Let AI replace you

Speaker 1 Support for today's show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. Perhaps you think if you have a good idea and work hard, success is inevitable.

Speaker 1 The truth is, according to Sequoia Capital, that almost every company, no matter how brilliant the idea, no matter how steadfast the founders, will encounter unthinkable obstacles that can make or break them.

Speaker 1 Unthinkable, no less. You can listen to Crucible Moments and hear about those unlikely triumphs over those unthinkable obstacles at Supercell, Palo Alto Networks, so much more.

Speaker 1 Check out CrucibleMoments.com or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 Here's a tip from the Smartless guys.

Speaker 2 Most of us buy unlimited data, then live on Wi-Fi like it's our full-time job. That's why they started Smartless Mobile, wireless for non-geniuses.

Speaker 2 Simple, right-sized plans based on what you actually use, not what big wireless loves to overcharge you for. No contracts, no overages, no gotchas.
And you can sign up in minutes.

Speaker 2 Plans start at 10 bucks a month with unlimited talk and text. And you can keep your number.
For a limited time, get your first month free on select plans. Use code Vox at checkout.

Speaker 2 Taxes and fees extra terms apply. Visit smartlistmobile.com.
Don't get out smarted. Get SmartlistMobile.

Speaker 4 It has taken a job that would take months to do, and it can basically do it in an hour.

Speaker 5 And I said, we got to get food delivered by a robot.

Speaker 6 My name is Jake, but perhaps better known as Rizbot.

Speaker 6 It's nice to meet you.

Speaker 8 When you were a kid, did you daydream about the future?

Speaker 8 I thought it was going to look like the Jetsons. Flying cars, video phones, robots to do our grocery shopping.

Speaker 11 Well, we're still waiting on those flying cars, but video phones are here, and so are the robots.

Speaker 12 In Austin, Texas, they're sort of everywhere rolling down the sidewalk on their way to deliver food.

Speaker 15 You'll also see autonomous cars on the street and AI is even showing up in city government.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 Daniel Collado works for the city's Department of Organizational Excellence, and he says AI is cutting through red tape and making things way more efficient.

Speaker 16 I think we put it across 27 different departments and on average, people saved, you know, between four and like 12 hours a week of productivity time.

Speaker 16 So I think that's really exciting exciting that across the board, we can see applications of this all over the city.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 11 And so what happened is my mother became, or she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Speaker 11 And so those robots allowed me to stay with her and meet her needs, but also still get those supplies from the store.

Speaker 17 This is a resident named Snow Snow White.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 I mean for me for that specific time it was really needed and it and it helped so much.

Speaker 5 She says those little delivery robots really came through for her.

Speaker 11 And there was a time daily I was using the AV robot sometimes two or three times a day. So yes, they're convenient, but then for me it was just something that it was essential.

Speaker 8 I'm John Glenn Hill, and this week on Explain It To Me from Vox, what if the AI revolution actually gets it right?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 13 Time.

Speaker 22 Honestly, if I had a lot of free time, I would work on myself.

Speaker 23 I would start taking up gardening. I would try to educate myself on things that are important to me.

Speaker 24 I would absolutely dedicate all of that time to rescuing cats, feeding cats, and

Speaker 24 housing them after they had been in some of the high-kill shelters in the city.

Speaker 19 I think a lot of the loneliness or the almost

Speaker 22 intense pressure to the point where I just want to give up of trying to schedule things, especially with kids, would just be released.

Speaker 8 There's actually a name for this best case scenario. It's called AI abundance.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 20 AI and robots 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.

Speaker 8 So tell me how we would end up better off.

Speaker 20 There are

Speaker 20 two types of positive outcomes depending on what your relationship to work is.

Speaker 20 Some people who really like their work, they predict a world where you have a lot more exciting work yet than today, and maybe with a little bit less time intensity.

Speaker 20 And then folks who are not that crazy about their job, they are 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.

Speaker 20 You can see this in lots and lots of pronouncements by business people who say, oh, we need more skilled workers.

Speaker 20 And that essentially encapsulates this notion that if we only had more workers, we could produce so much more.

Speaker 20 And 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 have one more AI worker, or press another button and have one more robot,

Speaker 20 and those can all perform work on their behalf and essentially expand our economic opportunities.

Speaker 8 We keep hearing that a change of this scale is unprecedented.

Speaker 7 Is it, actually?

Speaker 20 You know, I think it's the first time of this particular nature. But if you want to...

Speaker 20 go into like history and look for any parallels, I think the closest parallel would be the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 20 So you would have to go back some 250 years for anything that comes even close to what what we are about to experience this time, I think.

Speaker 8 Coming up, what steam engines can teach us about the AI revolution.

Speaker 1 Support for today's show comes from Upwork. You're the CEO of your business and the CFO and customer service.
That's a small business. Maybe you need some support.

Speaker 1 Upwork says that with Upwork Business Plus, they can bring you support in the form of top quality freelancers and fast.

Speaker 1 Instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork in fields such as marketing, design, AI, so much more.

Speaker 1 Upwork says that when you use Upwork Business Plus, you can source and vet candidates for skill and reliability.

Speaker 1 They can also send you a curated shortlist of proven expert talent so that you can delegate with confidence. Don't spin your wheels.

Speaker 1 Right now, when you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business Plus, you'll get $500 in credit. Go to upwork.com slash save now.
You can claim this offer before December 31, 2025.

Speaker 1 And again, that's upwork.com slash S-A-V-E.

Speaker 1 Scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit. Terms and conditions do apply.

Speaker 26 Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.

Speaker 26 Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro.

Speaker 27 You just have to hire one.

Speaker 26 You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.

Speaker 15 It's Explain ItTime. I'm JQ.

Speaker 19 And the International Monetary Fund estimates that AI could impact 40% of jobs around the world.

Speaker 8 And that number looks more like 60% in what it calls advanced economies, like here in the U.S.

Speaker 5 If that turns out to be true, what will the future of work look like?

Speaker 8 UVA's Anton Kornik says there are clues in our past.

Speaker 20 From a big picture economic perspective, you can say work as we have it today didn't even really exist before the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 20 Because before then, the most important factor of production was the land that people worked in order to produce the food that they needed.

Speaker 20 And all the sudden you had these new technologies that didn't rely so much on land as they relied on machines.

Speaker 20 It started with like spinning and weaving in the textile sector, but then soon we had the steam engine and electricity and so on.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 So you could easily build more spinning wheels, more weaving machines and

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And in some sense, you can say 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.

Speaker 17 What did that mean for workers at the time though? I imagine that transition wasn't easy.

Speaker 20 At the time, it was actually quite disruptive. And if you were basically an artisan weaver or something like that

Speaker 20 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 an order of magnitude cheaper so those artisans they lost their livelihood essentially overnight and they were impoverished.

Speaker 20 But I guess, you know, looking at 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.

Speaker 20 And that can be hugely disruptive and painful for the individual.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 17 When it comes to the AI revolution, is this something that's going to be benefiting like more so our grandkids than us possibly?

Speaker 20 Well, I very much hope that we can all benefit.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 20 small sectors where people are losing out and then there's going to be a debate, well, why should we help them?

Speaker 20 We didn't help, let's say, other workers in previous technological revolutions that much.

Speaker 20 And then the size of those sectors that are disrupted is probably going to go up. And then eventually.

Speaker 20 most people will be affected at this, but it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to be a somewhat slow process.
And our society is going to continually debate how should we react to this?

Speaker 20 What are the best things to do about this?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And then since roughly the middle of the 20th century, we created machines that could automate cognitive tasks, essentially computers.

Speaker 20 And you know, at first those computers, they could only perform highly routinized things like, let's say, adding up numbers in a spreadsheet.

Speaker 20 And that was very useful for businesses, so I don't want to put that down in any way.

Speaker 20 And now the big question with AI is that first we are seeing that these machines can perform more and more of the complex, really

Speaker 20 thoughtful cognitive tasks. So the big question is, where will this stop and will they leave anything for us?

Speaker 8 We work to get a paycheck.

Speaker 3 In a future where we don't work anymore, how do we eat?

Speaker 15 How do we get health insurance?

Speaker 5 Pay for a place to live?

Speaker 19 Are there things that people are talking about to sort of take care of that if this is our new future?

Speaker 20 I think that's going to be the

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 20 where our labor became more and more and more valuable because we were so scarce

Speaker 20 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 but once the AI revolution really hits there is

Speaker 20 no guarantee that we can earn like a decent living based on the value of our labor anymore

Speaker 20 I do believe that we are going to need a new system of income distribution at that For example, universal basic income

Speaker 20 compute allotments that everybody essentially gets a certain amount of computational power allocated that they can then either use or sell off.

Speaker 20 People are also talking about job guarantees. There's a whole range of options out there.

Speaker 20 From a big picture perspective, the primary

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 3 So, when the AI revolution arrives, what will we do with all that time?

Speaker 18 That's next.

Speaker 28 Support for the show comes from Microsoft Copilot, an official AI sponsor of the NFL.

Speaker 28 Copilot is giving NFL teams AI-powered insights to help players and coaches analyze plays, identify formations, and make faster, more informed decisions for real gains.

Speaker 28 Copilot is turning data into insights and insights into tangible action on the field.

Speaker 28 Because when teams have real-time, AI-powered insights that help them perform at their absolute best, everybody wins. You can make Microsoft Copilot your AI companion for NFL Game Day and every day.

Speaker 28 See how at aka.mslash copilot NFL.

Speaker 27 Tu mereces dis flutartus favoritos por menos. Ya sell na Bic Mac, McNuggets, or a sausage, egg, and cheese, McCriddles, pie tuento hocomo un meal, y a horra.

Speaker 27 Oof, nava como darte un gustaso por tam poco. Los extra value meals están del regreso.

Speaker 29 Gana por la mañana con el extra value meal, sausage, mc, muffin with egg, hash browns, and a cafe.

Speaker 29 Poros seizolares. Bara, buh, baba, ba.
Preces y participación pueden varía. Los preces de la promión pueden sermonores que lo de las comidas.

Speaker 8 I'm JQ, and this is Explain It To Me.

Speaker 1 We're talking about our AI future, which, for a lot of us, is already here.

Speaker 4 We have been using AI recently to

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So, I've done the all-American task of pretending to be busy.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 30 One of the things that being busy and having a full life gives you is purpose.

Speaker 30 And 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.

Speaker 3 So if AI really does change the way we work, does that mean we'll have more time to do what actually fulfills us?

Speaker 13 That's the question I asked Tom Waite.

Speaker 8 He's a senior writer at DAZED and reports on the intersection of culture and tech.

Speaker 21 I think we got to see a version of this kind of during the pandemic in the early 2020s.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It took this kind of real creative path.

Speaker 1 Throughout quarantine, many people have taken up new hobbies. One of the most popular hobbies this year has been gardening.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 21 Actually, when I was working on this piece for days,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Because 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...

Speaker 32 I think what most people did was just game and post and doom scroll and binge watch and cultivate their mental illnesses.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 19 Okay, that's fair.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 21 I think we can still do the work that we are doing today without maybe the pressures of having to constantly monetize that work.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And they would have so much more freedom and opportunity to do real meaningful work, I think, if they didn't have that like imperative to

Speaker 21 make money from it all of the time.

Speaker 9 I know it's very unhealthy for us to be defined by our artwork, but I also recognize that work can be something that gives our life purpose.

Speaker 17 And, you know, I think that's across beliefs.

Speaker 10 Capitalism, of course, thrives on it. But Marx argued that humans are productive by nature.

Speaker 8 Work doesn't have to be a bad thing, right?

Speaker 7 Like, I guess to put it another way, without work, like, do we have less purpose?

Speaker 21 I think the problem here is that we have a really narrow definition of work.

Speaker 21 And I think when we talk about work today, we're talking about things that generate money in order to, you know, put a roof over our head or put food on the table.

Speaker 21 But actually, someone that I spoke to for this piece, Liz Fuchsman, who's a researcher at King's College London, she pointed out that actually the word work is much more flexible and fluid than that.

Speaker 21 can include things like childcare and care for the elderly and all of these other things because we can we certainly put effort into other parts of our lives that don't generate money and that are actually really undercompensated today.

Speaker 10 Yeah, what would it take for this world to become an actual reality?

Speaker 21 Well, that's a whole different matter.

Speaker 21 I think it looks like a lot of disruption, a lot of kind of very hard work, ironically, because it requires huge structural, political, and economic change, I think.

Speaker 21 And that could look like something like universal basic income, even though that seems to have fallen out of fashion a little bit in the last year.

Speaker 21 Or you have countries like China or Singapore, which are

Speaker 21 super invested in AI technologies and, you know, kind of

Speaker 21 have that technocratic kind of vibe about them, but also have been using a lot of this excess kind of capital that's generated

Speaker 21 by introducing machines into like

Speaker 21 really good public infrastructure and public luxury.

Speaker 21 And I think that is like a huge cause for optimism personally, because it's a form of redistribution that, yeah, maybe you don't see more money going to your bank account, but maybe you walk down the street and your life just feels that little bit like

Speaker 21 better or more convenient or you're struggling less because you have better social provisions.

Speaker 3 Is there anything that like we, like I'm thinking normal everyday people, is there anything we can do to shape the way AI transforms our lives?

Speaker 21 It's difficult to feel like you have agency in this kind of new world of billionaires and robotic automation for sure.

Speaker 21 I don't know how much agency any individual has beyond their kind of like part in a wider collective.

Speaker 21 But I think what there is really space for now is like a positive vision of the future that benefits everybody.

Speaker 21 So instead of just like straight up criticism of these new technologies, which is often warranted, and I think you know that goes back to the Industrial Revolution and the kind of Luddites, like the fear and anger is warranted there.

Speaker 21 But I think that has to be channeled into a kind of positive vision for the future instead of just endless criticism because it feels like these technologies are inevitable and

Speaker 21 it feels like they could be used to make a better world. But nobody has really put forward that vision yet, at least for people

Speaker 21 like you and I, instead of people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

Speaker 21 I think of something that Elon Musk said in 2024 when he was rolling out some of his Optimus robots, which are supposed to, you know, be able to fit into our world very easily and automate tasks.

Speaker 21 And he said. With autonomy,

Speaker 14 you get your time back. And what can it do? It can do anything you want.
So it can be a teacher, babysit your kids. It can walk your dog, mow your lawn, whatever you can think of.

Speaker 21 That might have just been like bad marketing copy. I'm not sure.
But to me, it speaks to like

Speaker 21 misplaced priorities, at least as far as I'm concerned. Because if I'm getting more time, if something's automating parts of my life, I want it to automate the boring stuff.

Speaker 21 I want technology to enable me to spend more time doing the things that I want to do, not kind of displacing these very kind of like core human activities as I see them.

Speaker 12 And that's our show.

Speaker 17 Thanks to everyone who called and emailed in for this episode.

Speaker 18 And if there's another topic you want us to explore, tell us about it. Call 1-800-618-8545 or email askvox at vox.com.

Speaker 13 You can also support this show by becoming a Vox member. And membership comes with perks like access to our brand new Patreon where you can chat with your favorite Vox podcast hosts, including me.

Speaker 13 Let's talk. Go to vox.com slash members to join today.

Speaker 12 And if you're already a member, go ahead and activate that Patreon account.

Speaker 3 Thank you to Yulia Shraveko of AV Ride and everyone else who took the time to talk with us in Austin.

Speaker 8 This episode was produced by Hadi Mawagdi.

Speaker 13 It was edited by Ginny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by David Tatishore.

Speaker 18 Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer, and I'm your host, John Quillen Hill. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 8 I'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 9 Bye.

Speaker 25 Get a jump on next summer with Verbo's early booking deals. Don't wait to claim your dream summer spot, whether that includes a good porch swing or a poolside lounger.

Speaker 25 When you book early, you get the best places at the best prices. But back to the poolside loungers.
With Verbo, you don't have to reserve any loungers.

Speaker 12 They're all yours.

Speaker 25 In fact, the whole private home is yours. Book with early booking deals, and you can lounge around all summer long, however you please, at Verbo.com.