says there are clues in our past. From a big picture economic perspective, you can say work as we have it today didn't even really exist before the Industrial Revolution. because before then the most important factor of production was the land that people worked in order to produce the food that they needed.

11:14And all of a sudden you had these new technologies that didn't rely so much on land as they relied on machines. It started with like spinning and weaving in the textile sector but then soon we had the steam engine and electricity and so on. and what that implied was that what was really scarce in the economy the land wasn't as important anymore and the new thing that you needed to produce in addition to the labor that people had to put in were machines that you can easily copy and reproduce so you could easily build more spinning wheels more weaving machines and that meant that there was nothing holding back production and that meant that we could suddenly produce a lot more because that bottleneck of land was overcome and in some sense you can see that's the main reason why today people in advanced economies are something like 20 times richer on average than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

12:27Jonquilyn Hill:What did that mean for workers at the time, though? I imagine that transition wasn't easy. At the time, it was actually quite disruptive. And if you were basically an artisan weaver or something like that then you were actually a pretty skilled professional doing your trade and all the sudden you had these machines coming along that could do what you were doing but in order of magnitude cheaper so those artisans they lost their livelihood essentially overnight and they were impoverished. But I guess, you know, looking at the positive side, their descendants lived in a world where you had cheap textiles and soon all other kinds of cheap industrial goods and they lived to be much wealthier than their artisan parents or grandparents who lost their job in the first wave of the Industrial Revolution.

13:34And that can be hugely disruptive and painful for the individual. But if we have a little bit of social protection, we can mitigate the disruption and we can make sure that in the end, everybody actually benefits.

13:51Jonquilyn Hill:When it comes to the AI revolution, is this something that's going to be benefiting like more so our grandkids than us possibly? Well, I very much hope that we can all benefit. And I'll say just in terms of the economic possibilities, if you grow the size of the pie and if you grow it by orders of magnitude, it's possible, at least in principle, that everybody benefits. But whether or not that's going to happen is a story that is yet to be written. And it's going to be challenging. it's going to be challenging because at first there will be small sectors where people are losing out and then there's going to be a debate well why should we help them we didn't help let's say other workers in previous technological revolutions that much and then the size of those sectors that are disrupted is probably going to go up and then eventually most people will be affected at this, but it's not going to happen overnight.

14:57It's going to be a somewhat slow process. And our society is going to continually debate how should we react to this? What are the best things to do about this?

15:08Jonquilyn Hill:So there are people listening to this who actually lived through another more recent technology disruption. I'm thinking about the 80s and 90s with computers. yeah in some ways the way that i see the industrial revolution is that it first consisted of basically building machines that could automate a lot of our physical strength and then since roughly the middle of the 20th century we create machines that could automate cognitive tasks essentially computers and you know at first those computers they could only perform highly routinized things like let's say adding up numbers in a spreadsheet and that was very useful for businesses so i don't want to put that down in any way and now the big question with ai is that And first, we are seeing that these machines can perform more and more of the complex, really thoughtful cognitive tasks.

16:16So the big question is, where will this stop and will they leave anything for us?

16:25Jonquilyn Hill:We work to get a paycheck. In the future where we don't work anymore, how do we eat? How do we get health insurance? It's pay for a place to live. Are there things that people are talking about to sort of take care of that if this is our new future? I think that's going to be the most important and also most fundamental challenge to our current system. In some sense, you can say the Industrial Revolution has kind of by accident created this system where our labor became more and more and more valuable. because we were so scarce. And that has kind of underpinned all this material progress, all this increase in well-being that we have seen over the past 250 years.

17:17But once the AI revolution really hits, there is no guarantee that we can earn a decent living based on the value of our labor anymore.

17:33I do believe that we are going to need a new system of income distribution at that point. For example, universal basic income, compute allotments that everybody essentially gets a certain amount of computational power allocated that they can then either use or sell off. People are also talking about job guarantees. There's a whole range of options out there. From a big picture perspective, the primary concern has to be that we'll find some solution. Because as you say, if labor does get significantly devalued by this technological change, and at the same time we have much more abundance in the economy, it would be such a failure if we don't use that additional abundance to make sure that nobody is left behind.

18:36Jonquilyn Hill:So when the AI revolution arrives, what will we do with all that time? That's next.

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20:42Jonquilyn Hill:I'm JQ and this is Explain It To Me. We're talking about our AI future, which for a lot of us is already here. We have been using AI recently to basically read and summarize hundreds of pages long documents that we need. And it has taken a job that would take months to do, and it can basically do it in an hour. So I've done the all-American task of pretending to be busy. My fear is that, much like every other technological innovation, is that instead of working less and having more leisure time, we are just going to keep working the same amount and be expected to do even more. One of the things that being busy and having a full life gives you is purpose.

21:35And we have a lot of time on our hands and we find ways to fill it, but those ways aren't as meaningful without the purpose that busyness gives you.

21:47Jonquilyn Hill:So if AI really does change the way we work, does that mean we'll have more time to do what actually fulfills us? That's the question I asked Tom Waite. He's a senior writer at Dazed and reports on the intersection of culture and tech.

22:06I think we got to see a version of this kind of during the pandemic and in the early 2020s. I don't know about your friends, but a lot of my friends were like, as soon as lockdown started, they were like, I'm going to learn to paint or I'm going to write more. It took this kind of real creative path. Throughout quarantine, many people have taken up new hobbies. One of the most popular hobbies this year has been gardening. That kind of seems like the theme of COVID, right? Like everybody just has weird hobbies like baking bread and churning butter like they did in the 1800s. Actually, when I was working on this piece for days, James Smith, who was an academic and an author of a book called Work Won't Work, kind of threw a spanner in the works with this idea.

22:51Because he mentioned that people at the beginning of the pandemic had all of these great ideas about what they were going to do, get fit, have new creative outlets. And then his opinion was, I think what most people did was just game and post and doom scroll and binge watch and cultivate their mental illnesses. Which is like, it's a very harsh way of putting it maybe, but I think, yeah, it does speak to the idea that like the fantasies did not always kind of match reality.

23:20Jonquilyn Hill:Okay, that's fair. But I still get the sense that you're pretty optimistic about how this could play out. So if AI abundance works the way people hope it will, what would a world with less work look like in practice? I think we can still do the work that we are doing today without maybe the pressures of having to constantly monetize that work. I certainly would still write if I wasn't paid to write and if it wasn't my way of kind of like paying my rent I would still write because I value communicating with people and having that kind of like relationship that you have or discussion with other writers or with readers and I find a lot of value in that work enough to do it without a financial incentive and I actually think I would have a lot more freedom as a writer if I didn't have to kind of fit the specifications of the of the market right and I think when I speak to a lot of artists they say the same thing a lot of artists are stuck in this cycle of having to either create work that fits the market or even create content online that stops them from creating work in the studio because they have to do the work of marketing themselves constantly in order to sell what few paintings they then have time to kind of actually create.