How AI Will Impact the Future of Work

Will artificial intelligence be a job creator or a job destroyer? Who will be most affected — and how long will the AI revolution in employment take? Futurist Martin Ford and economist Betsey Stevenson join Kara to unpack the realities behind the AI hype. They explore the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of work, from the fate of blue-collar jobs amid advancing robotics to the government’s role in helping workers navigate this new era. They also dive into ideas like universal basic income and a digital dividend, and examine how AI could redefine our economy, society, and the role work plays in a meaningful life. Martin Ford is the founder of a software development firm and the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. Betsey Stevenson was the chief economist of the US Department of Labor from 2010 to 2011, and then served on the Council of Economic Advisors from 2013 to 2015. She's a professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan and serves on the executive committee of the American Economic Association. Register for Smartsheet Engage here! Want to see Kara and Scott Galloway live during the Pivot Tour November 8th-14th? Get tickets and details at PivotTour.com. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Kara Swisher?

  Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, we've got a conversation between futurist Martin Ford and economist Betsy Stevenson on the effects of artificial intelligence on employment. Ford has been thinking and writing about the effects of AI on jobs long before it was in the zeitgeist. He's the founder of a software development firm and the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, which won the 2015 Financial Times McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. Stevenson is a labor economist who researches the effect of AI on work.

• 0:53Kara Swisher?

  She was the chief economist of the US Department of Labor from 2010 to 2011 and then served on the Council of Economic Advisors from 2013 to 2015. She's a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan and serves on the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association. Martin and Betsy are two very deep thinkers on this topic and couldn't be more vital. A quick note before we get to the episode, I'm doing a live pivot tour with my co-host Scott Galloway. The tour runs November 8th through the 14th and it hits Toronto, Boston, New York, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and LA. We are sold out in several of those cities and almost sold out in most of them, but tickets are still available at pivottour.com in some cities.

• 1:38Kara Swisher?

  All right, this is a really sharp conversation, so stick around.

• 1:57Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 2:43Kara Swisher?

  Martin and Betsy, thanks for coming on ON.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  It's great to talk with you today.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:48Kara Swisher?

  Now, Martin, you're relatively pessimistic about how AI will affect employment, and Betsy, you're relatively optimistic. So let's start by having you both lay your cards on the table. Betsy, why do you see the AI glass as half-full? And then, Martin, why do you see it as half-empty, so to speak?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Well, economic growth, true economic growth, comes from only one thing: technological progress. And so if we want to be able to produce more using fewer resources, and those resources include human labor, energy, capital, the only way to do it is through technological progress. AI is obviously a huge leap forward in technological progress. But I don't want to overstate my optimism. In almost every time of huge technological progress, it has moved us to a better era, but it's caused a lot of pain along the way. I always tell

• 3:46Speaker 01

  my students, you know, economists describe the Industrial Revolution as if it was fantastic. Obviously, they don't read a lot of Charles Dickens. So, you know, there is definitely a downside, and I think managing the downside is the task for society and for policymakers.

• 4:03Kara Swisher?

  Okay, Martin?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I basically agree with what Betsy said. It's just that my position has been Since I started writing about this 16 years ago is that ultimately it's inevitable that machines are going to displace, I think, probably at least half the workforce, maybe more, because AI and robotics are going to get to the point where it matches and then exceeds the capability of most typical average workers. That doesn't mean that no one is going to have a job. There'll be some people that have particular talents and personality traits and things like that. But I think for the majority of people that come to work and do relatively routine predictable things, we will reach the point where it's going to be very difficult for those people to, you know, find a market for their skills.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  I think the machines will simply be better at just about everything that they can do. And we're going to have to adapt to that.

• 4:55Kara Swisher?

  I'm glad you mentioned robotics because often AI, it's left out of it because the way that progress is going is also pretty significant.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. AI seems to be, you know, the focus right now and we maybe initially we'd worry more about white collar jobs, but absolutely robotics is making enormous progress. So certainly in environments like Amazon warehouses, I think it's going to be quite disruptive.

• 5:18Kara Swisher?

  I've been to those warehouses and many, even a decade ago, you could see which way it was headed in terms of getting rid of workers. But Walmart CEO Doug McMillan recently said that, quote, "AI is going to change literally every job." Is that accurate or hyperbolic? Is AI a truly revolutionary technology or radically transforming how a worker, or is it more like the internet, which has brought about massive changes, but it hasn't fundamentally changed how a lawyer, accountant, or plumber does their job? Martin, let's hear from you first and then Betsy.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that AI is unique. I think it's unlike any other technology and the reason is that it's going to directly displace what is our core competence, right? The thing that sets us apart is our intelligence, right? Our cognitive capability. That is what so far has always allowed us to adapt and remain relevant to the workforce, even in the face of advancing technology. But I think what's happening is that finally we're going to get a technology that comes directly at our comparative advantage, right? It's going to displace the thing that really sets us apart.

• 6:22Kara Swisher?

  Betsy?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  So it's worth thinking about other big changes because what we used to do for a living was agriculture. Almost all people on the planet worked in agriculture. And the share of the planet engaged in agriculture has absolutely plummeted. And that hasn't meant that we don't have things to do. It doesn't mean that we don't have work. It does mean we don't work in agriculture. So I think when I talk about the importance of the transition, it's because we know that there will be jobs that are better able to be done by machines. The question will be, what are the new things that arrive? And what's the pace at which they arrive? And do we like those new things? Are they better jobs?

• 7:09Speaker 01

  In a lot of ways, the jobs people initially left the farms for in factories were not necessarily better at first, and they didn't really improve living standards. But I think most of us sitting around, right, you're doing a podcast for a living. I'm teaching at a university. I would much rather that than working in the field. So our jobs have gotten a lot better. But transformation takes time. So I actually am going to push back on your idea that the internet didn't change fundamentally how I do my job as an economist or how a lawyer does their job. The number of papers academics write nowadays because of computing.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  So let's put computing in the big bucket, but also because of the internet, because I can access, I can download the census during this podcast if I would like. When, you know, only a couple generations ago, if they wanted to get access to census data, it was a very big progress that involved punch cards. So it has fundamentally changed our productivity, and I think in a way made the job a lot better. The technology is not guaranteed to make the jobs better. And I think that's where we need to have our discussions and our focus about what are the tasks that are going to be replaced by machines? And how do we feel about those tasks?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  But let me say one last thing, before we get replacement, there's something else that's gonna happen, which is that the wages are gonna change. Because it's not enough for the machine to be able to do the job. The machine has to be able to do the job cheaper than a human. And one thing that could happen is humans could just do the job for less. And so what we could see happening is the wages of a lot of white collar workers facing downward pressure. And that, I think, is problematic. But I think that that's much more likely to happen first, before we see, you know, wide swaths of 50% of the population unemployed.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  What we're going to see is real reductions in the compensation people get. You know, there are still people using manual carpet weaving looms today because they're cheaper than using a mechanized one. So it is the interaction of the machine being able to do it, and then being able, the machine doing it cheaper than any human will do it.

• 9:40Kara Swisher?

  Martin, will you answer that? The historical element of this happening is that it's just a shift in jobs, which is essentially what she's saying.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Right, but I think that largely it's been a shift from one sector to another. So as Betsy said, we all used to work on farms. And people were working on farms, and they were doing relatively routine, predictable things. Those jobs disappeared when agriculture mechanized, and there was disruption, but there was a transition largely into manufacturing, right? So people went from farms, they went to factories where they were doing relatively routine, predictable things. Then manufacturing also automated and offshore. And now in countries like the United States, most people are in the service sector. But they're still doing relatively predictable, routine things. And the point is...

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Then this time, we're not talking about a specific technology like agricultural machines. We're talking about a general purpose technology and we're talking about a technology that is going to directly displace, you know, our cognitive ability and what that means is going to be deployed everywhere. So it's hard for me to see, maybe it's a lack of imagination on my part, some entirely new sector arising at this point. You know, we saw manufacturing rise after agriculture, then services, but AI will be deployed in all of those sectors.

• 11:02Kara Swisher?

  So there's nowhere to go.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Is there going to be some entirely new part of the economy that can absorb, you know, tens of millions of workers that are going to be potentially displaced from those other jobs? I doubt it because AI is going to be used everywhere.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  So I want to both agree with one point and disagree with another. We've seen general purpose technologies before. I call electricity general purpose. We use electricity for all sorts of things. It's not specific. I think the way to think about this is we have a technology that is going to replace our intellect. And that I think is what is so frightening for people. If you look back at that general purpose technology of like the steam engine, electricity, power, what did it replace? It replaced our brawn. For anybody who has kids, you might have seen the movie Beauty and the Beast.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Gaston was the most popular guy in town because he was strong, right? Gaston ate all those eggs so he could lift all those carts and oxes. And that's because strength was valued before we had technology that could replace strength. Now, technology is superhuman strength. Being the strongest guy is just not that different to being the weakest guy compared to being a forklift. And the problem with AI is right now, there's a bunch of people who have set up their status

• 12:35Speaker 01

  in society and their income in society by being 140 or 150 IQ person versus being 100 IQ person. And that's going to be the same thing as being like the really strong guy versus the average strength guy in the future. It's just going to be swamped when we have machines that are all at 300 IQ points. And so what will people, what will our comparative advantage do? And I, I think none of us can really forecast the future in quite the right way to say, where will we find the bonds of reciprocity between humans that will create a space,

• 13:16Speaker 01

  both for the ways we spend our time, the ways we get status, and the ways we earn an income?

• 13:22Kara Swisher?

  Right. So, speaking of forecasting, how we forecast the future and how it's impacted by innovation, the Nobel Committee just awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, no not to Donald Trump, but to an economic historian and two economists whose research looks at creative destruction, or in the simplest term, how innovation replaces older technologies that can lead to economic growth. One of the winners, Philippe Agion, actually co-chaired France's Artificial Intelligence Commission, and it published a report that says AI replaces tasks, not jobs, and that the spread of AI will create jobs. So, is he right? Will AI end up being a job creator or destroyer? Why don't you start, Martin, and then Betsy?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Obviously, it will do both. It absolutely will create jobs and it will destroy jobs. The question is, will there be enough new jobs created to absorb people that lose jobs? And secondly, are those new jobs going to be appropriate for those people? Are they going to have the necessary skill set? You know, I'm very concerned that for, relative to most people, you're going to, over the long run, see more destruction than creation. And, you know, it's true that it's, that AI automates tasks, but I think that that's going to lead to organizations sort of redefining the boundaries between jobs. I think you can imagine two workers doing basically the same thing,

• 14:45Speaker 02

  and half of what each of those people are doing gets automated, in terms of the tasks. And then, of course, at some point, management will look at that and say, you know what, there's really only one job there, right? Because half of what's being done can be automated. I think that's the process. It's rarely going to be a one-to-one correspondence between an algorithm or a robot and an existing job.

• 15:06Kara Swisher?

  Right. What do you think, Betsy?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  So... Here is the conundrum to think about. AI is going to allow us to produce more with less. That makes us richer. That makes us want to consume more. That means we need more of all the inputs, which includes humans. And that's where the sort of standard economic thinking goes is, yes, AI is going to replace tasks, but by being a cheap way to produce, it's going to allow us all to consume more. And so we'll scale up. And that's what's going to lead to there being enough jobs for humans. There's a lot of worry that maybe this time will be different.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  And I think, I don't have a worry this time will be different. I do think you eventually get to that point. The question is, does this process happen so fast? And do we fail to redistribute all those income gains in a way that means that demand goes up as well? Right? If Sam Altman is the only one who gets rich off of AI, then we don't actually need to produce more stuff because there's only so much Sam Altman can, you know, consume. That's sort of that vision of the manager only needs half as many workers because they're trying to produce the same amount of stuff and they're now doing it much more efficiently.

• 16:31Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  So the distribution problem cannot be fully divorced from the issue of how will this allow us to scale up and how will it allow us to consume? But also keep in mind that if we don't solve the distribution problem, that's its own limit on AI adoption. There's no real incentive to adopt AI if there's no demand.

• 16:53Kara Swisher?

  So we're starting to see the effects of AI unemployment, especially on young college graduates. The unemployment rate for that demographic is averaging 4.59% this year versus 3.25 in 2019. It's noteworthy. It's not earth shattering. When do you expect to see significant job losses? For example, unemployment peaked around 25% during the Great Depression. Martin is predicting 50%. So Martin, why don't you start and explain why you think 50% is your number?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Well, you know, that could be far in the future. I mean, when I wrote my first book, Sixteen years ago, I thought it might be fifty years before, you know, something like that happened. I think we're clearly on a trajectory toward that, and we're at a moment in time where, as you say, there is pretty clearly an impact on entry-level jobs. And I don't think it takes that much to start building systems that will go beyond that. For one thing, I don't think that it requires artificial general intelligence, or AGI, or certainly superintelligence, which is what everyone's talking about now. And again, the reason is that most people are doing relatively predictable, routine things. They might be very smart people, doing analytically difficult things, but,

• 18:05Speaker 02

  but, you know, not so difficult for AI. I think that, you know, given where LLMs are now, if they can address the issue of hallucinations, and they can also build what they're calling agents, right, that can plan and execute complex, multitask operations, and can also utilize the kind of tools that the white-collar workers use, the software, the digital tools, I think that we could begin to see an impact quite soon, I would imagine. It's really a question of what happens with the technology, and how fast they can address these issues. Betsy?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  So first, I just want to put it in perspective and say that even at 4.5%, the unemployment rate of recent college grads is lower than the unemployment rate of high school grads. College grads have always had an enormous advantage in having an extraordinarily low unemployment rate that is traditionally about a third of what the unemployment rate is for everybody else. So it's possible that college grads start to look like everybody else, but that's not what I think will happen. What I think is going to happen, and now I'll get a little wonky on you, which is, I think we're going to change what the age wage profile looks like. So if you are a college grad, you tend to earn less in your early twenties than even a high school grad. Why? Because you're

• 19:27Speaker 01

  focusing on college, and the high school grad who's gone straight to work is focusing on work. But by your sort of mid twenties, your wages are growing faster and you overtake those high school grads and they keep growing. And your wages don't really peak until around forty, around age forty-five. But it's not, it's not extremely sharp, but it's just, you know, in your forties, you earn more than in your twenties. I think that that steepness, though, that difference between what you earn in your twenties and what you earn in your thirties or forties is going to get even bigger. And it's because what's going to happen is a lot of the things that that twenty-two,

• 20:07Speaker 01

  twenty-three-year-old recent college grad does is going to be able to be done by the, the more experienced person with their AI tools.

• 20:17Kara Swisher?

  You don't need a young lawyer, for example.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  And so then the question will be, what do we set up to help the young people get the experience they need so that they can be an experienced lawyer? And it may be that we need to have more training programs, that what you're actually going into is a, a new type of internship where, you know, you're really just learning and you're getting a stipend that maybe you pay back out of future earnings or maybe the government sponsors these stipends. Think about what we do with medical residents. You go in as an intern in the hospital, you're not that productive. In fact, you're subtracting because the attending is teaching you.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  And so we get government sponsoring those kinds of, of first positions for medical students in, in medical settings. And we may need that for lawyers, for all sorts of white-collar jobs where it's just really hard to be super productive when you're young. Now, the thing that fights that is the faster technology changes. I can tell you the young people are better with it. They pick up very quickly, they move very quickly. But I, I, I think we do need to worry about generational gaps because I think that AI is going to make it very easy for sort of that Gen X, a very young boomers to hang

• 21:41Speaker 01

  on for quite some time, being very productive and using the experience they have.

• 21:47Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, because they don't need those associates, say if it was a law firm. They don't need what they're doing, which is mostly easily replicated by AI, for example.

• 21:58Kara Swisher?

  I'm going to be doing a live taping of On with Kara Swisher at Smartcheats Engage Conference, which runs from November 5th through the 7th in Seattle. You can register for their conference on their website and you'll hear more about Smartcheats services coming up in the break.

• 22:20Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription-based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle,

• 23:04Kara Swisher?

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• 23:24Kara Swisher?

  So as we mentioned earlier, according to conventional wisdom, white-collar jobs are more affected by AI than blue-collar jobs, which implies that jobs people do with their hands are relatively safe from AI. Is that accurate? And if so, will that always be the case? You mentioned robotics at the beginning, Martin, because I think it gets a short shrift in terms of its development. These advanced robots, and they don't have to necessarily look like humans. Actually, those are more complex robots. But, you know, like a dog-walking robot doesn't have to look like a person. It can look like a wagon. As anyone who's gone inside an Amazon warehouse sees. They're going to be able to replicate everything. When I saw one of the things they were doing a couple of years ago, I thought, oh, they don't, you're not going to need any of these people soon. I could, you could see where it was headed.

• 24:09Kara Swisher?

  So Martin and then Betsy, because you had brought up that idea of robotics pairing with AI.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that robotics are going to have a huge impact, especially in environments that are very controlled and predictable. And Amazon warehouse is, is a good example of that, right? It's walled in, Amazon controls exactly what happens in its warehouse. It can separate the people from the robots so you don't have collisions. It can reorganize the flow of packages and products through the facility, right? That's completely different than the outside world where you've got to deal with chaos. And that's why, of course, you know, self-driving cars have taken a lot longer than many people expected. But within those controlled environments, warehouses, factories, I think eventually

• 24:56Speaker 02

  maybe even supermarkets, fast food restaurants, I think that robots are going to have a dramatic impact. So it's definitely not just white collar jobs that are going to be impacted. It's going to be a very broad-based concern, I think.

• 25:11Kara Swisher?

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

• 25:50Speaker 01

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

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Because they're expensive capital and therefore they work best when they can be deployed and used for a large number of hours in the day. Now, the problem is there aren't as many people wanting to go places at 3:00 a.m. as there are people wanting to go somewhere at 6:00 a.m. or at 5:00 p.m. And so if you have enough self-driving cars to get everybody where they need to go, even in a highly dense area, you're going to have a bunch of those self-driving cars sitting around doing nothing for most of the day. And so I think it'll be a very long time, even in a dense city, before we end up losing the human drivers because of the fact that humans are going to be much more flexible

• 27:15Speaker 01

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

• 27:49Kara Swisher?

  That's a fair point. So let's pivot and talk about how government should help citizens deal with job losses or think of, you know, how to make that transition. Should the federal governments take steps to regulate the use of AI specifically to prevent job losses or at least slow them down? Or would that inevitably just help, say, China beat the US in AI? What is the government's role here? Martin and then Betsy.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I definitely don't think we should have laws, you know, preventing automation. We do see that now, right? You know, the, the unions at the ports are opposed to automation and so forth. And that just holds us back, that, that, you know, holds back progress. And it certainly does make us less competitive with other countries. I think we're going to have to figure out this inevitable transition. And, you know, trying to, to just, uh, slow it down is not the answer. We've got to figure out how to adapt to it. Certainly, that can be in part investing in education, you know, community colleges, things like that, so that people can pick up new skills and, and to the extent they're, they're capable of it, you know, transition into new positions.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  But in the long run, I, I think that ultimately we're going to have to go beyond that. We really need a new paradigm. And that's why I've written a lot about, for example, a universal basic income, a guaranteed minimum income, or negative income tax, those kinds of approaches where we're ultimately going to need the government to directly supplement incomes. Not just so that people can survive, but so they can be consumers, right? They can go out and create demand in the economy so that we can continue to have a vibrant economy. Or as, as Betsy suggested, you know, if Jeff Bezos is getting all the money, you know, he, he can't drive the whole economy just by buying another super yacht, right?

• 29:36Kara Swisher?

  Well, he looks like he's doing a, a good job right now. But, um, Betsy?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  So, I, I, Martin, I'm going to guess you, that I can get you to agree with this, even though it is about slowing things down. Um, I think the first thing we have to do is dramatically reduce taxation on labor and move our tax system either towards consumption, like goods, or towards capital. So historically, the view has been, we need capital investment to have economic growth. And capital is much more flighty. If you tax it, people will just stop investing and they'll consume instead. And people will just keep working no matter how much you tax them. So we'll tax the people, the labor, but we won't tax the equipment very much.

• 30:23Speaker 01

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

• 31:09Speaker 01

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

• 31:20Kara Swisher?

  Bernie Sanders is calling for a so-called robot tax on corporations that use AI to eliminate jobs in order to raise money to help people affected by that technology. What do you each think of this approach? Martin first and then Betsy.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  I'm not sure a specific robot tax makes sense because it's going to be very hard to determine exactly what is a robot? What is AI that's displacing jobs? I think, as Betsy said, you know, robots and artificial intelligence are capital, right? So probably it makes sense to more generally shift our taxation toward capital. But of course, all of this is a staggering political challenge. I mean, basically, all the ideas we're talking about here seem extraordinarily difficult to ever make it happen.

• 32:04Kara Swisher?

  Betsy?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  I agree with Martin that like, what's a robot is a challenging question. So there's an implementation question there. And I think ultimately, you pass a robot tax and everything will start to count as a robot. So maybe that's just the way politically you get it done. I think that we have to figure out how we are going to switch priorities or at least put workers and machines on, you know, a level playing field. And for sure, something's got to give there.

• 32:37Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 32:47Kara Swisher?

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• 33:30Kara Swisher?

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• 34:00Kara Swisher?

  So, Martin, you talked about UBI necessary to replace lost income from job losses caused by AI. And Betsy, you suggested that a digital dividend might be better. Could you explain what each of those things are and how they're actually different? Betsy, and then Martin.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  So, when I say digital dividend, I think as an economist, I was often put off by the idea of a universal basic income. It's sort of like, I'm giving up on you. We're just going to give you an income so you can sort of, you know, bugger off and leave us alone. And what I've been trying to think a lot about is that, look, the way the world works right now is we're all born with 24 hours in the day, a brain and physical strength. And our physical strength is worth something, but not as much as it used to be. And our brain is now worth a lot, but it's going to be worth less in the future. So, if our brain's not worth that much and our physical strength's not worth that much, what do we have? And what I don't want is a world in which what kids basically have is whatever their parents had.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  I'm really worried about us getting stuck where today's distribution of income sets up the future distribution of income for the next 100 years. And so, what do we all have? We all have our data. And I know the ship has kind of sailed on this, but I really think that government needs to stop and realize that our data is the thing we have. It is something that companies value, they want it, and we should tax the use of data and give that money back to people. So it's going to sound a lot like a universal basic income, but instead of being like a handout, now what I'm talking about is something that's based on you're contributing your

• 35:41Speaker 01

  data into the system and that you get a dividend from that. Another way to think about it is we could just, you know, nationalize some of our artificial intelligence and then pay, you know, a dividend on that. I think it's that the American public deserves a share of something that they have contributed to through their own data.

• 36:07Kara Swisher?

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

• 36:44Speaker 01

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

• 36:57Kara Swisher?

  Right, that's correct. They don't have a right to most things, but they take it and then hope that people won't sue, but they will in this case. Martin, talk about UBI, how that compares, how Betsy's ideas are different.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Well, I'm certainly open to what Betsy is suggesting. I think that if you're going to offer people a data dividend that is the same for everyone, then essentially that's the same as a UBI. Maybe it's a better branding. Another branding is a citizens dividend, right? Which is, I think, what Andrew Yang had when he ran for president, or is a freedom dividend, something like that. So it's just branding, that's fine. However, if you're going to have a scheme, and I've heard this sometimes too, where the amount of money that you would get is actually somehow tied to the value of the data that you're generating, then I think it would probably set up all kinds of perverse incentives, right? People

• 37:52Speaker 02

  would try to game it, try to actually go out and generate data in some way that results in a higher income, and that would essentially destroy the value of the data, right? Because data is only valuable if it actually reflects your true preferences or behavior. So that would be my only concern. But if, you know, as far as if UBI is bad branding, then for sure, call it something else.

• 38:16Kara Swisher?

  But no matter you slice it, as Betsy pointed out, the world in which a significant chunk of labor is done by AI means the companies will become incredibly powerful, and their owners even more than they are today. And so if the future belongs to whoever controls AI, and most of the people who control AI have publicly aligned themselves with Donald Trump, then how do we make sure that citizens still have a say in how our society functions if they can't go to dinner on the Mar-a-Lago patio at the White House?

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Well, I think that it will be more democratized than we think. I mean, it's true that there are a few companies that are actually building these systems, but the systems are going to be available to everyone, right? They're integrated into cloud computing. And I think that what you'll see in time is that, you know, speaking in terms of businesses, the value from AI is going to be distributed across industries. It's going to be the people that leverage it that capture most of the value, not the people that are necessarily building it. Because you see at least now three major competitors, right? There's certainly going to be intensive competition there.

• 39:22Kara Swisher?

  Well, except they're all doing round-tripping deals with each other to move $5 back and forth.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And if we end up with a burst bubble, that itself will create more unemployment than direct automation, for sure.

• 39:37Kara Swisher?

  Betsy?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  So keep in mind that as a resource becomes plentiful, it becomes cheaper. And, you know, if AI is everywhere, it will be the cheap thing. And if you need a human in any place, humans will become the place of scarcity and we could end up seeing the problem get solved that way. I do want to say, though, I am a huge believer in markets and capitalism, but in capitalism in its pure form, like very competitive markets. But you have to keep in mind that AI is a little bit different. Like, the spillovers are everywhere. It literally couldn't train it

• 40:21Speaker 01

  without having taken data from other people, without turning to the public commons. Right? So they are relying on a lot of public help. And that makes them different from your butcher, your baker, in that sort of standard competitive framework. The thing that worries me most about what's happening in the United States is we're moving even further away from a competitive market and we're moving towards a market where the people who curry favor with the politicians get rewarded. And that does not work very well when you're in even a world where it's butchers and bakers. It's going to work even worse in a world with AI. I don't think that's good for anybody.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  I think that that will limit our potential. I think it could cause the whole thing to sort of implode. And, you know, the countries that have robust democratic institutions are going to get through this much, much better. And right now, as the United States has every one of its institutions under threat, I think we have a lot at risk right now that is... The interaction of a collapsing democratic system with a, you know, rising power in AI.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  And that, that's going to be a challenge for the United States.

• 41:50Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I think the idea that, that small companies can't bubble up because they're not at the table, like pigs at the trough is a real problem. I've used the term pigs at the trough a lot, but that's what it feels like, you know, in a lot of ways. So how should people find meaning in their ability to provide from themselves if it's no longer tied to work, Betsy, than Martin?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  You know, there is a concept in Japan called ikigai. An ikigai is your, like, meaning or purpose. And if you look at the societies where Japanese citizens live to extremely long ages, what you find is everybody has an ikigai. But their ikigai does not usually work. And in fact, Japan recently did a survey of the entire population. And what they found was, you know, life satisfaction is very correlated with your work or your income, but your ikigai is much less correlated with your income or your work. And in fact, what ikigai is most correlated with is your participation in civic society

• 42:55Speaker 01

  and volunteer groups in community-based things. So people who are involved in four or five organizations have the most ikigai. And I'm, you know, I'm the mom of teenagers and I have spent a lot of weekends at dance competitions with my oldest daughter. You know, dance competitions are not because we're dealing with the most elite dancers. We're, we're dealing with high school girls and boys who really like to dance, who like to compete, who have a lot of fun, and they put their all into it. And there's a lot of ikigai that comes from that. So I think there is a lot of space for us, but I want to give another warning about

• 43:35Speaker 01

  the United States compared to any other country, which is we have seen our happiness and our life satisfaction stagnate over the last 50 years. Why? Because we're no longer doing as many things together in civic organizations. Bob Putnam has this book that's 30 years old now, Bowling Alone, that we still bowl, but we don't do it in a league. We're not getting together with, you know, broad parts of the community. And we're not using our wealth to build a safety net, to add vacation, to do all sorts of things that can make us happier.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  And so I worry a lot about whether the US has the capacity to respond to this in a way where we're all going to be able to find our ikigai. But it's certainly possible for people to. Martin?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's definitely a huge problem because jobs don't just provide income, right? They provide a sense of dignity, a sense of self-worth. They occupy time. They give people a sense of meaning. And we're going to have to find replacements for all of those things in a world where people aren't working as much. One idea that I have put forth is that maybe instead of just having one level UBI, one level payment, that everyone gets the same thing, there can actually be the opportunity to earn more money or to receive more money if you do certain things, right? If you, for example, stay in school and study. If you go and work in the community, maybe it should be possible to actually get a higher income. I worry especially about education.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  I mean, imagine that you're a high school student that's maybe struggling a bit in school, you're in danger of dropping out, and you know that when you turn 18 or 21, whatever, you're going to get exactly the same universal basic income as everyone else, regardless of whether you stay in school. Okay, I think that that's really perverse incentive. So I would actually say people a higher income if they remain in school. So I think there are ideas to work with there, but again, it's going to be a big challenge in many dimensions.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  I was just going to give you one really interesting study, which showed that for people in manual labor jobs, their sense of meaning and purpose in the world went up when they retired. And that's because they were able to shift away from work that didn't provide a lot of meaning to things that did provide meaning.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  And so I know particularly for modern knowledge workers in the United States, the idea that meaning and dignity is associated with paid labor is very, you know, is a common thought. But I'd like to remind you that lots of women did not work in the paid labor force, and they had plenty of dignity because they had a role in society. So it is important that we remember that you have to have a role, for sure, but it doesn't have to be paid work. And it historically has not always been paid work for all people.

• 46:41Kara Swisher?

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

• 47:17Speaker 02

  I hope that, you know, college continues to be important to people. I think there's going to be an explosion of other alternatives, right? We're going to have online degrees and that involve AI tutoring people and so forth. And some of those may rise to the point where they're, you know, a reasonable alternative to going to a four-year college. But I also kind of think that especially as we look to a future where maybe there aren't going to be so many jobs, the intensely vocational bent of higher education is going to maybe shift back toward more like a general liberal arts-type education. It just makes us better people, better citizens, more broadly and flexibly educated, rather than trying to focus on,

• 48:02Speaker 02

  you know, getting a job in a specific area. So that could actually be a positive thing if that happens. And as long as we can keep people motivated to continue to be interested in education, you know, which is certainly going to be a challenge.

• 48:15Kara Swisher?

  Betsy?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  I love that so much because I really hate the vocational, like, what is, what kind of job am I going to get from this education? Because education is supposed to teach you how to think, how to be not just a good citizen, but also how to learn, so that you're a really good, active, lifelong learner. You know, I love a liberal arts education, so I'm going to agree with Martin on that. I do think there's an issue of how do we keep people feeling motivated? Like, what are they doing in school? What are they trying to accomplish? What's their goal? And I think there's a lot of unanswered questions there. And education itself is going through a pretty profound shift

• 48:59Speaker 01

  because of the amount of AI use in doing assignments means that education is becoming kind of meaningless when you're cheating through AI. And so everybody's sort of trying to figure out how they're going to adapt to that. So I think there's a lot of adapting to be done, both by the universities and by society in terms of how do we think about education.

• 49:26Kara Swisher?

  If you were giving advice then to high school students about how to plan their careers, what would you tell them? Should they go to college? And if so, what majors do you think will be, I guess, least impacted by AI? I know you hate focusing on vocation, as you said, but it's important.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  You know, I think understanding people is going to be one of the most valuable skills out there. So you can never go wrong with psychology. I think that also means you can never really go wrong with economics, because economics gives you an analytic framework for thinking about how people make choices. I agree with Martin that this idea of a broad education is what you're trying to do. And I really push creativity. It's a great time to do musical theater, to think about art. In every society, when technology has come along to make us richer, we've found more money to pay for art. And so, you know, let's build everybody's creative side out because I think there's going

• 50:22Speaker 01

  to be a lot of space for creativity.

• 50:26Kara Swisher?

  Just to even to amuse the rich people. Martin?

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I agree with that. I don't think it matters that much specifically what you major in. What matters is the kind of skills that you pick up. And I think Betsy is absolutely right that you want to emphasize working with people and team building and this type of thing because that, of course, is what AI is not good at, at least not yet.

• 50:50Kara Swisher?

  It's not good at it.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  As well as genuine creativity. And it's very hard to predict anyway. I mean, you know, if you're a freshman and you decide to major in one thing, four or five years from now, it could be a completely different scenario. So I think that really focusing on those core skills and talents is what's going to be important. One other thing I'd add is that not everyone, of course, will go to college and certainly absolutely one of the best things to do now in the face of all of this is to enter one of the skilled trades.

• 51:22Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Electricians, plumbers. These jobs are really hard to automate. You would need C3PO from Star Wars, right?

• 51:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  A very advanced robot in order to automate those jobs. So that's quite a ways off.

• 51:35Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. It seems like AI is going to force us to rethink, but it also means to be a human. What do you think we'll say about how we handled the rise of AI? What worries you the most and what makes you the most hopeful? Martin and then Betsy.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thing I worry the most about is the economic impact. I'm not so much concerned with the doomer scenario where it's actually going to wipe us out existentially. Maybe someday that'll be a real concern, but I think we're going to have massive economic and social disruption long before that.

• 52:07Speaker 02

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

• 52:52Speaker 02

  But we gotta figure out how to adapt to the dangers that come with this, especially, as we said earlier, the distributional issue. You know, how do we make sure that the benefits of this end up distributed to everyone and not, you know, just a few people?

• 53:06Kara Swisher?

  Betsy, you'll get the last word.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  So I think there's a lot of agreement there. I'm really optimistic about a lot of, you know, the medical breakthroughs we could get, the living standard improvements we could get. What I'm actually most concerned about, though, is what's going on socially and how that starts to interact with AI and how it's already interacting with AI. You know, we already have vaccines that cure the measles, and we have people afraid to get them. So we can have all the cures we want, but if we have a society where we don't trust each other, we don't trust the government, we don't trust the medical profession, we're all gonna end up in silos of aggression towards each other, and that could erode all of the benefits.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  And that actually worries me a lot more than the job loss. I do think there's a fear of some people getting left behind in the next 10 years. But my bigger fear is the loss of social cohesion, because that's already underway.

• 54:08Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, absolutely. It will have all the good ideas, but we won't use them. We won't avail ourselves to them. I really appreciate both of you. It's really, it's a really interesting discussion, and we will get back to you in 10 years.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  I will look forward to my agent talking with your AI agent in 10 years.

• 54:26Kara Swisher?

  Okay. All right. Thank you, Martin, also.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 54:35Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Okum, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, Kalen Lynch, and Devin Schwartz. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Annika Robbins. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, start making space for more creativity. If not, you're just another pig at the trough. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit Follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 55:21Speaker 03

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