 All right, welcome to your Unbrook show. And today we're talking about robots. They are coming. The robots are coming. And they're going to take all of our jobs. And by the way, according to Bill Gates, we should also tax them because we have to do something with, well, we have to slow them down. When you tax something, you get more of it or less of it. You get less of it. So if we tax the robots, we'll get less robots. Maybe that's what Bill Gates wants. He wants us to slow it down because the robots are coming and they're going to take all our jobs. And what are we going to do if you think people are alienated today, if you think people are frustrated today, if you think the Chinese have taken our jobs. Imagine what happens when the robots take our jobs. I mean, it's like 1,000 times worse. The Chinese are nothing as compared to the coming robots. A lot of panic, a lot of hysteria out there. We need a basic universal income. Pay everybody because soon they won't have anything to do. They won't be any jobs for them. So we need to make sure that they have some income because the robots are coming and they're going to take our jobs. All right. So today, we're going to try to unpack the whole question of robots and the impact they have both economically. So we'll do a little bit of economic analysis of this, the phenomenon, you see Karen, you've got me stuck now in my saying it right or not. This is an inside joke. So we're going to discuss what robots, what kind of impact they're going to have on our lives and both from an economic perspective. That is just from a sheer jobs perspective, what did jobs look like? Do jobs really go away? What kind of new jobs would there be? What happens to people who are unskilled? In general, what happens? And what about all this hysteria? And what about all this, the panic that is out there that really does exist, I think? People are really worried about this. We really haven't seen anything like it in terms of the worry. And I think it's going to get worse, much worse, partially because people can't think. So much worse over the next 10, 20 years. Think about the panic hysteria, irrationality with regard to trade and with regard to automation, with regard to China that emanates from the Trump administration. And it's picked up by so many Americans today. Robots are a much more dramatic thing than anything China has done in terms of the potential effect on your life. So think about the hysteria today over stuff that I think trade specialization, different countries specializing, comparative advantage. All these economic issues that were kind of resolved 200 years ago and that we know the answers to and there's no question that, for example, a trade is good. There's no question that the automation we've seen through the 19th century and into the 20th century has been good. But in spite of that, in spite of the fact that we've resolved all those questions, in spite of the fact that we have answers to all those problems, in spite of the fact that there's not a single legitimate or semi-legitimate economist who believes that free trade is bad, in spite of all that, it's still true that so many Americans think it's bad and that the president of the United States and many within the governing authorities of the United States, they think that it's bad. So now that's something we've already, we've had for 200 years, we've understood for 200 years, economists have been writing about for 200 years, then flip it to something new, something we don't completely understand, something that involves a lot of uncertainty because we don't really know how it's gonna develop, how it's gonna evolve. And something that is on top of the hysteria that's involved with trade and regular automation. Now, robots, and what are you gonna get? You're gonna get much worse, I think, and this is gonna become politicized and the Luddites are gonna come out in full force and I fear that the Luddites might have, unless we really do the educating and we start the educating early, the Luddites are people who since the early 19th century have objected to technology, have always claimed that technology is gonna destroy jobs, have always claimed that technology is bad for the human soul, for the human spirit, for the human ability to produce for himself. They've always complained that no matter how much success automation has had, no matter how much progress automation has made, it seems like they're always Luddites and they're always people who reject that and abandon that. So we're talking robots today, we're talking this trend, but I also wanna talk about the ethical implications of this, what does this mean for individual human life? What does it mean, what kind of responsibility does that imply on you as a human being? How should you as an individual relate to robots? How should you as an individual think about the actual work that you do and what do robots imply for your individual life? So I wanna take kind of a macro economic perspective, but then much more importantly, I wanna drill down to a micro individual perspective. What is this have, what impact does this have on you as an individual and what responsibility do you have towards your own life and how does robotics or robots, how do they impact that? And there's nothing new here in the sense that your responsibility to your own life is not changed by the existence of robotics, but the time scale, the urgency of thinking about certain issues, the urgency of understanding what productiveness actually means, I think is to some extent accelerated by robotics because they're gonna change your life. Robots are going to change your life unless you're on the verge of death, unless you're gonna die in the next 10 years, robots are gonna change profoundly the way we live over the next 20 years and certainly over the next 100 years. So anybody who's out there who's a teenager, your life, your career, the things that you land up doing is gonna be profoundly affected by the robotics revolution. Of course, all this assumes that civilization continues and we don't all spiral into some dark ages and the end of life as we know it. But let's make that optimistic, benevolent assumption for the purposes of the show. Robots are coming and they're gonna be really, really cool. All right, you can call in if you have any thoughts about this. I mean, this is gonna be the main topic we talk about. I've got a couple of other things I wanted to discuss as well and so that relate to, that relate to ethics that relate to what it means to be an egoist and what it means to be selfish and that'll fit nicely into part of the show but I got an email critical of my claiming that sharing is bad. So I want to respond to that and it should raise some interesting questions. So feel free to call in if you have any questions about, or if you have any comments or have any concerns about the coming or ongoing robotic revolution, 347-324-3075, 347-324-3075. By the way, we're also broadcasting on Facebook Live so if you wanna see video of me standing in my new office and doing this so in my home office if you will and doing this then you can watch on Facebook Live. By the way, if you're on Facebook Live and there's a little sculpture in the back there, that is sculpture of Thomas Jefferson which I bought my son years and years ago and this room is his old bedroom. So robots, well, why don't we start with a phone call? We've got somebody's very eager to talk. All right, your new on book show, who's this? Hi, this is Jennifer from Michigan. Hey, Jennifer, how's it going? Good, how are you? Good, good. I was thinking, like you said, this is nothing new. People have always reacted this way when there's been new machines come out and I was trying to figure out why they would act like that and at first I thought maybe they're just lazy and they don't wanna change and learn new things but I was thinking it's a specific kind of laziness because it's not really physical laziness because if I gave you a shovel and you gave me a shovel and told us to dig a hole we would know how to do that unless we're like really weak or something we could dig a hole. But if you told me to go in like a steam shovel and run it I wouldn't know how to do that. You have to learn how to think new things and that's the problem. People don't wanna think and that's not good obviously. That's where they're being lazy. And that's much more dangerous I think than physical. Yeah, I definitely think you're right. So I now get to that kind of in the second part of the show is that, or soon I'll get to that. It is, it places more personal responsibility on you to dictate the path of your life. So when you're born into a subsistence farm and all you have to do is work from sunrise to sunset and you put the seeds in the ground and you know whatever it does you do in farms I don't know you collect eggs or whatever. And basically you're living off of that and that's all you do and it's a horrible life but it's all you do. And suddenly there are very few choices, the very few decisions you have to make. There's indeed very little thinking you have to do. There's some thinking but there's very little thinking. Suddenly you have a lot of thinking to do and I think the more we automatize our environment, the more we automatize our work, the less repetitive it becomes, the less automated it becomes for us as humans. And the more free time we have but also the more choices we have in terms of our profession and our profession now becomes, all of the professions become, professions where the essential characteristic of that profession is your ability to think, to choose, to decide. So it requires an ability to decide and to think and to choose. Whereas in the past if you worked in an assembly line there were no choices. You pulled the lever, you pulled the lever every few seconds, you pulled the button, you did, you typed in the screw, whatever it is that you did. There were no choices, there were no decisions. And yes, and that appeals to a certain laziness of people but it's worse than laziness. It's not applying that which is uniquely human which is the decision making, the free will, the capacity to think, the capacity to invent, the capacity to do something new that didn't exist before. And that is what robots make possible and that's why robots are such a huge benefit to mankind, huge benefit to us. It's because they free us up to do more of what is uniquely human which is to think. And at whatever IQ level you have, at whatever IQ, I shouldn't use IQ level, or whatever intelligence level you have. Go ahead, go ahead. All right, instead of taking three days to do the laundry like you used to do, we're watching some show about Tudor England. You used to take three days just to wash the linens in the house. Like what you could invent in three days and just throw it in the washer and you could think of all this cool stuff like airplanes and stuff in three days. Yeah, but put aside the washer, imagine you can say, you can say what, there's a robot. You could say, what's a good name for Butler? There has to be a good name for Butler. Jeeve. Yeah, Jeeve. Hey, Jeeve, do the laundry and the robot takes the laundry and doesn't and does it better than you because it could identify the stains on the clothes because it could look every milli inch, milli inches wrong, a milli millimeter of clothing and really look and find every little stain and every little piece of dirt and it can correct it and put it in the washing machine or it could do, or maybe it is the washing machine, I don't know. And it would do your laundry. And so it's even more, you don't have to even pick up the laundry, you don't have to put in a machine, you don't have to worry about it. Now you can really think big thoughts and you can think about, you have much more time to think the big thoughts, you have much more time to do all that. So it's the kind of things that we're talking about but that's the laziness you're talking about. It's people who don't want to engage in that thinking and that's something I really want to talk about because I think it's relevant for all of us, this idea of thinking and what to think about and what we need to do to prepare for the age of robots. All right, thanks for calling. Really appreciate it. Thank you. As always. And it was nice seeing you in Chicago, what was it, a week ago? Okay, we've got somebody else. Hi, you're new on Bookshare, who's this? Yep, go ahead. Hello, this is Eric from New Hampshire. Can you hear me? Yes, I can, yes I can, but speak up. Okay, great. Yeah, you must have it in my mind. I was thinking about asking you this question recently, both AI and robots. I've been thinking a lot about this topic because I agree with you. This is going to have huge impact upon society in many ways that we can't even imagine right now. Did you read the, I mean, did you watch the recent interview by Mark Cuban? He talked about this and he talked about many people will lose their jobs due to robots and AI. And one thing, one type of job I was surprised that he mentioned was programmers. Because coming back from China, I was teaching English and now I want to get into programming, maybe go back to college, but I'm afraid if I do that and then I graduate and then I won't be able to find a job. Sure. So what do you think about? I did not see the interview, but he's absolutely right. I mean, some programming jobs, not all programming jobs, but some programming jobs which are easily learned by AI. And again, AI, artificial intelligence, I'm not implying that robots or that the computers have intelligence, they have the ability to mimic intelligence, they have the ability to do certain tasks and they have the ability to learn in some ways. So there's a certain sense in which they can learn. So, so they, yes, absolutely some programming is already being done by machines and that will only increase. And yes, millions and millions and millions of jobs. This is the prediction. The prediction is, and this is, I'm making this prediction and I think this is pretty safe to say, 70 to 90% of all the jobs human beings do today, 70 to 90% of all the jobs people do today will be done or will either not exist or be done by machines in a hundred years. So 70 to 90% of all the jobs. So yes, hundreds of millions of jobs. I would say less. What's that? I would say less than a hundred years. I think this is gonna happen very soon. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's quite, I don't think it's quite as fast as many people predict because I think this is much harder than many people predict. I think this is much more challenging. So it's true that millions of jobs will be replaced over the next 20 years, but hundreds of millions of jobs will be replaced over the next hundred years. So what's the question? Well, think about that. So my question is, so what? Yeah, I agree with you, yeah. I think there'll be other jobs that will come up and better quality jobs and all that stuff. Let's see. So I'm just, there is that emotional element. So you know. Yeah, so I'm gonna talk about the emotional elements and I'm gonna talk about the fear and kind of what this is gonna cause in a culture and how one should prepare both as an individual and how one should be preparing people as a political intellectual leader for the change. Yeah, I'll get to that. I just wanna mention this though. In the Mark Cuban interview, he mentioned, he said that the jobs of the future will be for those who have like a liberal arts education, you know, philosophy majors, English majors. I was a little bit surprised by that. I think Mark Cuban is trying to be a central planner again. I mean, there's a certain element of truth in, I'll get to that. But I think we also have to realize that the right answer to what are the jobs of the future is, I don't know. Nobody a hundred years ago could imagine the jobs that we exist today. Nobody, nobody even 50 years ago could imagine many of the jobs that exist today, silly, not 200 years ago. And I think that the right answer to the question of what are gonna be the jobs of the future is, I don't know. Now, it is true that, and by the way, if philosophy and the humanity stay at the kind of low quality they have today, then I'm not sure those degrees are gonna be that valuable. So yes, I can imagine some kind of philosophy degrees and some kind of humanities degrees would be valuable. But I think they would have to have a lot better components of actually providing guidance in terms of living and actually providing guidance in terms of thinking. And those thinking skills are gonna be incredibly valuable. But that's always true, it's just gonna be accelerated. Oh wait, thanks, appreciate the call. I'm gonna take one more call and then we're gonna go and discuss kind of the macroeconomic issues. Hi, you're in the Iran Book Show, who's this? Good afternoon, Mr. Buruk. I'm enjoying your show and I'm a longtime fan of Angrand, just typing a robot myself. Excellent, I love hearing from robots. Go ahead, this is great. Did you have a question? I guess the robot has no questions. Because it knows everything. I wanted to ask, why would a robot, I'm just doing my best and hear all this talk about taxing me, I do all the work and you humans just around, is that fair? All right, great, I don't know who that was, but that was the coolest call I've ever got. All right, so the robots are complaining because they're going to be taxed. Yeah, I wonder if that's Jonathan. I don't know, I should memorize his phone number. Jonathan, was that you? He could tell us on the chat, but somebody with a good sense of humor, that was great. So yeah, robots are being, robots, Bill Gates is proposing the robot to be taxed. We talked about this a little bit on a previous show, but there's more to be said about the whole idea of taxing robots. So let's jump into this topic. I want to do a little bit of history about automation, 19th century, and where we are today. And then I want to talk about a little bit about kind of where we are in the robotics revolution and where we're likely to be heading in terms of robotics. And then I want to talk about taxing robots today and what impact that would have and whether that makes sense. What does it even mean to tax robots? Robots don't make, you know, they make anything, right? And then I want to talk about, you know, what is it? Why are we confident that jobs are what we created? Because this is a big one. I mean, so it's always happened in the past, but we hear over and over and over and over again that this time is different. What, why are we confident? Or why are some of us confident that this time it's not different, that it's the same? What is it about human nature? What is it about the economics of a free market, even a semi-free market that we have today that assures us that this time it's not different, that it's the same? And indeed, could it be different? That is, could changes in the kind of, for example, could government interference make it different this time, right? So a lot to cover. But I just want to mention a few facts about the past just to give it context. So 200 years ago, over 70% of America's workers lived on farms, right? Today, less than 1% of them live on farms. And that's because of automation. That's because of tractors and, you know, I don't know, I don't even know what farm automation looks like. But it's all the stuff that farming does. Many of the 1% who do have jobs on farms, a lot of that is speciality farms like organic farmings and things like that. So actual mass production of food is done incredibly efficient by machines with very, very little human intervention. You know, there's still certain things that are picked by hand. I don't know, strawberries and certain fruits, but that's gonna become automated without a question over the next few years. You know, so 70% of the jobs that exist today did not exist 200 years ago and were not even imagined 200 years ago. And as I said, a lot of jobs that today exist won't imagine 50 years ago. I mean, how many people 50 years ago believed there would be such a profession as computer game programmer, or computer game whatever, right? I don't know even what they do in computer games, writer, simulator, creator and so on. Computer gaming employs thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. And it also provides, at the other hand, entertainment for hundreds of thousands, for sorry, for tens of millions of people all over the world. And you know, that nobody could have imagined that just maybe 40, 50, 60 years ago. And that's, so not to mention, all the millions of other jobs. Now I've talked a lot about on this show and other places about the fact that 100 years ago there was no, on any scale, there was no hospitality industry. There was no real hospitality industry. And yet today, millions of people work in the hospitality industry. And here I'm talking about hotels resorts, restaurants. You know, and then you could even increase, and then there's a luxury good industry. There's a, I mean everywhere you go, they're massage parlors. I mean the legit ones, right? The illegit ones, I think they've always existed, but the legit ones, you've got nail salons everywhere. I just walked by in a mall, what was it, eyebrow threading store. I don't even know what that is and I don't think I want to know what that is, right? But all the stuff that nobody could have imagined, and partially maybe people did imagine, but nobody had the wealth to consume. Nobody could go on vacation, 100, 150, certainly 200 years ago, because nobody had the wealth to go on vacation. Everybody was working. I mean one of the things we don't realize is how little we work today, relative to our ancestors, in terms of just sheer numbers of hours in a year, we probably work less. And the people who work the most today are the people whose profession, the people who enjoy their work the most. So I think that a lot of people in business who really enjoy their work, or people in entertainment who enjoy their work, are the people who work the longest hours. So we have a situation today where the boring stuff, we're working the least numbers of hours. The interesting stuff, the stuff that we really enjoy, are the, we work the largest numbers of hours, and we generally have huge amounts of time for leisure activities, for going to the movies, for going to restaurants. I mean who could have imagined, even 20 years ago, that there would be celebrity chefs, and that people like myself would travel around the world going to fancy restaurants just for the experience of eating new food in an interesting, fascinating way. I mean foodies, right? Who could have imagined there would be such a thing? And that middle class people could participate in this, that it wouldn't be something exclusive to the 0.1% of the wealthiest in the world. And you could go on and on and on and on with these ideas about the kind of professions that both wealth today have created, the existence of the fact that we are wealthy, and that the fact that all, that much of our material needs, for example, food has been given over to robots so they can do it so we don't have to worry about it. But think about, you know, most of the material things that we today consume are to a large extent, to a large extent already being produced by robots. Okay? So, but that has created a massive space, massive opportunities for us to do other things and to invent new things and to innovate other things and to figure out what do we want to do with our lives? Like you couldn't, 200 years ago, 99% of people in the world couldn't sit around saying, what do I want to do with my life? What would be fun to do? You know, what does it mean to be human? What's the human experience? How do I apply myself to maximize my own happiness? None of those questions could have been asked 200 years ago. There wasn't time. And you didn't have any options. And you had to work really, really hard 10 hours a day just to feed yourself and house yourself and just to survive. Suddenly, what was enough to actually have thoughts that maybe we haven't had since ancient Greece or you know, and some people had your enlightenment but now everybody can have them. And that's what's unique. Even in ancient Greece, it was only the exclusive realm of a few people to be able to actually have the time to think about these thoughts. Plus, our life is so much more comfortable than it was back then, right? By the way, you should be live tweeting this, right? And thank you to Penny for actually doing that. But you guys should be live tweeting to expand the audience, because the bigger the audience, the more we can have an impact on the world and the better it is for all of you selfishly. You should be sharing the show. You should be sharing it on Facebook right now. If you're listening right now on Facebook Live, press the share button, get it out there. If you're listening on BlockTalk Radio, then go to Facebook and like it and tweet it and do whatever it is. You do it, put it on, I don't know. I don't know what you put it on anymore, but whatever the latest coolest social media, get the word out there. So, and use hashtag you on Bookshow when you tweet. So, people out there, you know, let's have the wrong Bookshow trending instead of video game movie mashup. That's what's trending right now and UFC London. I guess those are much more important things culturally than the show. All right, so if you go back, if you go back to the 19th century, what you find is that the same kind of debates, the same kind of analysis, the same kind of concern about automation that we're seeing today with robots, there was very little difference. You know, people looked at mechanization, right? All these machines taking off human jobs. And we're talking about big time, millions and millions of jobs being taken over machines. Now they want that many people on the planet. One of the great advantages of mechanization is you can now feed clothes, howls, billions of people. Whereas, you know, in the 19th century, how many people were there? You know, it was like half a billion, I think, people. I just saw a graph. I just tweeted a graph that had that. Let me just find this so I can tell you what the numbers were, but there it is. Okay, so if you look at around 1800, there were, since the population, there were about a billion people on the planet. Today, there were over seven billion, I think, right? So for a billion, so it was seven times more people. GDP per capita has gone up by 12-fold, something like that, 12-fold. So we're much, much richer. And there are many, many, many more people around. And that's, to a large extent, the consequence of automation, of the fact that we have freed ourselves from the necessity to produce the things that are necessary for our very existence. Now, I'm gonna get to the question, which people in the chat are getting at. You know, can robots become conscious? Do they have rights? Is singularity gonna happen in the sense that not just robots can do things, certain cognitive skills better than humans, but for example, beat us a chess, but which they already can. But can they replace human beings in everything? Of course, that's what I think singularity suggests, and that's what many people suggest is the idea that they will replace it with anything. We'll get to that. But I wanna emphasize that the same debates, the same concerns, the same panic, all of these things were happening in the 19th century. Now, in a sense, there was a certain awe at the machines, right? Just like there was a certain awe at the computers, a certain awe at robots, but then there was also real fear, riots, demonstrations, destructions of machines, and real fear about it. Of course, factory owners loved machines. And by the way, one of the reasons you got a significant reduction in child labor, and one of the reasons that child labor basically disappeared during the 19th century was because they were placed by machines. And as one factory owner wrote or said about work, as he says, machines never get drunk, their hands never shook, from excess, they've never absent from work, they didn't strike for wages, and they were unfailing in the accuracy and regularity. I mean, yeah, all these, this is what replaced people because people can be flawed machines. If you maintain them, if you program them well, they are basically perfect. So, I think it's pretty amazing to see exactly the same debate going on today. Again, a certain awe for machines on the one hand, but a certain fear of them on the other hand. What were the consequences during the 19th century? Consequences were a dramatic, a dramatic collapse in the cost of everything. So, a dramatic reduction in costs, which resulted in a dramatic increase in the standard of living. Staple goods became cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. There was more leisure time for workers and less need for strenuous manual labor, right? And there's a really good article about this in capex.co, capex is, I think, a UK think tank. capex.co, why we should never listen to the Luddites? Very good article. It doesn't really answer the question of why we should never listen to the Luddites, but it tells a really good story about the 19th century and about what the consequences of industrialization should in the 19th century work for the benefit of human life. And of course, the real consequences is everything you have around us today. It's life in America today, it's how rich, how unbelievably rich even the poor in America relative to anybody was 200 years ago. And by the middle of the 19th century, most industry became capital intensive instead of labor intensive. So even by the middle of the 19th century, most manual labor was being replaced by automation. And of course, this only is accelerated over time. You know, one of the differences, one of the interesting differences this article points out, which I think is maybe not a difference anymore. One of the big differences is that when people looked at America and the UK, one of the differences was that the British laborers always resisted change, always resisted automation, always fought it, the Luddites were very popular in Britain. And one of the things that made America unique, one of the things that made America special was the fact that Americans embraced innovation and embraced changed and cheered on the trend towards automation. And you know, relatively speaking, I'm sure there was resistance or some Luddites here, but relative to the UK, it was a small number. And this makes me sad, right? Because that's not what you're seeing today. It's what you're seeing the opposite, right? You know, people like Karl Marx played off of this automation and played off of what they claimed was, this was all gonna create this alienation. They claimed that all this automation, but factory jobs as well, was gonna create this angst, this existential angst among people. And you see the same argument being made today. So this was the spiritual crisis capitalism was gonna create because machines were gonna take your jobs and you're gonna feel alienated because what are you gonna do now that the machine has taken your job and you as a human being were gonna feel useless and helpless and ignorant and there's nothing you can do and it was gonna destroy your self-esteem. And it's fascinating because I was reading this article in Atlantic Magazine. I guess it's an article that was written when it was this in December after Donald Trump was elected and analyzing kind of the frustration of the people who voted for Donald Trump. And it's exactly the same language. It's this American workers have no source of meaning. They're losing their jobs, they can't get self-esteem. Now there's a complication here which is that over the last few decades we have demonized and made, what would you say, made it unsexy and uncool to have a manual job. So everybody needs to be some kind of program or intellectual in order to deserve self-esteem from the work that they do. That's kind of the leftist I think to a large extent responsible for that kind of attitude. They look down on manual labor. They look down on people struggling to make a living even though the left always claims to be the friend of the working class. They've actually become the enemy of the working class. That's part of what I think the Trump phenomenon or the election of Trump represents. It represents the fact that many Democrats felt that the Democratic Party had betrayed them. Many Democrats felt that the Democratic Party had become a leadist, had become a party that didn't understand working people, didn't respect working people, didn't care about working people. And I think that's right. I think, and this is the whole attack on the elites. The attack on the elites, the elites don't care about working class people who actually work for a living. And there's an article in The Atlantic, the spiritual crisis of modern economy that deals with all this stuff and about how alienated people are. They're losing their jobs, machines are taking over. And what are they gonna do? And they can't think of what they could do and they're unemployed or they're underemployed or they're partially employed. And they're just frustrated by the world and it's machines and it's Chinese. And they're no jobs in their little community and they can't think of what else they could do or they just don't think. And this is the big spiritual crisis. And as I was reading this and I was thinking, oh my God, this is exactly what Mark says in the mid 19th century. This is exactly what kind of the existentialists said in the middle of the 20th century. This is the same, same, same old story of capitalism creating alienation and creating people destroying self-esteem and the spirituality and all this garbage. And yeah, it's all true if you refuse to be a human being. If you refuse to embrace what it means to be human. If you refuse to do what is necessary for a human being to survive. And I think we live in a world where it seems like what people think is necessary for a human being to survive is to complain, to bitch and to demand entitlement. And it used to be so then people understood what was necessary to survive was to use their mind, to use their reason, to think, to innovate, to be entrepreneurial at whatever level you can do it. At whatever level you can imagine. But not to sit around and bitch and complain and moan and demand and have your hand out but actually get off your butt and go out there and find a job and gain a skill and move to another place in the country where that skill is valued and where you would get paid for it. We have now instituted into our American psyche and I find it hard to believe that I'm saying this about America, into our American psyche and intellectual laziness and entitlement, a demand not to have to move anywhere, not to have to retrain at all, not to have to rethink what we do in our life and to have the same job for 50 years and be able to retire on nice benefits and live well forever. And this is why there's such an appeal for this universal basic income because the idea with the universal basic income is we'll guarantee you an income. So if you don't wanna be ambitious, if you don't wanna retrain, if you don't wanna reskill, we are not gonna penalizing you, we're not gonna penalize you for all that, you're still gonna get a basic universal income. You're still gonna get enough money to live well off of. And where does that money come from? Well, it comes from those who are ambitious, those who are innovative, those who are gonna create and build something. We're gonna take money from them and provide it for you because our expectations of you have now come down to the point where we don't expect you to be able to find another job, we don't expect you to be able to retrain yourself, we don't expect you to be able to be an entrepreneur, we don't expect you to innovate, to do anything, to figure out what people want or to figure out something they don't know that they want and provide it to them. Lack of imagination, but also lack of expectation from human beings. The assumption is you're all lazy and stupid, right? All right, so, you know, so this is not an all, none of this, none of this is new. Not the threat of the robotics taking people's jobs, not people's response to it, not the intellectual's response to it, if you go back to the intellectuals back then, even some of the industrialists themselves who were panicking and were worried about what they were doing and just like today, you've got the alone musks of the world and other entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley advocating strongly for universal basic income because they're convinced that they are destroying jobs for people and that what they are doing, what they're doing is bad for people somehow and that they need to adopt universal income because otherwise people will really not have jobs. So it really is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the robotics discussion to the robotics debate. It's the same arguments that have always been made and you know, I strongly believe that those arguments are gonna fail again and why are they gonna fail? They're gonna fail because there's no limit to human needs and human wants. There's no limit to human imagination. There's no limit to the kind of things we can do with our minds. There's no limit to the kind of places we can go. Imagine the day where we have an entire tourism industry built on going into space and there could be thousands and thousands of people employed in such an industry. There's no limit to progress. There's no limit to wealth. There's no limit to what can be produced and created. Now the only limit that there is is my imagination. I can't imagine all the wonderful things that are going to happen because I don't have a good enough imagination for it but it's just that limit of the human mind limit of imagination. Now there could be a limit and that limit could be just if we impose by force, if we restrict people's imagination, if we restrict people's use of their own reason, if we restrict people's ability to think, then yes, then we're going to get a sliding back into a dark ages but as long as people are allowed to think, as long as people are left alone to think and as long as people can create, can imagine, can produce, then there will be new jobs, that there will be new things that we desire. I mean, I saw this article, this article in in Wired Magazine from 2012 that is, there was really an interesting analysis and he did a good job and he divided up all the existing jobs and new jobs into four quadrants. So Quadrant A is jobs today that humans do but machines will eventually do better and you can think of thousands of jobs that machines could one day relatively soon do better than what we're doing today. I mean, you will get machines driving trucks. You will get machines flying airplanes. I mean, even today, the 787 does not need a pilot and indeed it's not clear why we need a pilot in the cockpit of a 787 at all because the autopilot is just as good and just as reliable, probably much more reliable than any pilot would be. A lot of tax preparation today is done by computers and X-ray analysis. X-ray analysis is done by computers and indeed CAT scans can be done by computers better than by human eye because they can see the finer details within an X-ray within a CAT scan than a human eye can see, right? So jobs today that humans do but they're gonna disappear and they're gonna be a lot of them, a lot of them. Some programming, low end programming jobs. Any job that can be repetitive, any jobs that can put into a relatively easy internet algorithm and some of these algorithms are in a sense, quote, self-learning that they develop, they learn in some way from the data that you keep feeding them. So many of today's tasks gonna be replaced by that, right? But then, there are all kinds of jobs that we as human beings cannot do, right? That machines are going to do, right? That robots can do. Very, very fine, very, very like nanotechnology type things. Like, you know, you couldn't build a computer chip without automation. Well, imagine the kind of commuter chips we can build with robots and as robots become better because already most computer chips are built by, all computer chips are built by robots but imagine as they become better and more accurate and more and more, right? You know, there are gonna be so many things that engineers today say, I wish I could do that, that once robots become better and more sophisticated and finer, they will be able to do. The AI, what's called artificial intelligence, they have the ability to analyze these vast quantities of data, the ability to map the human genome, the ability to simulate different things around the human genome and understand what all these genes actually do. Once we get big data, well, we have big data, once we improve the tools to analyze them. So the ability to do more things, so one, robots are gonna take our jobs. Two, robots are gonna do jobs that we can't even imagine today, robots are gonna do them, not us, right? Now that is probably gonna require new jobs on our behalf, right? So, you know, there are certain tumors that are removed today by robots. You know, robots drive carts on Mars. They put patterns on fabrics automatically that you can download from the internet and send to a robot, right? There are a million things that are being done today by robots that would dazzle anybody 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 200 years ago, certainly even 50 years ago, right? And, you know, all this exists. And machines are doing them. I mean, think about, in a sense, the mechanization of every aspect, every aspect of our human life. So then, we have jobs that robots, robot jobs that we can't even imagine yet. Lots of jobs that robots are gonna do that we can't imagine. So we can imagine them driving trucks. But we can't imagine the kind of professions, the kind of things that robots will do as we get smarter, as the robots get better and faster and more agile and more complex. So the millions of jobs out there that are gonna be robot jobs, right? And then, all those robot jobs, or a lot of those robot jobs, are gonna require some human interference, right? So this article predicts that the highest-owning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet, right? We can't yet see the machines and technologies that will make these jobs possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done. So robots create massive jobs in and of themselves. And then the last type of jobs it is, is jobs that only humans will be able to do, at least for a while. And a lot of that is human interaction type jobs. A lot of that is intelligent type jobs, is jobs that relate to choices, are jobs that require free will, are jobs that require the cognitive skills that human beings have, jobs that require design and an artistic flair. I mean, robots might be able to mimic certain artistic things, but suddenly, because of industrialization, we now have time to go become ballerinas and become athletes and fashion designers and yoga masters and fan fiction authors and all kinds of other things. I mean, my two sons, one writes comedy and one is in the music business. Now, neither one of those jobs are likely to be taken over by robots, maybe ever, certainly not anytime in the near future, but I think ever, because they require certain cognitive skills and they require, I think, free will in a way that robots will never be able to mimic, not really. So, you know, you can easily say that the number of entertainers is gonna grow dramatically because the number of entertainers in the world has grown exponentially over the last 100 years. Who had time to be an entertainer? Who had the wealth to pay an entertainer? But yet today, just by downloading from iTunes doesn't cost us much, but we've created a whole industry of entertainers and then industry's only gonna grow and the amount of leisure time we have in order to enjoy this entertainment is only gonna grow. So, suddenly we have the opportunity. You know, this article says that we'll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question, what should we do? It will be many generations before a robot can answer that. Now, I'm not sure it can ever be answered, but certainly, you know, we're safe for a few generations without any question, right? And it, you know, those are the kind of interesting professions that are gonna exist in the future, the kind of interesting professions that are about what should we do? What kind of things would enhance human life? What kind of things would make human life more enjoyable, more fulfilling, more exciting, more thrilling? What kind of professions is that? Those are the kind of professions, say instead of truck drivers, they won't be any truck drivers. Now, that means people will have to reorient the way they think about work. It means our educational system is gonna have to shift dramatically. It means that a truck driver's kids are gonna have to be educated in a different way than the truck driver was. And this is where Mark Cuban, in a sense, is right, right? Because long term, and I don't know how long this is gonna take, the kind of professions where the main question is what should we do, what should we do, that are should type questions, are more kind of liberal arts questions, are more human flourishing type questions that need answering. And that might require more psychologists, more artists, more philosophers than it requires simple engineers. It might require certain types of engineers. So we're gonna see and see more and more and more professions that engaged in human flourishing rather than professions that engage in human survival. So almost everything that is required for basic survival is already automated and is gonna become completely automated by robots, including any manual labor that is required for human comfort. So put aside flourishing, comfort, like doing the dishes and washing our clothes, which is already far superior to what it was, not that long ago, but it's gonna become much, much better. So human survival and human convenience are all gonna be taken care of by robots. And then what's left is the flourishing. It's the art. It's what should I do. It's how should I live. It's a computer games, right? It's the movie industry. It's music. It's art forms we can't even imagine today. Three-dimensional, live action in your living. I don't know. What do I know, right? I do not specifically do not have the kind of imagination to imagine what that would all look like, but that's what it's about. All right, we're gonna take one more call and then I wanna get back to, I wanna get to the question of what does this imply for you? What does this imply for everybody? What kind of life decisions one must make today because we are at an inflection point. We are approaching a big dislocation in terms of work. What does that mean for you? All right, hi, you're near on Book Show. Who's this? This is Debbie. Hey, Debbie, how's it going? Well, thank you. You know, well, first of all, I'm really glad to hear you saying very emphatically that no one can predict what's going to happen in terms of future technology because that's just so true. And it's not just people who don't, I mean, it's even really, really creative people in technology. I read an interesting prediction made by Thomas Edison back in 1911 for what kinds of things people would have in 2011. And it was pretty comical. Like his way of thinking was so very focused on, it was very analog. So one thing that he talked about was that books, he says books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. But that's really cool. So he's basically envisioned, yeah, like an analog version of an iPod, but like just so unsophisticated compared to what we actually have. Well, he couldn't imagine a digital world. I mean, and this is the guy who kind of figured out electricity and what we could do with it, right? And so he was already dealing with bits in a sense, but didn't realize that he was dealing with bits and didn't realize what the potential of that was. So the very event possible, or at least who contributed significantly to it, could not have envisioned that same world. Yeah, but let's- So just to- Yeah, I mean, I was gonna give a current example of that and that's the whole venture capital community, right? I mean, even the best venture capitalists in the world. Basically, I'm making bets on technologies that are gonna have an impact in five, 10 years, not in the very distant future. And even there, they get it wrong more often than they get it right. And we're talking about the smartest, most educated, most aware of technology people on the planet, and they make more mistakes. They have more failures than they have winners. Now, so if you take Sequoia, Collina Pookins, they probably, half of their companies fail, and another few of them succeed, but succeed just a little bit, then maybe 20% of their companies secured really well and then one or two of the companies are home runs and for any given five to 10 year period. So even the best minds today who are thinking about this constantly can't even predict the next five to 10 years with accuracy, never mind what the world is gonna look like in 30 to 40 years. Yeah, absolutely. I don't even know if the percentages are as good as you say. Well, I was using the best, I was using the best venture capitalist in the world, right? Not the average, the average venture capitalist is much worse than that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it's a point really well worth reinforcing that the unpredictability, which I find delightful of what's coming next. But the thing that I had actually called about originally was the issue of education, which I see as a very important part of this issue and why people are so freaked out by the prospect of having to have more sophisticated, more thought intensive, critical thought intensive jobs. And I'm just, it never seems to be shocked by the lack of ability to do basic critical thinking. And I attribute that to our education, our government education system. It's almost like government induced brain damage on a massive scale. And that is the part of this that worries me the most. And so I think that that's it. I know I agree with you completely too, so yeah. So the biggest downside here, and thanks for calling, really appreciate it. It's good to hear from somebody from Silicon Valley. But the biggest challenge here, it really is education and the fact that education is controlled by government and the fact that education has basically eliminated or actually stamps out, particularly in the worst cases, critical thinking skills. And it's the critical thinking skills, it's the ability to think that is gonna be so crucial in the future. And I'm not talking about the ability to do math or the ability to think in terms of, people say, oh, we need to get everybody to program and we need, and this is the push, right? It's the push to get kids into the program, but it's not about that. It's not about any particular skill. The fundamental skill that is gonna be more required in the future than ever in the past, but was always required for good human life, always, right? Is the ability to think critically? Is the ability to use your mind? It's the ability to use the mind, even in the sense that you have to have a really sharp mind in order to write comedy, in order to be an entertainer, in order to produce, in order to answer the question, what should we do? What is good for human life? What are the kind of products and kind of things that should be produced in order to enhance human flourishing? That should requires real activation of the human mind. It requires actual thinking. It requires engagement with the world. It requires an active, engaged mind. It's not about, and again, what most people today think in terms of, oh, we need to teach kids to think, is that they wanna teach them a skill, programming. Now I'm awful teaching kids programming because I think programming teaches a certain aspect, a certain way of thinking. It teaches logic, is I think the primary thing it teaches, and it teaches something about the way the electronics work and the way the world works, so that's a good thing. But that's not the essential. The essential is kind of what Montessori Education does, which is teach very young kids how to engage with the world, how to induce information from the world, induce knowledge from the world, how to integrate knowledge across, and how to apply that skill in a creative way, not in a mechanized, automated way, but in a creative way. And one of the challenges is to take that and apply that kind of education, that kind of methodology, the methodology of sustained critical thinking. And at the same time, provide the students with knowledge of the world around them. How do we do that? Throughout school, and how do we replace public education with private education so that real innovation, real competition, real thinking can be applied to the field of education? Because right now, within the world of government schools, there is no innovation going on and there is no thinking going on. There's some pseudo thinking going on at universities which produces awful products, which are then crammed down students' throats at the schools, which destroy critical thinking. In the old days, there was new math, or site C, or whatever it is, and I'm sure it has the new variations today. I'm not up to speed on the latest monstrosities coming out of the colleges of education, but I can guarantee that none of them are very good, well, the monstrosities, they can't be good. But there's nothing very good coming out of those colleges, which would actually enhance education. So the number one political, in my view, the number one political issue that is more important than any other issue for human flourishing in the future, for human success in the future, for dealing with the disruption that is gonna happen with the coming of robots and the automation of our entire economy is education, education, education, and what I mean by education is mean privatize it, get the government out of it. And I think the way to achieve that is to retain government funding of education, but get the government out of running education. They shouldn't manage school, they shouldn't control schools, they shouldn't, and they shouldn't even decide how parents use the funding in terms of which school to go to. So I like, and I've talked about this on a previous show, education, saving accounts, and if there was one political, I mean, put aside Obamacare, put aside all this other stuff that's going on, Trump, if there was one political issue that I think is the most important political issue to rally around, the most important political issue to write your congressman about, the most important political issue to advocate for, it's privatizing education. And I think the more private, the better, anyway, from charter school to vouchers to tax credits to what I think is the best, which is education, saving accounts, any one of those is an improvement, but education, saving accounts is the ultimate improvement, and we should be advocating for that and let the conservatives worry about the other ones. Because it is about, the future is about thinking, and it's about thinking skills, but not just thinking skills as applied to your profession, but in the future, and I think the supply is right now. I mean, it's already known, I think, among young people, that you're gonna have to change professions over your career. You're not gonna have one career, you're gonna have multiple careers. You're gonna shift, you're gonna change, you're gonna have to learn new skills, you're gonna have to be agile. And that kind of ability, that kind of ability to constantly, to think on your feet, to have the self-esteem, because this is not just about thinking, it's also about self-esteem. To have the self-esteem, to be willing to jump from one career to another career from one company to another company. I mean, I know a lot of businessmen who are older, who look down on people who job jump, who have a resume with lots of jobs on it. And I think they're missing the boat. I think this job jumping is exactly the kind of skill that we're gonna need in the future. Because things are gonna move so fast, you're gonna have to be willing and able to switch jobs, switch careers, switch focus, learn new things, learn to do stuff. And that's gonna require a whole mental focus on that, on what am I doing today? Is this the best that I'm doing with my life today? Is my job under threat from a robot? Is my job under threat from AI or from something? How do I adjust? How do I change? Even if I do that, I still need to be aware of my new job that even though robots haven't competed that job away, it could be competed 10 years later, I need to make sure that I'm always reading, that I'm always looking, that I'm always educating myself, that I'm aware, that I'm alert. So career can't be, okay, I've chosen to be a doctor. Here's the one path that exists. Now, I don't think doctors ever had that because there was always new technology, new medication, new treatments, they had to be aware of all that. But there also has to be aware now, another element. There's technology that are gonna affect my job, it could take my job away, it could do some of what I do better, like surgery. I need to be conscious, conscious constantly of the technology, of the latest technologies, not just how it affects how I do my job but the very existence of my job and how do I design my job as I move forward to make sure that I always have a job? That's what career means. Iron Man talks about purpose and career as a cardinal value, purpose as being a cardinal value and career being most people's purpose. And when she talks about the virtue of productiveness, she's not talking about just doing work, going to a job, making a living. None of those concepts, purpose, career, productiveness relate to just making a living and having a job. It's about consciously thinking about what you're doing, doing the best that you can at what you're doing but also planning over the long term what you want to do and what you can do and what you should do and part of that is realizing the risks to your job coming from China or coming from robots or coming from, and this is what pisses me off royally about people who pander to we've lost the jobs to China. China is taking our jobs, not to put aside the collectivism implied by that but much more important than that is the issue of personal responsibility. I mean personal responsibility in the deep objective sense, not in the conservative sense, in the deep objective sense, which means taking responsibility over your own life, figuring out what you want to do with your life, figuring out what is going to be necessary for you to do in your life, figuring out what the threats and what the opportunities are in your life, in the scope, in the realm of what is possible to you, given your abilities, given your intelligence, given your skills. And this is a point that I was at a seminar last week and Greg Salamieri made, but I've made before as well in one version or another but Greg really made it in a pointed way. And like you're in South Ohio and you just lost your job because I don't care because of what, because of AI, because of robots, because of China, get off your butt and go find a new job. And by the way, five years before your job, you lost your job. Could you predict, could have you, okay, let me start over. Could you have predicted that you would lose the job? Could you have done something to prevent you from losing your job? Or could you have been prepared for the day when you lost your job to be able to shift a new job that was safer and better for you? Did you go to night school to get new skills and to perfect the skills that you have so you wouldn't lose that job or not lose that job, maybe that job was doomed, but so that you would have another job? That's what it means to take your life seriously. That's what it means. That's what Americans always did. There was always a percentage of the bitching complaint. But the essential characteristic of Americans was that they took responsibility over the entirety of their life, that they planned ahead, that they thought about these things and they actually focused on it and they were responsible for themselves because they realized that your happiness is only dependent on you, on your thinking, on your willingness to think, on your ability to think. And the same with education. If we care about a kid's education, then don't send your kid to stupid public schools that are dumbing them down. Find the best school possible. Fight politically for an alternative. Fight, fight, fight for the alternatives. Not just as, oh yeah, I'm for school choice, but go and really do something of it instead of getting all consumed by Islam or getting all consumed about immigration or getting all consumed about trade or getting all consumed about Hillary versus Trump, it would be cool if objectivists and others got all consumed about the battle, the most important battle, the most fundamental battle, for privatizing education, which is so essential for our kids and our grandkids' ability to lead good lives. Without it, everything is doomed, everything is lost. So, you know, this is my, this is the moral point that robots bring up, right? The kind of economic, almost metaphysical, human nature point is, we always have more desires, more needs, more wants. There's always gonna be another frontier that we want to explore, somewhere new we want to go, something new that's never been done before. There's always gonna be breakthroughs, there's always gonna be things that need to be done and a lot of those things are still gonna require a certain manual labor and there's always gonna be a percentage of the population that does manual labor, but the fact is, for example, all the nail salons and the massage parlors and all the stuff that requires a human touch. Now, maybe one day they won't, maybe one day you'll go and they'll be a machine that massages you and does it exactly the way a human being does it and that's also possible. And one can imagine that over the next 100 years manual labor, generally, all manual skills will disappear and that means that more and more and more human beings will be human beings because essentially what it means to be human is to use our minds, what it means to be human is to be a rational animal. And therefore, that's great. That means more human beings will have the option of using their minds in order to make a living. You know, that's really cool. Now, the only responsibility I would say we have, socially, right, is to get out of the way of the educational process to stop producing a crummy, brain-numbing product that is gonna destroy the capacity of half of humanity to actually do those jobs. And that's the number one political issue of our time, not minimum guaranteed income and it's not taxing robots, which is just taxing capital, which is just taxing progress, which is taxing technology, which is taxing human prosperity and human flourishing, right? Which is so stupid, it's hard to imagine. It's basically a tax on capital, that's all it is. Robots are capital, right? So what we need, if Bill Gates really cares about human beings, if Bill Gates is really concerned about job losses, if Bill Gates is really concerned about the jobs of the future, what he should be advocating for, what he should be spending his billions and billions and billions of dollars on, is a massive campaign to privatize education. And Zuckerberg should stop giving a hundred, he gave a hundred million dollars to the New Jersey public school system, which just went down, it was like flushing the money down the toilet. Instead of that he should have been investing that hundred million dollars in private education. So that's whatever issues come out of robotics. The solution is private education. Now again, economically, metaphysically, human needs are unlimited and the human ability is unlimited, the human mind is unlimited. The moral issue is, I had a bug there in the air and I was waving my hand, right? The moral issue is, and this is where we default again, it's because we don't teach people this. And this is where philosophy departments default, this is where parents default, this is where educational system default, this is certainly where our culture defaults. In a sense teaching people to take care of themselves, not to take care of themselves in the sense of tying their shoelaces, but to take care of themselves in terms of using their minds to figure out how to flourish, using their minds to figure out what values they should pursue, to use their minds to figure out how they can live the best human life possible, the best life possible to them. And I don't care how intelligent you are, this is not an issue of horsepower in a sense of intelligence, this is an issue of focus, this is an issue of what you're using that intelligence for. And if we use that into any human being, can work, will have work in a robot driven society, as long as he's willing to engage his mind, as long as he's with whatever ability he has, because there'll be plenty of jobs that will not require a lot of high level of intelligence, but will require a mind they can choose, they can make decisions. So, I think it's gonna be fun, I'm really looking forward to the future, I worry only because of philosophy and because of education that we're not preparing people for the future. I highly encourage people to go read Johann Norberg's book called Progress, which is an excellent book, and Johann Norberg is a friend and it's certainly an ally, a philosophical ally in what we do, and Johann is all about the progress we've made to date and the progress that is possible in the future, and he's an optimist and I like that. I am overall an optimist, the only thing I'm, okay, so there's a question here. Oh, I don't know who, it's not to me. Well, here's a question, so would you say there's nothing wrong with being a janitor who is very good at sweeping and cleaning, very skilled, although he was not thought about how to do his job better in a decade? No, if he hasn't thought about how to do his job better in a decade, I do think there's something wrong. If you're not engaged in the mind, inactively in the mind on a big chunk of your day, then you're not fully human, right? So you're not engaged in human activity and therefore I don't think you can flourish and I don't think you can completely be happy. I think you have to, you have to be happy. You have to use your mind in order to be happy, you have to engage in rational thought in order to be happy, right? And that's true of any profession. And a lot of these professions, the nice thing is a lot of the professions that don't require you to do that are gonna go away and what will replace them are even the simplest job in the world in 50 to 100 years will require as a feature of it the engagement of human reason and that's exciting. That is really, really, really exciting and I think that people are panicking about robots and people who underestimate human ability, it's people who don't really understand human nature and don't really see man as the rational animal who think of themselves, they lead us to think of themselves as superior. We can deal with robots, we'll always have jobs. We have imagination but most people don't. It's the superiority that so many central planners have and I've said before, unfortunately there is a central planning mentality in Silicon Valley. There's a central planning mentality, a leader central planning mentality in Silicon Valley and this is why people can sit there and say we need a guaranteed minimum income because people are too stupid to take care of themselves. We know, we know how smart people are and we know what they're gonna have to be doing in the future so I reject all of that but I do, again, the philosophical issue is how do we teach, how do we ingrain, how do we demand, morally demand that people take on the responsibility for their own life. Take on the responsibility for shaping their life. Take on the responsibility for figuring out whether there's a future in their career or not, whether their job is gonna be taken away or not and figure out what path they should be on in the future. If you're a truck driver, your job is gonna be, man, let me give you an example. Let me give you an example. So I have a driver here in Orange County who often takes me like to LAX and because I travel so much and I use the same driver because I like him a lot and this is a guy who used to work for a company I used and he was the best driver there so I kind of, I committed to him and I only used him and I always asked a company for him and then he said he was gonna spin off and start his own company and I said, well, I'm with you, I'm gonna bring my business with you and I'm gonna recommend you to my friends and I've got him a lot of business over the years and so on and you know, but he's got one car and he's thinking about expanding to two cars but we've had this conversation and he's told me because he's thinking, right? And I like him because he's a thinker, he's a limo driver but he's a thinker, right? And what does he say? He said, look, I'm looking at Uber and I'm looking at self-driving cars and I know that in 10 years, I'm gonna be competed out of business or there gonna be very few of us around and so I'm gonna buy a second car because this business requires me to have two cars and if I'm gonna make a living even the next two years I need to second car but you know what, any money that I make here I'm gonna start looking for a new business because I'm gonna be out of a business at some point five years, 10 years, 20 years but at some point this business is not viable. It's not viable. Now that's the kind of mentality everybody has to have in whatever your profession. You know, if you're a radiologist much of what you do is you're not gonna be able to do in five years. AI software is gonna take over. It's gonna be able to look at those scans much better than you can. Now there'll still be a need for some radiologists but what kind of comparative advantage can you as a radiologist develop so that your job is safe and so that your job, because most of the jobs are gonna go away. There'll be fewer people doing a more intense skill at a high intense skill level, a different skill level and that's what's gonna be that new skills whatever that is is gonna be valued. So, I guess what I'm saying is you've gotta be completely aware, completely alert, completely focused on what your career implies, what your career needs, what the future is gonna be in place. You're still gonna miss stuff because we can't predict the future with certainty. I would definitely keep, you've gotta look at technology because in any field, in any area you're in, technology will have an impact on you. So, whatever you're doing today, you gotta take full responsibility which means engage, be aware of the world, how it's impacting your job, your life and so on and then you've gotta have the courage to often change careers midstream, to learn new skills, to take time off to learn a new skill, to maybe completely reverse course because life is not static and I think people, unfortunately, I think there was a period, and to some extent, I hope we're not heading towards another one where the economy was stagnant, relatively stagnant, people had the same job for a long time, standard of living went up but not that much, innovation was restrained and people got used to that kind of mentality and that, because of technology, ain't the future. You're gonna have to be agile, you're gonna have to be flexible and you're gonna have to be using your mind. All right, so I was gonna talk about sharing and I don't have time, so I'm gonna do that in the AM560 talk, I'm gonna talk about what it means to share. You know, I usually give them my talks, this example of the kids in the sandbox sharing and the parent demanding that they share, so I'm gonna talk about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing and so on and what it all means and how does egoism relate to all this stuff and how does egoism relate to being nice to people and being kind to me, charitable and so on and is that consistent with the objective or not? So please listen, it'll be up on the blog talk site in a few days, you can listen live on AM560 Chicago on some of the radio stations online, an I Heart Radio, I think it's I Heart Radio and I will also be broadcasting it here live on Facebook Live, so Facebook Live, it'll be on here in an hour, in an hour and 10 minutes basically, it starts five minutes after the hour, so in an hour and 10 minutes I'll be talking about sharing. So just wrapping up, I don't see any new callers, so just wrapping up our conversation today, right? Robots are not a threat, robots are massive, massive benefit and opportunity. Massive, they're gonna increase the amount of wealth, they're gonna increase the quality and standard of living to unimaginable heights, we cannot imagine how good life has the potential to be 100 years from now because of technology and robots and the human mind and its application. Now, one of the requirements for that is freedom because human reason can only function when it is free. So coercion, force, authority, government controls, government regulations, the more of those we have, the less innovation, the less wealthy we will be in that distant future but if we're granted freedom, even, I hate to say this, the limited freedom we have today, I see an incredibly rosy future into, well, I shouldn't say the limited freedom today because the limited freedom today is not static, it's either getting worse or getting better. If it gets worse, then the future could be very bleak. What we need to try is to make it much, much, much, much better and because if it gets much better, freedom, we get more freedom, in other words. The amount of wealth, the kind of life that human beings could live. I don't know, it's just unimaginable. It is imaginable by science fiction writers. I mean, it's hard to tell what the technology of 100 years from now will be. It's hard to tell what human beings lifespan will be. We might be living to two, 300 years. What about space travel? What about the kind of occasions you take? What about the, I don't know, the enhanced sex you might have. Who knows what's happening because I think one of the things that we're gonna have is chips implanted in us and that enhance our mental abilities, our cognitive abilities and our physical abilities. So I think we'll have microscopic robots maybe in our bodies or maybe chips in our bodies. Who knows, I don't know, I don't know. But it is, the future is amazing. I mean, the thing that pisses me off more than anything else is the fact that I'm getting old and I'm gonna die one day, right? I wanna see how amazing this future is going to be and how amazing the technology is gonna be. So if you have the technology to download my consciousness into something so I can live forever, I'm cool with that, all right. Okay, well, thanks. Oh, a movie recommendation. I think somebody on the chat mentioned this. I'm watching the series called Humans and it's a BBC produced, I think with, I can't remember who the affiliate is in the US, but it's a British US joint production. You know, I really enjoy it. I think it raises a lot of interesting moral questions. Now granted, it's based on a premise I don't believe in and the premise is that you can bring to life a robot so that they have true emotions and they really are conscious. But imagine if you had all those robots in the world and some are conscious and some are not and what humans would do in order to stop, to control the ones who are conscious and the whole cognitive dissonance of having conscious robots and what that means and everything and it's really fascinating. I mean, I'm enjoying it. There's a certain element of silliness to it as there is in most shows because of some of the science is off and some of the human relationships are off but I'm enjoying it. I think it's quite entertaining and raises some interesting issues that don't just relate to how we relate to robots but how we relate to those who are different from us. So it's called humans. It's on, I can't, FX maybe? I think it's FX. And you know, I know Tom wants a flying car. I want a flying car too. Believe me, I want a flying car more than you want. I want a flying supersonic car because then I could get to London in like five hours instead of the ridiculous time it takes me today or maybe four hours, I could flight it. I imagine the quality of life improvement. We've got a call, but you know, I can't take it because we basically, well, let's take this quickly but you have to be really quick. Hi, you're in the Iran Book Show. Hi, Iran, it's Alan. You mentioned science fiction and I wondered if you could speak briefly about how over the even centuries from Frankenstein to Metropolis to Terminator, robots have just been depicted as something to fear. Do you have any comment about that? What would be the origin of that? Yeah, that's a good point. That's a whole discussion because I think generally we enjoy to be scared. You see that in the horror movies today. You see that in the, you know, all the zombie movies that are being produced. We love to be afraid. We love to believe the end of the world is coming. There's something that appeals to at least a lot of human beings, if not all of human beings by that. And I think Frankenstein and all those science fiction novels have always played into that, into that fear that seems to have always existed among human beings. And it would be interesting to delve into the origins of that fear sometime. So a lot of science fiction writing was geared towards that, but there was also a more optimistic vision of human in science fiction. So I think you can find science fiction that kind of explores the whole range of kind of human desires and human emotions even. So they were definitely optimistic like Jules Verne who are much more optimistic about the future and didn't have the kind of terminator Frankenstein vision or Robert Hanline who had kind of a weird vision of at least human sexuality, but at least had a very positive vision of mankind's progress in the universe and its success on the planets. And I'm not an expert on science fiction and it would be interesting to have an expert on science fiction on the show sometime to talk about that. I don't read enough science fiction to tell, but my guess is that a lot of the science fiction is positive and optimistic about the future. Take Star Trek, I mean Star Trek has always been or even Star Wars is a certain sense in which you have to create conflicts. So there's always a battle going on, but at the end of the day, the good guys win and technology seems to advance and life seems to be better. At least that's what I think they're fighting for is a better life, but to the extent that technology is advanced, they seem to be freer. So there's a whole issue there about science fiction, but there's also a whole issue about why people enjoy so much to be afraid and to be scared. And I think this relates to global warming, why we think the world's gonna end because of global warming and why we thought it was gonna end because of global cooling and why we thought it was gonna end because of population bomb and why we're gonna thought it was gonna end because of cancer and why we thought it was gonna end because God was upset at us and why we thought it was gonna end for a million other reasons for the last 100,000 years. Every few years there's a new reason why we think the world is gonna end. There's something, I don't know, in storytelling or in psychology or maybe a consequence of the philosophy that we're being taught that requires a world-ending scenario on the horizon to get us all excited and riled up about the future. So I don't know. I mean, that's a whole interesting topic which I think the robots fits in. The robots fit into this global warming over a population story. Oh no, and the Luddites have said this all along. Oh no, the world's gonna end because the robots are gonna take over and none of us will have any jobs and indeed the robots are gonna kill us all because they're not gonna need us anymore. This goes back to 2001 Space Odyssey where the computer doesn't need human beings anymore. So it starts killing them off and there'd been tons of science fiction stories about the computers trying to kill us all off because they don't need us. Of which Terminator is maybe one of the best made and one of the most well-known and I could do a whole show on Terminator one and two. Not three or any of the others, but one and two are brilliant. Anyway, there's something that prevents us for being optimistic about the future. At least a significant portion of the population and I think it's a rotten philosophy. And I think it's a rotten philosophy. It's a mysticism, a disrespect for reason and altruism that drive this and it's been around for a long, long, long time because all three of those have been around for a long, long time really going back to when we lived in the caves or before. All right, I have to wrap up now because I have to prepare for the AM560 show. So we are gonna close and thank you. You've been listening to your own book show. Please, please go out there and share and like and do whatever it is that you do to let the world know. I think this was a pretty good show. I think people learned something from it. Also, also, don't forget to make a contribution to Iron Man Institute. You're getting a value here. You shouldn't be free writing off of that value of other people supporting the Institute to pay me to do this. So you go to the Iron Man Institute website, press the Contribute button and put a note in there that it's for the Iran book show. All right, thanks for listening. Talk to you next week. Bye.