Ask Not What Your Robots Can Do For You

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

The other day, a few steps away from the Atlantic's office, a security guard fell into a fountain and drowned.

But folks got over it pretty fast.

The security guard was a robot, and the company that it came from quickly promised to replace it free of charge.

Smart machines, like Steve the Robot Security Guard, are officially everywhere.

How are they changing us?

How will we change in response?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, folks.

I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic, and I'm all alone in my studio here in D.C.

and in New York.

It's Jeffrey Goldberg.

I'm the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Taking a big bite out of a big apple, and I'm Alex Wagner, contributing editor at The Atlantic.

A lot of it, a lot of editors.

A lot of editors.

But joining us in our fourth chair this week, somewhere in the United States.

Yes, this is Alexis Madrigal.

I'm a staff writer for The Atlantic and joining you from Denver, Colorado, in my father-in-law's study.

Awesome.

The Atlantic, by the way, global.

I mean, national, but really global also.

Really global.

We're all over the place.

All right, folks.

Anyone take a run at this wind?

I have a trivia question for you.

Who, on March 5th, 2016, tweeted the words, quote, mark my words, we're going to beat ISIS.

Come replace the big lie, Obamacare.

Believe me.

Alex Wagner?

Donald Trump?

Really similar tweets.

Those are both good guesses.

Yeah, Alexis, do you have a guess?

No.

So those words were tweeted by a bot called At Deep Drumpf.

Drumpf

being the

ancestral name of President Trump that was popularized by late-night comedy host John Oliver.

A bot creator at MIT, a roboticist,

made a bot, trained it on the corpus of Donald Trump's speeches and tweets and other things, I believe, and

posts tweets at intervals from

the selection of words that the bot tweets out.

And it wasn't a stretch to think that maybe Donald Trump himself had tweeted it.

It was not at all because it was.

I thought this was a trick question, obviously.

It was a trick question, obviously.

No, I thought the trick was that it was Donald Trump.

I didn't actually think it was Alex Wagner.

I just want to go on the record and say that Alex doesn't talk that way.

I know Alex pretty well.

Could have been Alex, Alex.

And she doesn't believe we can beat ISIS.

More to the point.

More to the point.

Nor does the bot that impersonates me on Twitter.

That's right.

So bots pretending to be the president may not actually surprise us anymore.

But what happens when bots, and by that I mean machines trained on human tasks and behaviors, can actually do the president's job?

I mean, besides tweeting.

Alexis, in covering technology for us, you've been diving into the long history of machines getting better at human work.

And this isn't science fiction any longer, right?

Based on what you've seen, what can we expect from these increasingly smart machines?

And even more importantly, how will they change our work?

And how will they change our lives?

Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, I think, you know, machines have gotten a lot more capable.

In particular, in recent years, they've gotten better at interacting with our physical world.

Kind of the avatar for that would be, you know, Google's self-driving car, say, and also our social world, right?

They can interact with us on Facebook or Twitter or in your phone,

all sorts of different things.

And so a lot of companies see that.

They also see that human workers are expensive, that they have to pay benefits for them,

that those workers could organize.

And I think that they have decided that whether or not a lot of robots actually lead to productivity or efficiency increases, which they do in some cases, they just kind of prefer robots.

I think people are looking for systems that have less labor.

And one kind of funny way that I've thought about this is that robots have gone to sort of the top of the hiring hierarchy.

Like all things being equal, a company would prefer to hire a robot.

So the joking way I've kind of put it to myself is that robots have essentially become the new white men,

that they just kind of get the benefit of the doubt, they get the jobs, and that that's kind of true up and down the socioeconomic spectrum and for different kinds of jobs.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So what I hear you saying, Alexis, is that in the framework of systemic racism, that the bots have leapfrogged, leapfrogged all of the people all the way to the top of the hiring hierarchy.

And now companies are not looking for black folks like me.

They're not necessarily looking for smart women to diversify their workforce, but they are looking for bots.

If all things being equal, they would rather replace us people with an algorithm than a person.

Yeah, I think from a corporate perspective, if you look at it,

they don't have to deal with the long-term ramifications of having employed an actual human body.

They don't have to deal with the possibility of workers unionizing.

They don't have to deal with any of these things, right?

Instead,

when

people think about a job, they're not like, well, we could hire some people.

They think, oh, let's go get a machine to do that for us.

They take the cream of many jobs.

And it happens at all levels of society.

It happens at the very top, because it turns out machines might be really good at reading medical data.

And it happens down at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy, too, in jobs that require

strength and

maybe less higher-order decision-making.

And I think right now we're still seeing mostly nibbling around the edges.

We're mostly seeing

new tasks that

artificial intelligence can do.

But I think we're at a key moment where new systems of work are about to be developed.

And I think that's where we'll see a lot more job displacement.

Alexis, can I interrupt you for a minute and follow up on your idea that it's machines are the new white men?

Because Alana Samuel.

Samuelscomb, This is

I believe.

Yeah, boy.

That's a hot take waiting to happen.

Alana Samuels, who also writes for The Atlantic and has done some great coverage about automation and robots.

In some of her reporting, she cites studies that say Hispanics are 25% more likely than whites to lose their jobs to automation and that African Americans are 13% more likely.

What do you think that's attributable to?

The way a lot of those studies are done is they look at the individual tasks and skills that machines may take or may get good at quickly.

And I think one of the things people find is that certain types of labor are really seem to be more amenable and that a lot of those jobs are lower down the pay scale in some ways.

And

people of color are overrepresented in those areas.

And I think that's probably where

you would see that.

Aaron Powell, but you think it's going to touch, you know, not necessarily the C-suite, but the top of the sort of

paycheck scale.

Oh, I think it will.

I think it will.

I think one of the interesting things is that what machines are good at doesn't map easily to what we pay really well for in our economy.

It's just they're two totally separate things.

And I think they kind of carve this random path through our socioeconomic structures.

And I think that, to me, that's what's fascinating about robots and the economy.

It's just, it doesn't necessarily map the way that people think it will.

So, you know, my job or say your job, do you expect that?

Definitely Jeff's job.

Yeah.

How long do I have?

I, you know, I mean, it's funny.

It actually,

these jobs that are highly social jobs, say, that have a lot to do with meetings and emotional intelligence and these kinds of things, I think people think those will be some of the hardest to replace, right?

And I think people think that routine jobs, things where you do the same thing over and over, those will be fairly easy to replace.

My job is purely routine, Alexis.

I have to tell you.

You have the greatest emotional intelligence of any man I've ever met, Jeff Kohlberg.

Is it raise season?

I'm sorry.

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here?

But go on, Alexis.

Yeah, I mean, I do think that there will be some class dimensions.

I think that at the top, right, the rich people, I mean, if we just imagine that the future will be sort of of like the present, but more so, you know, the top looks like people working ever more intense jobs for salaries that are orders of magnitude higher than poor people's.

And then at the bottom, I think that's where you see these kind of crazy changes where people don't have, you know, regular hours.

We're already seeing that.

They don't have one employer.

We're already seeing that.

But the kind of the way that the piecework is dealt out is by these algorithms that are optimizing and competing against each other to find a labor force in real time.

And I think one of the things that I find disturbing about this vision is not that that's necessarily bad in and of itself, but in an American context where so much

of our social safety net has been pegged to having one single job, it does terrify me that precarious employment seems much more likely to take over a greater chunk of the labor that's done.

And we don't really seem to have a social system, at least in the US, that's really prepared to deal with that.

But we don't have politicians who are prepared to level with people about the truth of what's coming, right?

This wholesale technological disruption.

We have a president who tells coal miners that everything's going to be okay.

And we know that it's not going to be okay.

And he's not the only politician who won't level with people.

So Alexis,

if you were the president of the United States, what would you tell people in specific job categories, specific type of jobs, about what the near future holds for them?

You know, people have looked at this, right?

I just want you to grapple with the idea that it just made you president of the United States.

Yeah, that's fine.

I was ready.

It's a heavy list.

You know, I think

there's a few things I would say.

One is, I'm not totally convinced that education is sort of a panacea for this.

If you compare how long it takes to retrain big chunks of our workforce and you compare it to how quickly the jobs may be automated or new job categories may be automated, I don't know that I necessarily see that changing.

What about truck drivers?

What about the day that Walmart moves its trucks to driverless trucks?

That's where New York City cabs become automated driverless cars.

I mean, there's

both of those things.

It's likely plus retail jobs.

I think all those things are likely.

I mean, I guess I think it's easy to become very dystopian about this in the American context.

And

there's a reason for that.

No one's going to do anything for those people.

That's the real answer, right?

And that may not be true around the world.

And it may not be true in this country once we start seeing that kind of thing.

So Alexis, you're the president.

How do you prepare the people?

I think you do have to level with them.

I think you have to say, you know,

we need less of a whole bunch of job categories.

And, you know, we have examples of people doing this.

You know, in 1960, the Longshoremen essentially cut a deal with the ports and the shippers to say, look, we're going to have to shrink our workforce because mechanization is coming to the waterfront the end.

And they were able to, in doing so, win really important concessions in that.

And I think, you know, underlying all of this, right, is that in the U.S., we have a kind of ideology about work that says your self-worth and who you are is really deeply tied up with the work you do outside the home.

Yeah.

And more so now, probably than even in the 1960s.

That's right.

If you're taking care of a parent at home 12 hours a day, that's not considered quote unquote work.

And I think one of the things that I foresee changing when much of the work that's done out of the home now could be done by machines of some sort is that we start to reevaluate the value of labor in the home, caregiving of different kinds for younger and older,

as well as the kind of emotional labor that people do all over the place.

And I think even within workplaces, I think one of the most undervalued things that managers do, that workers do, is provide emotional labor to other people.

people

and that's not really like a skill that most of the studies that's what jeff Goldberg does.

Am I doing enough for you emotionally?

For me, you've done a great job.

Wouldn't you just rather have a robot face it?

You don't have to answer that question.

Fazid, you're all about the future.

You just want a robot.

I do wonder, though, when we talk about workplace dynamics, just because we're in such a moment of tribalism in American politics, you know, one of the things about the workplace of the 1960s is you had your sort of like clerical worker who maybe had a high school degree.

You had your CEO who had a college degree, but they were all in the same place.

You had a mix of people.

And I wonder whether with automation, where you increasingly have a more homogeneous work environment where everybody has achieved a certain level of education and everybody is making a, you know, there's less variation, whether that doesn't actually hurt us as a society because we're not interacting with people who are from different socioeconomic brackets, different class, different education, et cetera.

Let me do the mega happy scenario on that one.

Okay, I like that.

I actually think that emotional labor.

No, I I think that there is, I think there is.

Yeah, I'll do the emotional labor for all of them.

Here's what I would say.

I do expect a radical reevaluation of the value of different types of skills.

And I actually think a lot of the analytical skills that right now are kind of at the pinnacle,

I don't think those are going to be the things that are the most valued skills of the future.

It's just the computers are going to do it better.

It's like imagining that chess is the height of human intelligence.

Well, guess what?

We don't,

There's going to be a different set of things that are valued.

And I think that there's going to be a moment coming up where there is a fairly substantial shakeup

in those values.

And it may provide an opportunity for restarting.

class mobility and social mobility for people as we start to see that there are other skills that are possessed up and down the socioeconomic spectrum that and the educational spectrum and across different

races and ethnic groups.

It may just be that this is a it's a it's a moment of chaos.

It's a carnivales moment that might allow us to

rejigger society in a way that would be better, not worse.

I want to keep spinning out this utopian vision for a little bit.

I imagine a possible future where

working in an office as I do,

all of a sudden

the drudgery work that office work currently entails, the responding to emails and setting up meetings and filing expense reports and whatnot, that all of that I can outsource to the bots and I just get to think and dream and do highfalutin

upper level cognitive work.

Matt, I think this is like the one part of the utopian vision that I actually don't believe in, I think.

Well, maybe.

Matt is just having a fantasy.

That's what's not answering my emails.

I just want everybody to understand that.

That's what all this highfalutin thing is about not answering our emails.

It takes like a lot of mental labor to envision this future.

And I'll tell you why I don't believe in it.

We have actually been automating the office for a really long time.

And there's a fascinating book by a woman named Barbara Garson called The Electronic Sweatshop.

And she basically tells the story of office automation in the 70s and 80s.

And the truth is it probably made things more drudgery-filled because these sort of sweeping jobs that sort of were, you had lots of autonomy and room for action got sliced up into little tasks that you then had to sort of complete and ring the bell and get another task and ring the bell and get another task and ring the bell.

And I think we actually may even have

a clip of her talking about this very phenomenon.

I remember working in the windowless basement of a bank once.

And

no, I mean, I just picked some numbers off of one sheet of paper and typed them in.

It was just wherever the three numbers were encircled, I typed them.

And I was typing as fast as I could, and I didn't have to line anything up or put in a sheet or do anything like that.

And there was always a little satisfaction previously in getting things to come out even or to the margins, but I wasn't doing that anymore either.

And in this particular place, I noticed that people were working as fast as they could.

Their fingers seemed to be flying in a blur with these three fingers of one hand, but there were no supervisors.

And that really threw me.

I said, why is everybody working so fast with no supervisor?

Well, I was there a few days, and I was called to an office four flights away where a perfectly nice young man said to me, you know, your keystroke count fell to under 9,000 an hour after lunch

two days in a row, right.

Under 9,000 an hour.

Is something the matter?

Well, apparently my keystroke count should have been about 15,000 keystrokes an hour for straight numerical work.

So even the supervisor is being replaced and there's that constant monitoring.

That is I just want to highlight a couple things.

That's from 1988.

I mean it's from 1988.

And I think when you think about office automation, you think about jobs, if you think about automation in general, people draw on all these examples, right?

The industrial age, they think of sort of the deindustrialization of America.

But we have this example really close to hand, which is the automation of most office work.

Most of what people did in office in 1970, people don't do anymore.

And we can see how did it go?

Well, ask yourself if you work in an office, do you have some drudgery in your job?

Are you surveilled by your employer?

Yes, of course you are.

These are these things.

This is how it has worked.

And I think the pitch for automation has literally been forever that it's going to eliminate drudgery.

And the truth is that it oftentimes creates drudgery because of the task it split up.

And at the very, very, very least, it doesn't do away with drudgery at all.

Well, then, what are they for, these machines?

Oh, that's a good idea.

What are the machines for?

I mean, I think there's a couple of things, right?

Right now, there was a survey that came out recently that said that people at work, their number one concern at work, is that they're going to be replaced by a robot.

That's really worrying them, right?

So, what does that do for labor relations, right?

I mean, it's like the ever-present threat at all levels of work

that you could lose your job.

So, are you going to fight harder for that raise?

Are you going to organize?

I actually think this is even a hard question for people who are in the labor movement.

I talked with a woman named Carmen Rojas, who runs a thing called the Workers' Lab, which is sort of a think-tank-do-tank kind of thing supported by SEIU, big service employees union.

And I asked her, just flat out, do you think workers should organize against automation?

And this is what she told me.

Oh, God, that's a great question.

My hunch is that worker, my feeling is that workers should organize, period, right?

Like that right now,

one of the reasons that workers are experiencing

the hollowing out of their experience as people in this country is for lack of organization.

I think automation can be a driver, but I don't think it should be the only driver.

Part of what I'm hearing from Alexis and what I heard in the 1980 eight clip from Barbara Garson is that we actually, we have seen this movie before.

We've seen it over and over again.

We saw it in the 80s, that there are these technology-induced dislocations and we can learn from them or we can repeat the patterns of the last time.

Part of what's interesting to me about this is that we're at this inflection point, right, where

We still, humans still, are the ones making these bots.

We're making these machines.

We're telling them what to do.

We're training them.

And none of this is necessarily inevitable, right?

We could create,

we could use machines in ways that are beneficial to us, that do enable us to work better, that

to do work that takes advantage of our innate strengths and creativity and humanness, right?

You know, Matt, you remind me in that of an amazing essay that Helen Keller actually wrote in 1932 for The Atlantic entitled, Put Your Husband in the Kitchen.

A great idea then and a great idea now, I might add.

But she wrote, in the machine, I'm summarizing it a little bit.

It's worth everybody googling.

But at one point, she writes, in the machine, rightly controlled, lies the hope of reducing human drudgery to the minimum.

Not merely that we may be free of drudgery, but that every individual, and this is the important point, may have the opportunity for a happy life, for a leisure, which, under wise guidance may lead to mental and spiritual growth.

Now, it seems to me that you can't do that at all levels of the economy without some kind of universal basic income, but the idea is a pretty lofty one, that somehow we can actually better ourselves as Homo sapiens through the harnessing of machine innovation.

You know, I keep coming back to this idea that, you know, other countries are actually doing this differently.

They're having a totally different conversation, not just about automation, but about universal basic income, about working hours, about all these things.

You know, there is nothing about what's happening in the U.S.

that is universal around this conversation.

And I just think we really need to understand that because

it should give us hope, I think, that with

some settings switched in our political economy, we actually do kind of have some breakthroughs that make life better for

the bottom 50% of income earners in this country.

And I don't think that

robot automation stuff

has to lead us away from that kind of outcome.

You know, our framing of, hey, the robots are coming, they're going to take all the jobs, and it's going to suck for workers, like that is, in fact, an American frame

as explained here in this next clip with Carmen Rojas.

My experience has been that that framing is unique to the U.S.

context where the relationship between the market and the state is wholly disconnected, and the market is seen as sort of a free-form,

organic system that manages the money in our economy, and where the state is, frankly, just seen as a witness to the market and not something that can actually regulate and set standards in the market.

So, I think I mentioned this to you in another conversation.

In the Western European context, automation is an issue, but they are actually, the state is looking at ways to train people, tax robots, think about

not how to move people out of work, but to imagine the type of work that we're going to need humans to do, not for the next two years, but for the next 20 years, for the next generation.

Whereas in the U.S., the robots are coming.

It lacks the imagination of what the role of the state is in shaping a shift in our economy.

And we pour trillions of dollars into workforce development.

Like, why aren't we training people today to do jobs that we know people aren't gonna do?

So, we still are training people to be truck drivers.

Why?

That's a great question that Carmen Rojas poses.

And I hear a lot of questions implicit in it, which I want to get to.

So, stick with us.

In the next part of our conversation, we're going to talk about how machines are changing who we are.

First, a word from our sponsors.

running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs, but luckily, there's a simple answer to them: Shopify.

It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku, and it'll help you with everything you need.

From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality.

Turn those what-ifs into

sign up for your $1 per month month trial at shopify.com/slash special offer.

Robots don't feel fear.

They don't feel anything.

They don't get hungry.

They don't sleep.

I do.

I have even had dreams.

Human beings have dreams.

Even dogs have dreams, but not you.

You are just a machine.

An imitation of life.

Can a robot write a symphony?

Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?

Can you?

So that, of course, was a clip from the movie iRobot.

Cinematic man.

Magic.

One thing we know is robots can drop a thick burn, clearly.

Total sick burn.

No less.

On Will Smith.

That's right.

I want to talk a little bit about what are humans best at?

As machines are getting smarter and smarter and better and better, better, Alexis, what should we be training humans to do?

How will our lives change?

Well, you know, I think one way to answer this question is say, like, what do we think humans will get better at once there are machines that we work alongside?

I mean, we already do.

I mean, who sorts your Gmail, right?

So what are we going to get better at?

And I think the easy answer would be that we'll get better at what machines are bad at, you know, and I think there's something to be said for that.

I think bodily intelligence is something that we super underestimate.

We've been able to beat ourselves with machines at chess forever, but designing a robot that could walk into any room physically and actually move chess pieces around, that's hard, right?

And so I think that kind of intelligence will be recognized as more valuable.

But I think the kind of counterintuitive answer is that we'll get better at the machine, at the things machines are good at.

And one of the reasons I think that is that when you encounter one of these alien intelligences, you encounter the way an artificial intelligence thinks about texts, about sentences, say, or about pictures or drawings, it actually forces you to think about how you think.

It denaturalizes your intuition, you know?

So you were sitting there and you're like, why would the machine do that?

And then you have to think about, wait, well, why did I pick that word in that sentence, right?

And I think that that is going to have some pretty tremendous impacts, I think, on the way that humans think on an individual level, but also on kind of a systems corporate level, too.

Right.

When machines deliver us unexpected answers about the way an organization works or an ecosystem works or whatever it is.

And I think that's going to be truly exciting.

Like the, the, it's kind of like when you have a kid, at least for me, when I had a kid, I just like watched my children learn about the world and watching this like kind of human, but kind of not human intelligence train itself on the environment was like incredibly stimulating.

It made me think about all kinds of ways that we think and the actual sort of second to second functioning of our brain, that kind of Joycean consciousness that we have, right?

I mean, I just, I ended up examining that in a lot more depth.

What you're saying, Alexis, reminded me of

a story that many, many of our listeners, and I imagine you all might know, the story of Alpha Go,

this robot that was created to play the game of Go.

And of course, famously, Go has been thought of for a long, long time as a game that was just built for humans.

Chess

is a game of logic and calculation.

It's something that's built really for that kind of analytical machine brain.

But Go is this game of cunning and intuition and creative leaps of insight.

And for a long, long time, it was thought of that only humans could excel at Go, that it was built for us and then earlier this year um uh kudja the top-ranked player in the world said you know what that machine could never beat me

and

alpha go trounced him he won it the machine won all the games that it played against him and What was so interesting about that moment, that La Coded to the story to me, was what Kudja said after that.

He said, after humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong.

I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.

So for this person who's been playing Go, I imagine his whole life,

the machine actually showed him something that was possible in this game that he'd never known would be possible before.

And of course, AlphaGo was a human creation.

And that to me is really interesting.

I just wonder if we're not erring on the side of open-minded people who are incredulous about technological advances.

And I don't mean to be the Debbie Downer in their room.

No, I'm Debbie Double Downer.

Yeah, I just feel like there's a whole swath of the population that is not going to sort of, whose worlds will not unfurl like a blossoming flower at the sort of moment of liberate them to do what they seek to do.

Or even just the idea that this technology is challenging presumptions about our own knowledge, but that they'll retreat further into themselves.

And that, that, you know, I think the assumption is that our humanity will be ever more present with us.

But I just wonder whether there's not a whole section of society that's going to withdraw in the same way that, you know, we look at where we are right now with automation and technology.

And yes, we're more connected, but at the same time, we're also more isolated.

And there are people who've used technology and automation to draw.

or to build walls basically between themselves and others.

Society doesn't feel like we're sort of more together in this, examining our strengths and weaknesses.

I feel like we're sort of more in our own little caves.

Well, and I think, yeah, I don't disagree with that as being a possibility for the future or even

a good read on right now.

I mean, I think it's no accident.

I don't think that a lot of the turn against just basic rationality, let alone expertise, seems to have occurred right at the moment when essentially computers start to beat us at the things that used to define the height of rational

intelligence.

I do think that there will be a segment of society, particularly if we don't handle a lot of the safety net and socioeconomic problems that could result from automation, that will just be pissed, that will just be angry.

You know, you remind me of something that Tyler Cowan, the economist, said once.

He said, you know, I think he was asked, will there be a revolution in America when the jobs all disappear?

And he said, probably not, because we figured out a system by which we provide people with enough cheap calories and entertainment and sufficient entertainment options, video games mainly, so that we can narcotize the masses in a way that's sufficient to avoid a revolution.

Also, obviously,

the third part of that is actual narcotics, opioids.

But I mean, it's a depressing thought, but

it is true.

People are quiescent about what's happening to, for me at least, a surprising degree.

But I would say, I mean, to sort of add on to what you're saying before, Alexis,

this country does not seem to be happier or more unified in this flourishing age of technological advancement.

It seems like a pretty unhappy place at the moment.

I'm not linking necessarily technological innovation, the rise of social media, but

I was a big fan of the 70s.

Jeff and Alex, I think you're both right about the perils here.

Old.

Old and bitter.

What he was thinking was old

and bitter.

No, I think you're both right about the perils here.

But I think that we have a responsibility.

Those perils impose a responsibility on us.

I actually think most people are not at all quiescent about the possibilities, the possible dangers of widespread automation and machine learning.

I think, on the other, I think, in fact, most people are spinning out this dystopian future.

But I think that dystopia is not inevitable.

However, if dystopia is the only thing that's imaginable, then that's the only direction that we're going to head in.

If we don't imagine how we could actually

take advantage of what is now technologically possible to make human life overall more meaningful rather than less, if no one's sketching out that vision and all we're doing is warning against the dystopia that's inevitably coming into place, then I think that the dystopian future is the only likely path that we're on.

Well, if we don't warn against it, then how's it ever going to stop?

There's no conversation nationally about what we should actually be doing.

I mean, I think, and also left to our own devices, like Helen Keller says, if we find a robot to make faster widgets, we just make more widgets.

We don't say, oh, we made our widgets for the day, let's go on a walk.

Email has not created less work for all of us in this conversation.

It's created more.

So let's, you know, there's downsides to all of these things.

Yeah,

agree, you know, it's hard to argue for the optimistic scenarios, particularly at this moment in our history, right?

But like, you know, you go back to the 1890s and you look at what people were writing about then, there was just this intractable labor problem, right?

I mean, people just felt like there was no way that the

U.S.

economy, which, you know, had undergone much deeper industrialization after the Civil War, could keep going along the pathways that it had, in particular with the sort of depredations that a lot of workers were encountering.

And then you have progressivism that essentially shaves off some of those edges and institutes all kinds of other things

with the help of strong unions and other things.

And I think if you go back to those 1890s, it looked hopeless.

And it was also this incredible flowering of utopian work, which we're not seeing now.

We're seeing a flowering of dystopian work.

You go back then, there's a book called Looking Backward by Edward Belme.

And like, it's, it spawned an entire series of books that tried to imagine a future in which the seemingly impossible problem of the time had been solved.

And then the whole books are just terrible explication of how that happened.

But

I would love to see that.

I would love to see a flowering of books that instead of just like imagining the hunger games plus the road plus like battling the robots that instead and succumbing to like horrible climate change impacts that instead people like try and figure it out.

Like I just I want to say to novelists, like figure it the fuck out.

This is your job.

You know, spend like, spend 10 years and you come up with

how do we do this?

You know, what are the what are the radical things that need to happen

that need to change?

You know, I would like to see the hunger games and the road, but as a musical comedy

or maybe a barn, you know, starring Will Smith.

Animated animals.

Starring Will Smith.

No, no, you know, Alexis, it's interesting, right?

I mean, I mean, dystopia sells, obviously,

but it would be interesting to sort of imagine what this country would look like if people, A, had enough to eat and a place to live, but didn't have to work, and that we devalued work as the thing that gives us meaning.

Well, devalued out of the homework, right?

Because we've already devalued all kinds of work.

It's just right, we've chosen, I would almost say we've chosen to selectively value a certain kind of work.

Well, but I mean, was homemaking truly ever considered?

I mean, I just don't think that economically speaking, there was ever, and I'm not saying this is right, but that there was ever a sort of, that that was valued in the same way that work that creates capital does.

Yeah, I totally agree.

I agree 100% with that point.

That kind of work has never been valued, although there used to be a lot more at-home production within homes too.

Barbara Garson, who we heard from earlier, she was the author of the Electronic Sweatshop and kind of dealt with automation in the 1980s.

She makes a really important point, which is just that the tools that we use do not necessarily instantiate systems of oppression around them, that different possibilities can result from the same basic technology.

And here she is again.

Now, I must make an apology to the computer.

It's not inherent in the machine any more than a sewing machine gave us the garment sweatshop.

You can take the sewing machine home, you can make a wonderful dress, you would never want to go back to doing it by hand.

You could be a designer and use a sewing machine.

The same thing is is true about the computer.

So we should apologize to our sewing machines.

Listen, I'm saying.

I'm sorry, sewing machines.

I'm sorry, MacBook Air.

No, but I don't know that Jeff and I are blaming, you know, Macintosh.

We're blaming humans and they're, you know, I mean, it's like, we don't think much of our villa of the machine.

No, yeah, no.

I mean, it's like money.

You know, money can be used for good, it could be used for bad.

Sometimes people use it for good, sometimes people use it for bad.

I think this is a very good point that a lot of we tend to already we're sort of at the point of talking about machines as more intelligent than they actually are.

It is humans that are ultimately controlling the puppet strengths.

I think the thing that scares me kind of the most is it's not necessarily humans.

It is corporate persons, right?

There are these sort of responsibility for that kind of decisions are like they're spread throughout these organizations.

And what the artificial intelligences are, are like the literal avatars of the corporate person, right?

They take the goal of the company, they run it, they encode that in a neural network, and then they go do whatever that thing is meant to do.

And that actually does freak me out because we can have a lot of sort of high-level philosophical, ethical conversations about, you know, trolley problems and, you know, the ethics of AI.

But the truth is that pretty much all of the high-level AI is being done in pretty corporate settings and

with the goal of solving individual corporate problems?

And I think that's going to lead to really specific set of AI

relative to the set we could imagine.

And that goes back to Jeff's original point, which is that the conversation is happening,

as you point out, Alexis, the conversation and the innovation is happening in the corporate sector.

There is no national political conversation or economic conversation about the implications of automation or how we might harness it for good.

And there's certainly not a socio-cultural conversation happening in the American public about what this means for our lives.

Politicians don't want to level.

They don't, I mean, you know, what are voters scared of?

They're scared of technological disruption.

They're scared of globalization.

They're scared of trade.

Trade they can control a little bit.

I mean, through their, through the voting booth, not maybe to the long-term good of the country, but that's a debate.

Globalization is inevitable.

Technological advancement is inevitable.

Politicians don't want to tell people that

these things are common, whether you like it or not.

Back in the 1970s, there were these sort of steady-state economists,

like Herman Daly, who once went before Congress and said,

the attitude of the ruling class to the poor was let them eat growth.

The idea of growth, that you would make more money in the future than you do now, is kind of what keeps people locked into

the current sort of political and economic system.

And I think what a lot of these, the technologies technologies and globalization, particularly the rise of these other powerful manufacturing nations, and

it just a lot of those things mean there may not be growth.

So, okay, what now?

And I think that's something that people started to level with in the 70s.

Computers came along and sort of changed the narrative there.

And I think we're kind of back there again with a lot of the same issues and without having actually thought through it all.

That's saddening.

That leaves us in a dark place.

Hashtag reality.

Matt, that was emotional labor, emotionally laboring.

That's saddening.

I just Venmote him five bucks for it.

So I want to take us out on an upbeat note with our final segment.

What do you want to keep?

Your keepers.

What have you heard, seen, experienced, watched, listened to, read

recently that you do not want to forget?

What do you want to put in your personal archive and take into the future?

When the machines have taken all our jobs, what fond memory do you want to hold on to?

Alexis, let's start with you.

I'm going to go with events.

I had a very strange Saturday in which I went to a huge warehouse in West Oakland and I watched a bunch of self-driving model cars race around

this empty old pipe factory.

Chris Anderson, Wired's old editor, has started this thing called RoboCars.

And most of them didn't work, but there were a lot of like sweaty teams programming their hearts out, and that was awesome.

And then after that, I went to the opening of a place called the Museum of Capitalism, also in Oakland, of course.

Your weekends are fantastic things, Alexa.

I'm leaving out all the child care.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Hashtag San Francisco.

Hashtag Oakland.

Hashtag Oakland.

So my

thing to keep, I am going to shout out the work of Martin O'Leary, who is a research scientist in Wales.

And he ordinarily studies glaciers and glaciology, but

on the side, he produces...

Is it like condiology?

No.

Glaciology.

Nothing like condylistiology.

Not nearly as serious.

On the side.

On the side, Mr.

O'Leary creates bots.

He codes these sort of delightful little serendipitous bots and deploys them on Twitter, and they are fantastic.

You should follow all of them.

One of them is called Bot Ston, a bot which takes the song Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and substitutes alternate lyrics.

It can be hard to hear so I'm going to help it along.

No

one

dines like Gaston, no one lies like Gaston.

In a shiny match, nobody shines like Gaston.

So that's one of the types of bots that Mr.

O'Leary creates.

I dropped that one in there just so we know that bots can be delightful and can make delightful things for us.

Alex, how about you?

I hope this isn't disclosing too much, but I moved.

I moved this week.

And part of moving requires getting rid of things.

So in preparation, I listened to the words of Marie Kondo, which is, you know, she is a,

dare I say, a household name at this point among a certain sector of hoarders.

Basically, I listened to her sort of like preach the gospel of getting rid of things and, you know, saying goodbye to the things that we've lived, the objects, the apparel, the old hoisin sauce that is, that has been close, near, and dear to us, and saying, thank you for your time with me.

Thank you for your use.

Goodbye.

To the hoiser.

What's that?

I couldn't believe how much hoisin sauce we have in the Wagner-Cass household.

What if you need it?

You need it.

It tastes like nothing else.

And I practiced condo

condoism.

I don't really actually know what

the followers call themselves.

Condologists.

Condalista.

Condolyista rice.

Condo lista rice.

It was incredibly freeing.

Now, I still have probably too much, you know,

weird old catnip toys and

definitely probably too much sriracha, but I think that the load is lighter, both proverbially and emotionally, and it's worth holding on to.

Ironically, letting go is worth holding on to.

Too much sriracha, the Alex Wagner story.

Totally the story.

The Red Rooster bread.

I'll get you yet.

I thought you were only supposed to keep things that you

bring.

I thought that was part of it.

And you kept catnip toys.

Well, they bring my cat joy.

And, you know, he can't talk.

So I had to make decisions for him.

Why can't your cat talk?

He's not automated yet.

Right, exactly.

Get a robot cat.

Jeff, speaking of robot cats, what do you want?

Speaking of robot cats.

So I was going to stick with our future theme by citing

a song by Future, Mask Off, which I've always had a, this is probably admitting too much, but I've always had a kind of aesthetic weakness for codeine rap.

Remember codeine rap?

Yeah.

Just I like listening.

I don't like codeine, but I like codeine rap.

I'm not sure it's good for society, codeine rap, but I do.

But then

Alexis reminded me that of Oakland.

And I was thinking, what do I think of when I think of Oakland?

I think of Boots Riley.

I was just going to say, you think of Boots Riley?

I spent part of the weekend when I wasn't working 24-7 for the Atlantic.

I spent part of the weekend listening to some Boots Riley, including one of my favorite Boots Riley cuts, Ride the Fence.

Now, I'm I'm not like Boots Riley, I'm not a communist.

I'm actually pro-America, but I

kind of overlooked that because this is a guy who can use the word antelope in a rhyme.

There's this great line in

tired of being hunted like an antelope, take the system by the throat.

That's the antidote.

So I pose a proposition, take a look, be in supporter, opposition.

It just, the man can rhyme.

And so can this man.

No, no, no, no, I'm not.

I'm not.

I'm purposely not.

Look, by the way, I'm not rapping.

Let me show you what I mean.

I'm anti-Republican and Democratic.

If they self-destruct, that's anticlimactic.

Tired of being hurt like an antelope.

Take the system by the throat, that's the antidote.

So I pose a proposition.

Take a look, be in support of opposition.

You'll be proactive, proceed with confidence.

Cause you know that you can't change shit by riding the fix.

Riding the fix.

Boots.

Boots Riley.

The guy.

Guy can make rhymes.

That's right.

Oakland Legends.

Boots Riley.

Boots Riley.

I really feel like I need to do more productive

things with my weekend.

I threw away hoisin sauce,

and

you guys are operating on an entirely different plane.

Thanks, y'all.

This has been an enlightening conversation.

Alexis, thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Alexis.

Come back soon, Alexis.

I will.

It helps that you're my boss.

Yes, he's incentivized.

That was the imperative.

Come back soon, Alexis.

That was an order, not a request.

Once again, that'll do it.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced and edited by Alice Winkler, with additional production by Kevin Townsend and production support from Katie Green and Kim Lau.

Big ups to our colleague Alexis Madrigal, and cheers once again to my co-hosts, Jeffrey Goldberg and Alex Wagner.

Thanks to John Batiste for our amazing theme music, including his incredible version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which we will play in full after these credits conclude.

If you like the show, please make sure to rate and review us on iTunes and also send us your thoughts.

As always, you can find us at theatlantic.com slash radio or facebook.com slash radioatlantic.

Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.

All

glory

My eyes are glorious of the coming of the Lord.

He is trapped in the vintage where the red and rattlesnake.

He had lose the faithful lightning of the terrible Swiss war.

His troop is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah,

glory, glory, highly loved,

hallelujah.