The Future of Work and Death

Even if we can change human beings,

in what direction do we change them?

Do we want to change them this way or that way?

This is an example of the way in which

technological advance impinges on sociological necessity.

What we need to ask ourselves is,

"Where does my individual ability to control my life

or to influence the political process

lie in relation to these new forms of technology?"

Government and politicians

don't understand what's happening.

See, they don't even realized this change is happening.

It is very difficult, not impossible,

to predict what the precise effects will be,

and in--in many cases, like with other technologies,

we have to socket and see.

Who would have predicted the internet?

And I talk about this matter as humanity 2.0

'cause in a sense, this is kind of where we're heading,

to some kind of new--new normal, as it were,

of what it is to be a human being.

It's not a problem

that we should dismiss or underestimate.

It's staggering in its proportions.

Ignorance and disbelief at the same time.

People don't believe that change is happening this fast.

That's the problem.

This is a stone

formed naturally in the Earth's crust

over millions of years through pressure and heat.

It was discovered in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

Dated around 2.5 million years BC,

it is arguably one of the first examples of technology.

Stone tools were first adapted for the use of cutting,

scraping, or pounding materials by Homo habilis,

one of our earliest ancestors.

Over one million years later,

mankind made one of the most significant

of all technological discoveries...

Fire.

The ability to control fire

was a turning point for human evolution.

It kept us warm, allowed us to see in the dark,

and allowed us to cook food,

which many scientists believe was a huge contributor

to the ascent of mind.

Each age, each empire, has brought with it

the discovery and invention of numerous technologies

each in their own way redesigning human life...

...leading us to now...

...modern-day society.

We're now more advanced, connected, knowledgeable,

and resistant to disease than ever before,

and it is all due to our ability

to apply scientific knowledge for practical purposes

in a bid to maximize efficiency.

Just as the stone set us on a path of transformation,

the technologies of the future

may bring with them a paradigm shift,

changing two major features of the human experience.

Two things that have defined our lives

for as long as we can remember.

Two things that have always been involuntary constants:

trading our time for sustenance

and losing that time through senescence.

The Industrial Revolution effectively freed man

from being a beast of burden.

The computer revolution will similarly free him

from dull, repetitive routine.

The computer revolution is, however,

perhaps better compared with the Copernican

or the Darwinian Revolution,

both of which greatly changed man's idea of himself

and the world in which he lives.

In the space of 60 years, we have landed on the moon,

seen the rise of computing power,

mobile phones,

the explosion of the internet,

and we have sequenced the human genome.

We took man to the moon and back

with four kilobytes of memory.

The phone in your pocket is at least 250,000 times

more powerful than that.

We are ever-increasingly doing more with less.

One of the things that has been born

out of this technological revolution

is the ability to replace human workers

with more efficient machines.

This is largely due to the speed

at which we are advancing our technological capabilities.

Information technology grows in an exponential manner.

It's not linear.

And our intuition is linear.

When we walked through the savanna

a thousand years ago, we made linear predictions

where that animal would be and that worked fine.

It's hardwired in our brains,

but the pace of exponential growth

is really what describes information technologies,

and it's not just computation.

There's a big difference between linear

and exponential growth.

If I take 30 steps linearly,

one, two, three, four, five, I get to 30.

If I take 30 steps exponentially,

two, four, eight, sixteen, I get to a billion.

It makes a huge difference.

And that really describes information technology.

When I was a student at MIT,

we all shared one computer, it took up a whole building.

The computer in your cell phone today

is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller,

a thousand times more powerful.

That's a billionfold increase in capability per dollar

that we've actually experienced

since I was a student,

and we're gonna do it again in the next 25 years.

Currently, on an almost daily basis,

new algorithms, programs,

and feats in mechanical engineering

are getting closer and closer to being a reliable

and more cost-effective alternative to a human worker.

This process is known as automation.

This is not just about,

you know, automation where we expect it,

which is in factories

and among blue-collar workers and so forth.

It is coming quite aggressively

for people at much higher skill levels,

and that will only grow in the future

as we continue on this exponential arc.

This business that, you know, not having to work very hard

because machines are taking care of things for you,

I mean, you see this also in the 19th century

with the Industrial Revolution.

And, in fact, I think one of the problems

with the Industrial Revolution,

and this is where Marxism got so much traction,

was that machines actually did render

a lot of people unemployed, okay?

That already happened in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And it was only by labor organizing itself

that it was able to kind of deal

with the situation intelligently

because there was no automatic, you might say,

transition to something else.

It was just, you know, "We don't need you anymore.

We have these more efficient machines,

and so now we don't--you know,

now you just have to find work somewhere else."

Automation clearly has been happening for a long time,

and it has, you know, automated

a lot of very laborious work that we don't want to do,

and that's gonna continue to be the case in the future,

but I do think that this time is genuinely different.

If we look at what's happened historically,

what we've seen is that automation

has primarily been a mechanical phenomenon,

and the classic example of that

is, of course, agriculture.

I'm a farmer.

Here's what mechanical engineering has done

for all of us who work on the farms

and for you, too.

It used to be, in the United States

and in most advanced countries,

that most people worked on farms.

Now, almost no one works on a farm.

It's less than two percent.

And, of course, as a result of that, we're better off.

We have, you know, more comfortable jobs,

food is cheaper,

we have a much more advanced society.

The question is, "Can that continue indefinitely?"

And what we're seeing this time

is that things are really quite different.

If this keeps up,

it won't be long before machines will do everything.

Nobody will have work.

So as we move deeper into the automated future,

we will see different stages take form.

The first stage that we're entering

is the stage where automated robots are working

side by side with people in factories.

Some of those jobs are slowly going away,

but in the near future, within two to three years,

you're going to see a huge percentage

of those factory jobs be replaced

with automated systems and automated robots.

The next stage following that is we could see

up to a third of jobs in America

be replaced by 2025

by robots or automated systems.

That's a huge percentage of people

that could be unemployed

because of this automated tsunami

that's coming, basically.