 Welcome to this NHK TV session. I'm Hiroko Kunia. Let me first start out by introducing our great panelist. On my right is Christopher Pizzeridis. He's the Regist Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He's an expert on economics of labor markets and is the recipient of 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics. Next to him is Dilip George. He's the co-founder and chief technology officer of Vicarious. It's a Silicon Valley startup. And he's an expert on the research of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. And he's building human-level artificial intelligence. And next to him is Yoshiaki Fujimori, President and CEO of Lixell Group in Japan. Lixell is a multinational group that provides housing equipment, such as kitchens and bathrooms and toilets. And next to him is Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of MIT Initiative on Digital Economy. He's the co-author of The Second Machine Age. And lastly, but not least, Taurus Lund-Paulson. Did I pronounce your name correctly? He's a minister for business and growth of Denmark. Denmark has incorporated what is called flex security to secure steady economic growth and employment at the same time. And this session is titled A World Without Work. Now where are we headed? An Oxford University study on the susceptibility of computerization of US jobs concludes that 47% of US jobs are in high-risk category, meaning these occupations could potentially be replaced by machines in the future. There is still much, much debate on the likely size of the impact brought on by the technological advancement on work. But awareness is growing more and more that despite increased productivity and growing global income and quality of life, many jobs could and have disappeared due to creative new services. Before I begin the discussion, I'd like to introduce to you two perspectives, one from the Club of Rome in 1997. 1997 report says that increased productivity and falling prices is, quote, some way of achieving the goal to paradise. But the road to paradise is beginning to look very much like the road to hell, unquote. The question asked was that we are driving towards more abundance, but at the same time towards zero employment and zero availability of money for many people. Another perspective, this goes back to way back in 1930, John Maynard Keynes. He warned also about the widespread technological unemployment, but he had a very different perspective. He said, man's struggle for subsistence may be solved due to technological improvements. He saw that men, for the first time, will be faced with how to use his leisure time. So here we are going to be asking questions. Are we driving towards more and more wealth with less and less labor? And what policies and actions do we need to take to soften the impact on people? So let me first start by asking Mr. George. You are the cutting edge Silicon Valley startup who is trying to build artificial intelligence. How far have we approached close to the mind of the human being? Let me just explain to the audience here that his company beat Captcha. Captcha was thought that only people could recognize the distorted figures and the distorted numbers and computers, but artificial intelligence was able to beat that. What does that tell us about the latest? Yeah, so there are two perspectives. One is artificial intelligence is already very successful and is being applied in a wide variety of areas. And these artificial intelligence are what we call NATO AI. They can excel humans in particular areas, but those AI systems cannot be general purpose, cannot be flexible like human beings. So in the narrow AI area, we are making great progress and we have already made great progress. And even narrow AI systems can replace workers in those specified areas. We are working on what we call general AI, building machines that work in a very flexible way like humans do and have the same common sense understanding of the world as humans do and can reason about situations and adapt to situations. And the basic premise is that the brain can be understood. What we have in our head is nothing but a machine and it can be understood and machines can be made to work on the same principles as the human brain. And we are still far away from getting all the way to the human level intelligence. It is hard to predict how long it will take because it is probably half a dozen breakthroughs away to get there and breakthroughs are unpredictable. But there is a lot of investment going into it. A lot of smart people are working on it. So it is not a question of whether it will happen. It is only a question of when it will happen. Machines can now do the physical work. And you're saying that you're developing something that can mimic the brain. And you said the key factor is prediction forward. Yeah. So one of the things that we did when we beat capture was. So there are pattern recognition systems which can look at an image and say whether it's an A or B. But we were one of the first to even come back and predict the occluded portions of a character. So this is based on what you know about characters, what you know about letters, predicting the missing portions of letters. And being able to make predictions can be considered as the hallmark of intelligence. If you have good models of the world, you are able to make predictions on what is going to happen next. And being able to mimic that in software is one of the key breakthroughs that is required for creating human level artificial intelligence. Before I go to the other panel, I have one more question to you. Because the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs just recently conducted the basic income create-a-thon. Yeah. Basic income is to provide money to people, regardless of whether or not they're employed or unemployed, so that they can have a decent living. Yeah. What was in the minds of the entrepreneurs that you thought that we needed to start thinking about basic income for everyone? Yeah, so we can go back to one of the famous quotes from Arthur Clarke is that. The goal of future is full unemployment, so we can all play. This is a famous quote. And you can see that if you can build machines like the brain, if you can replicate all functions that humans can do, then all the production can be done by machines. And then there's a question of what do humans do? And we can play. But the basic rule of play that we teach children is everybody gets a chance. Everybody gets a share. You take turns. And ensuring that everybody is part of this abundance that is produced by machines is an important social responsibility. And people in Silicon Valley are aware of it. They are also enabling the change, and they're also aware of the consequences of it. And I would say that is the impetus behind those conversations. So they're saying that massive numbers of employment could be lost. Yes. Let me go to Mr. Brunos and you and your book and your second machine aid. You say that there will be few winners and many, many losers. What's happening to the labor market? So I wouldn't actually put it quite that way. Let me clarify. So it's true that the technology is making the pie bigger. And overall, wealth is getting larger. But there's no economic law that says that everyone's going to benefit proportionally. It's possible for some people to come out way ahead and others behind. Through most of history, it was a rising tie that lifted most boats. But in the past about 20 years, we've seen what Andrew McAfee and I call the great decoupling. That is a continued growth in productivity. GDP is at all time high in most countries. We have more millionaires and billionaires than ever before, some of them probably in this room here. But median income, the income of the person that the 50th percentile is lower now in the United States than many other countries than it was in the late 1990s. So the productivity has become decoupled. And part of the reason that's happened is that technological progress can be biased. You can have it biased towards high-skill workers against low-skill or middle-skill workers. You can have it biased towards capital or labor. You can have it biased towards superstars or against other people who aren't superstars. So those are all possible ways that technology can unfold. But I want to stress that ultimately what happens is a function of the policies we put in place, how we organize our activity, the decisions that executives and individuals make. And there's no inevitability about this particular path. That is the path we've been on the past 20 years or so. And if we don't change, we'll probably continue on that path, but it's within our power to shift that. And it's quite possible that we can restore a system that creates prosperity for the many, not just a few. But you say the change is happening exponentially. The technological change is happening exponentially. Our institutions, our organizations are not changing nearly as fast. And that's part of why we're having these difficulties. And I think it's wonderful that Dileep and many others are inventing better and better ways for machines to have more capabilities. But it's the responsibility of economists and managers and the rest of society to find ways to keep up. In the earlier Industrial Revolution, you mentioned how machines had automated muscle work with the steam engine and electricity. The rest of society adapted to that. And we invented mass public education. We changed our social security system. We made a whole set of other changes. And that helped soften the blow. They were still very rough for many people. And not everybody benefited immediately. But ultimately, we adapted and we made some changes. We now have to make equally important changes in our institutions and our organizations today. And one of the reasons I think it's good that we're having this conversation is that we don't want to hold back the technology. What we want to do is speed up our human capabilities, our skills, and our organizations to keep up with what the technology is making possible. Mr. Pizarridis, excuse me, you say that the global share, the global income is growing, but the share labor gets is getting smaller and smaller, therefore inequality is rapidly rising. And last year, I think you warned the people here and that the wealth of the richest 1% would own more wealth than 99% of the population. And Oxfam just announced this week that it happened. Right? My view about it is very much the one that you just heard from Eric LePie is growing bigger. There's no guarantee that everyone will benefit if we leave the market alone. In fact, if anything, we think that not everyone will benefit if we leave the market alone. So we need to develop new system of institutions, new policies that will redistribute inevitably from those that the market will have rewarded in favor of those that the market will have left behind. Now, having a universal minimum income is one of those where it's in fact, it's one that I'm very much in favor of, as long as we know how to apply it without taking away the incentive to work at the lower end of the market. I'm also not worried at all about job creation at the unskilled end of the market because there are many labor-intensive services that will never be able to automate. You know, there is the caring nursing sector, medical sector. I mean, I don't mean high-level doctors. I mean, sort of nurses and those who look after, given with the ageing of societies as well, that would be a big job creation sector. However, many successes there are in artificial intelligence or anything else. There is the leisure industry, which is labor incentive. You don't want to sit in restaurants and be served by robots. I think you never will. Or you don't want your food to be cooked by robots, at least I don't want to go to restaurants. And there are many sectors that are like that. Where we're going to miss out is where we are already seeing it in the United States. And then it will spread to other countries, which is the middle class, which as was said in an earlier session this morning, is the big consumption class of the economy. So how do we ensure that there is enough demand going out into the economy that will provide the incentive for people to create jobs for the majority of the labor force? And inevitably, we have to confront the idea that governments will take a more active role. I know currently there is a presidential campaign going on in the United States. I know if one of the candidates gets up and says what I just said, you will lose the election. But then we have Scandinavia representation here. If someone comes up in Scandinavian elections and says we're going to move away from that and you've never heard the word redistribution again, he's also going to lose the election. So we have to educate our public that we need it. Redistribution is not a dirty word. I live in Britain. We pay more than 50% tax, admittedly at high incomes, but even at the income of the, or a mere professor at the London School of Economics, he has to pay more than 50%. But we're still happy living there because we see the money being spent well on the whole. There's a good national health service. We take care of poverty. They're doing it even better in Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries. And it is a change in institutions that we need to see. But the problem is that all these changes are so happening very quickly and men have to take a slower time trying to adjust to everything. And I would like to ask Mr. Fujimori, how you as a corporate executive feel about the job security for the workers? You probably make rational judgment, looking at productivity, looking at personnel cost, looking at the new systems. What is happening with the job security? You know, as the CEO of the company, that we always consider our jobs. And one side that we wanted to use, everything possible to improve our productivity. If AI come in, we'll take it. You make it, we sell it, we use it, we'll make it more productive. And also, as of right now, that we have about 100 facilities in the world, we have lots of workers over there with the highly productive machinery coming up, I think we'll hit some blue cars as well. And also, not only that, it will hit some of the white color segment like marketing, HR, finance, et cetera. But having said that, what we are worried about is not that because we can always retrain them to do higher value added work for them, so the company can all world prosper. What we are worried about is the disruptive technology. Disruptive technology or disruptive business model will overtake us, so that all company goes down by those disruptive technology or disruptive model. So we wanted to more think about a competitive strategy. We are competing with our manufacturers of our kind today. 10 years from now, 20 years from now, DELETE may be competing us, or maybe the Google may be overtaking us, so the business model will change dramatically with all these AI and new force industrial revolution come up. So we got to catch up all these. The question is, would we have our disruptive team within the company? Or do we want to be more agile to adapt to the change quickly? It's our company's choice, but CEO or industry has to think more of those how to survive, how to improve our company. So the rational decision that each corporation will make is to be more productive and more competitive. And even in your country, Denmark, you are promoting small and medium-sized corporations to increase robots, introduce them in more highly intelligent production facilities to increase competitiveness. But you could get into a vicious cycle of automating less workers, less demand, and less purchasing power. Isn't this a big dilemma? It is. It's also a concern, I can say. But when I'm traveling around in Denmark, visiting companies, some of the companies that are investing in automation, that kind of thing, they are, in fact, able to create jobs now because they will be more competitive. Denmark has, because of our very high taxes and that kind of thing, also for companies. We have been exporting a lot of jobs out to other European countries and even also to Asia. So I think for Denmark, in fact, having this new agenda, that could be an advantage. But of course, some of the European countries, also in the EU, they will have a lot of pressure because some of the new technologies would send jobs away. Before Mr. Brilson, when productivity rose, companies made more money, they hired more people. And even if people were replaced, there were new businesses that were created. So the cycle was not a vicious one. This time, do you predict that this vicious cycle could occur? I don't know. Because are we going to be able to make new services for industries faster? I think that's a great question. It's something that we have to take very seriously because as I was saying earlier, I don't know for sure and that worries me. There's no guarantee that we're going to continue what we did in the past or whether we're at a turning point right now. I think we want to try to do everything we can to try to encourage job creation and educate the workforce and do our best so that we can continue in the positive way we've been in the past. But there are some disturbing trends. I mentioned earlier about median income. Also, if you look at new business formation in the United States, we hear a lot about the wonderful things happening in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, but if you look at the whole country, there's actually fewer new businesses being formed. There are fewer young companies. Entrepreneurship is actually lower than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It's been falling. And that's a disturbing trend because ultimately those new jobs are coming from entrepreneurs. It's the function of an entrepreneur is to think of ways of creating, taking technology and combining it with skills that humans have to fit a business, a consumer need and putting those things together. That's what entrepreneurs do. We need more people to do that because the old jobs are being automated. There's no question about that. I don't know whether it's 47% or what the exact number is, but there's no question that many existing tasks will be automated. And that should be a good thing as we replace some of those routine tasks if we can find the new jobs and the new industries and the new goods and services. I'd like to see us working harder on developing those and developing the skills for the workforce so that we can fulfill those because ultimately that will be the best way to provide for people is to have people doing productive work. And that would be my first option before we go to a basic income or other sorts of things which we may have to at some point. I think we could invest much more in education and entrepreneurship, research and development to reinvigorate the economy. Mr. Pissarides, where do you see the areas of growth for the labor market? Oh, there's no doubt that it will be in the service sector and most of them will be in service. Service sector requires lower skills of the traditional kind, but it will require better skills in human communication. How do you treat other... I mentioned the care sector in... So it will be labor-intensive? They will be labor-intensive, but they will require skills that are very different from the ones that our schools are giving people now. You know, they will be able to communicate better. Their product will not be one that they will be producing alone in a laboratory or in an office. It will be more involving other people more directly. So I'm only in favor of new forms of education or at least an adjustment on educational systems that will give these new skills. There will, of course, be jobs, and I hope there are jobs at the entrepreneurial level because it's through entrepreneurship that we get the job creation and making investment more productive. And in the United States, of course, in Europe, that's rising much more. I mean, in Europe, we're behind where the United States is. I mean, startups is only now becoming a fashionable term in Europe, and many young people are moving in that direction, including my own son, I should say. So I see it in the background. So I should say, you know, I mean, the very first statistic you gave about 47% of jobs will be destroyed and panicked. I mean, you know, in China, in the 20 years between 1985 and 2005, I'm sure more than 47% of jobs will be destroyed, which no one will say that let's panic, you know, what's happening to all these Chinese people. In fact, employment has, overall employment, has stayed the same productivity it has risen, but that's because the economy during that period was able to create jobs of the traditional kind, manufacturing, sort of export, low-skilled export, manufacturing itself. But what worries us is that if entrepreneurs create businesses, but are there going to be creating businesses that can't absorb enough workers that were displaced by the smarter machines, the smarter robots? Mr. George, what is, how do you say that? No, because machines will be able to do pretty much everything humans can do, and might even be better than us at doing those things because they don't get tired, they don't have children to take care of when they go back home. So they might be better at many of those things, and including, eventually, not in the near future, communicating with humans, we might not prefer it, we might prefer communicating with a real human because we might consider the robot to be fake. So it is not whether the robot is able to do a good job of it, it is more like we prefer interacting with a human, so that can be a decision that we make as a society, our own preferences, but my take is that, no, machines will eventually get better than humans at many of these things, and we will be able to produce a lot more with much less human effort, and that doesn't mean we won't have meaningful activities. So our definition of what is meaningful activity has changed over our history. TV career was never a career before, and that was, we have new technologies, new careers, and probably what will change is our definition of what earns you an income, what earns you a living, but probably our meaning of life, or our self-worth can be detached from how much money we make from our work as opposed to what we actually do for our own fulfillment. So you're saying we detach our work and income? That could be a possibility, yeah. Really? That's a new paradigm. Yeah, in the sense that you don't have to work to get a basic income, so that's one of the ideas. And you work because you like work, not because it's a necessity to earn a living. That could be, that could be a damn shift. Yeah, I can see that kind of a future. I think it might be useful to distinguish the far future from the near future. I agree with Dilip that eventually machines can do, will be able to do almost everything because of the amazing research. Ultimately, the brain is a machine, and so there's nothing, I don't think there's anything magical that would prevent technology from eventually replicating most, if not all of those capabilities. But that's a long way off, and I don't know, maybe it'll be a little bit sooner with the hard work of some of the folks that are working this. But I don't think that's the immediate challenge that we're facing right now. Right now we're facing something closer to what we said at the beginning, that narrow AI and other technologies are very, very good, better than humans. They're superhuman, I think, arithmetic, doing the payroll. You wouldn't want a bunch of human, there used to be a job called computer in the census, but a bunch of human computers, adding up the numbers for your paycheck every month, it's much better to have a machine do that. And there are many tasks like that, the machines are continuing to get better at, especially in routine information processing work. And that middle category that Professor Pizzerides has mentioned is being very much affected by automation today. So the immediate challenge isn't that all jobs are going to be eliminated. It's that certain categories of skills and jobs are becoming automated, and therefore the people who make a living on those, they're having a harder time. Their wages and their employment prospects are being pushed down. At the same time, other types of skills are becoming much, much more valuable, and you're getting superstar incomes at that part. So we're seeing this divergence and growing inequality in part, because of technology, there are other forces at work, let me just be very clear. And that's the immediate challenge that we face right now. And so that's why I'm optimistic that we can do things in terms of retraining, re-skilling people, and doing things in terms of inventing new jobs still today. Someday, I think we'll reach that world, the Star Trek economy, where everything is done by the replicator and so forth. But I don't think that's what we're facing right now, and I wouldn't want us to take our eye off the ball about the things that we need to do in 2015 and 2020 to transform the economy. Can you give us concrete examples of what, most of the jobs that could be displaced are more or less in the middle class arena, right? Well, many of them, yeah. I mean, it's more complicated. And I wouldn't want to put it all in one single dimension. In our work, we've looked at a database called Onet, and we've come up with seven distinct dimensions that are important. But for the sake of brevity, I think that many of them are in that category. As Professor Prisariti said, that there are many tasks that involve nurturing, caring, persuasion, interpersonal skills that are very difficult for machines to do quite yet. And there's a big demand for those kinds of jobs. Coaching, I wouldn't want to be at a, I don't think my son would want to be at a football game and have the halftime speech to encourage him, given by a robot, it just wouldn't be the same. And the leader of a company has to be able to inspire her workers and be able to get people to buy into that. And also there's a lot of creative tasks in creating art, writing books and novels, scientific breakthroughs, there's a lot of creativity there. Entrepreneurship is a creative task. Those also machines are very, very bad at this more complex unstructured problem solving. So I think there's lots and lots of things that machines cannot do. There's some that machines can do and we need to reinvent our education. Our education, let's think about it, is mostly focused on teaching people to sit and rose, follow instructions, memorize facts. Now that's what machines are good at. That's stupid for us to have humans do the same things that machines are good at. We should be teaching them those interpersonal skills, the creativity, the things that machines are not good at. I believe they are teachable, but it requires a complete reinvention of our education. But machines can learn much faster than humans. And I wonder if- Not in those categories? Not well, I mean, I will never say never. But the media challenge before us right now is that in those categories, it's very hard to teach a machine to be truly creative. They can find simple patterns. They can recognize things. But to come up with a new business idea, I think that's almost impossible for a machine to do. Mr. Fujimori. Yeah, I can give some of the example of the demand supply gap even today that machine can do a lot of things, as you mentioned, in especially in the corporate. So we don't probably need as much people, as many people as we have right now because of that. But on the other side, there are lack of talents in the society, like elderly care, like a daycare or a childcare. So those care things that are totally lack of talents and supply right now, especially in Japan- But they think it'd be lower paid jobs. That's the problem. So the whole society has to change. So if we know this era is coming, either to a higher degree or to a lesser degree, it's coming. And I think we have to think about the total social architecture or social system where we pay more of those people like elderly care or childcare so that their job is much highly recognized and paid for so that some of the jobs are lost in the corporation because of the machine learning can switch their job to those things that are highly valuable to the society. And I think government has to think about today for 10 years future maybe or 20 years future, but we know that day is coming and we have to take an action right now. It's quite, you know, I mean, you asked what kind of jobs would go with it? I mean, you see them around us all the time. I mean, I can give you an example from our university. So I'm sure this holds for almost any company. I mean, like 20 years ago when I was doing research, maybe 25 years ago. I mean, I'm still doing it. I mean, 25, when I was doing research 25 years ago. We would write something by hand, longhand on a piece of paper and handed on to someone that we used to call our secretary, then, you know, assistant. And then a week later it would emerge as a tight paper. If you were lucky, a week later it would emerge. If you wanted to make an alteration and have it photocopied, you have to wait a few more days and it will involve two or three people. There were actually people who are doing those jobs. Now all those jobs have gone, they disappear. Those are the middle level jobs. The people doing those jobs had education and a lot of them had university degrees. Or if not, they had the one just below the university degree. Those jobs have gone. But at the same time in universities, we had cleaners say that they were coming six o'clock in the morning before we have to clean our offices. Those are still there. That hasn't been mechanized. Whereas computers have displaced the middle level jobs that the university used to have. They haven't displaced the professors and they haven't displaced the office cleaners and office managers. You know, that's the kind of change that we're seeing on a bigger scale. You wanted to say something? Yeah, because I'm agreeing with Fujimori saying that governments and also politicians should look maybe five or 10 years ahead. I think that's a crucial question right now because governments like myself, who like to get reelected and that that's the kind of being a government and some of these investments, you'll maybe only see the success in five or 10 years, a period of time. So the first thing that government should be able to do is also to confront what's going on, maybe in 2020 or 2025. And that's on a European level. That's a European Union, but it's also on some of the European member states. And when I try to raise a debate about these issues in Denmark, lots of companies are saying, why not focus on tax or why not focus on that? And I think governments and also companies should be able to discuss this with each other. For the side, elderly care workers are low-level workers. Government can decide that's high-level workers if they're skilled. So its social ecosystem can change to absorb those gaps. That's the role of government, it's very huge. To sort of ease the gap that people have to face in adjusting the kinds of jobs that are available, I think Denmark has adopted this system called flex security. Flex security mean very adjustable hiring and firing policy. You have good unemployment benefits and then good training. I mean, how effective has that been for people to change jobs and be able to adjust to the situations in the short run, I guess? Well, that's been a great success for many years. And different governments have also been able to talk to companies and also labor organizations about whether this is necessary for Denmark to have this competitiveness because we are paying quite much money in taxation for this welfare system. Also, like my British colleague just said. So we have... How many years of unemployment benefits can you get? Oh, it depends on how long you have been on the labor market. But you can get about two or three years benefits and have you then also some other benefits you can even have more social welfare. But I think it is crucial that of course, if you lose your job, you should be able to come back to the labor market. And I agree on what Eric has just been saying that we'll be able in Denmark, hopefully in the future, also to focus more on education because education is the future trying to give the unskilled workers a hope and also a possibility to come back to the labor force. And education for me is number one and that will be the link back to companies and also back to the labor market. If I could add that many countries, like we had in Southern Europe in particular, many governments think that if they protect the job, you know, employment protection as they call it, then they're helping the workers. In fact, that's not the case. What the government needs to do is to protect the worker. The worker's income is to find a way of guaranteeing a good standard of living with the worker and leave the job alone. Leave the employer deal with the job because employers are much better at knowing what kind of jobs are good and what's productive, much better than the government. And Denmark probably doesn't, better than any other country in the world. But that's the basic idea. The government gives security to the workers and flexibility to the employer. And that combination is the best one in terms of adoption of new technology and adapting to new challenges in the economy. Now, the challenge the government has to face is how to protect the income of the worker and the living standard of the worker without creating disincentives. In other words, bring the worker back into a job in the way that Minister Postman was saying. And but there's been a lot of research in that field. In fact, my research is very much along those lines. And we do know how to handle it. And again, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, I should say, they are handling it well. They are a good example for other countries to follow. I wonder, I just wanted to introduce a quote from Keynes again. He said that spread the bread thin on the butter to make what work there is still to be done to be widely shared as possible. Which means like, work sharing. People share jobs. Or there's ideas like negative income tax. I mean, what do you think are the effective policies that could enhance decent life, but at the same time, allow people to move on to the next job? Well, I would build very much on what Professor Pizarrelli said, is that we really face a fundamental choice. Do we want to protect the past from the future or the future from the past? And by that mean, do we want to preserve the existing jobs, the existing industries, everything the way it was? And you see companies lobbying the government to be protected. Uber is having a lot of trouble in the United States and Japan, especially here in Europe, to introducing a new way of delivering rides to people. And some of the owners of the taxis and the taxi medallions and the existing services have been very successful in blocking it. We can go through many, many other industries where that's happening. I think there's an instinct for governments to say, hey, we want to preserve these jobs. We want to hang on to the way things they are. But that's always 100% of time a failing strategy. And whatever number of jobs gets automated, that's not where we should be focusing. It's actually good and productive for jobs to be automated. What we need to be focusing is on inventing those new jobs and making it easier to discover and develop them. And as we do that going forward, we may find that there's more flexible work arrangements. When I talk to some of the people in the so-called on-demand economy, next time you take an Uber, you can interview your driver. I ask, are you being paid more? And many of them say, no, not really. But I'm much happier because now, if I want to work on Saturday morning, I can work. If I want to take off a Friday afternoon to be with my children, because many humans do have children they want to take care of, then they can do that as well. And they have much more flexibility. And it turns out to be a plus for them. So these new ways are being invented that benefit the consumer, benefit the worker, and in that case, obviously, benefit the investors, the founders as well. So that's a possibility. Going forward, I wouldn't surprise me if as our living standards rise, we choose to have much more leisure as John Maynard Keynes suggested. He was a little bit off. And if you follow up on that quote that you were making, he predicted that by our era, people would be working maybe 12 hours a day. 15 hours. 12, yeah, a week, sorry, a week, not a day, yeah. 15 hours a week. Yeah, some of us are working 12 hours a day. Three hours a day, three hours a day. Yeah, so yeah, and he was not right about that. He was pretty much accurate about predicting how wealthy we would be. But I think he underestimated our appetite for consuming a lot of the new things that have been invented. But even holding that aside, it's certainly true that the work piece is much shorter now than it was in 1929 when he first wrote that draft of that, or 1870, it's been falling. And I think that's mostly a good thing. People can spend more time doing other things. And as long as they are able to have enough income to take care of their basic needs, that's a choice many people will make. There's another argument that if the changes are so fast and that people are not being able to adjust to it, should we control the pace of the innovations? Should regulate? Probably not. I don't think that's a good idea to control the pace of innovation because I don't know what the side effects are from that. And I don't think that it's a reasonable way to control the pace of innovation. How exactly to make that happen. It's better to let innovation take. But do you want to keep automating everything and bringing, you know, taking over? Yes. As long as we do the other things. So let's just focus, as I was saying, on protecting the future from the past and have that. And look, what are we talking about? We're talking about a world, let's just be very clear, a world with a lot more wealth and a lot less work. Shame on us if we think that's a bad thing. I mean, that would be, that's just weird to think that that's a bad thing. It should be a good thing to be able to have more wealth with less work, but we have to do it in a way that we distribute things equitably. It's scaring everybody. Understandably, because right now, our current system isn't letting people share it. It's been benefiting the few, not the many, but it doesn't have to be that way. That's not, there's nothing fundamental baked in. Those are some societal choices that we can make. All right. Well, I should let you say that. Shame on us if we don't do anything good thing. And shame on our politicians if they are not brave enough and get up and say that and say, this is what I'm going to do and vote for me. This is a group that can influence that. But, you know, most of the government today tends to block the new things coming in. So I would go the other way. The government should accelerate even those new things coming up and disruptive technology being replacing existing technology. I mean, you know, most of the countries are tightened much more regulations and they are more protective from those new businesses taking over existing businesses. I don't think it's the right thing to do. So Japan is saying way and the other countries are saying way. I think government should relax all these regulations to allow new businesses to emerge. But Mr. George, isn't it true that some experts say that people who can be hired by the new entrepreneurship are those who are immune to unemployment to begin with and only those who are immune will be hired? Well, I think one technology can help retrain people and also people plus technology can be a very powerful combination. Plus, I think every human being has the ability to be creative and whether it being on entertainment side, crafts, thinking of new ideas, exploring the rest of the universe. So every human being has the capability to be creative. And we are creative when our basic needs are met. And for example, I wouldn't be an entrepreneur if I was worried that if I fail, I will starve and die. If that was the outcome I am facing, I wouldn't dare to be an entrepreneur. I wouldn't take the risk. And I think that's a future that we can give to everybody that people's basic needs are met. And I think they all have the capability to be creative. In Denmark, I think it's leading the way on a lot of this. I mean, what you're describing with Flex Security is a great example of how you can have people moving from job to job but still have that safety neck. I'd love to hear more about that. Yeah, but maybe I'd like to return to Uber because I think that that's a great example because in Denmark we have quite much regulation, I must say, and I'm not in favor of that. But the reason why we have made so many laws and also have so high taxes is the welfare system. But talking about Uber, and I'm in favor of Uber, I think this would be a huge company also in Denmark in the future. But when I'm talking to taxi companies and then they ask me, how can you make sure that Uber also would pay tax because they're not a part of the system because it's ordinary people driving around. Nobody would control if they're paying taxes. So there'll be a huge discussion in Denmark how to secure that the new ways of living, that they will also be a part of the welfare system. You know, I had a conversation with some of them and they were talking, in some countries, Denmark is not so much one of these, but some countries is mostly a cash economy and people pay their taxi drivers with cash. And do they pay taxes? No, they don't. But when they go with Uber, they have no choice. They pay with a credit card, all that's recorded. So in many cases, it's bringing it into a part of the economy where the taxes can be paid. So in that sense, it actually could be helping on that dimension. I think in Denmark, people probably already are using cards anyways. Yeah, the question is, which creates the more jobs? You know, protect taxi drivers. Or if you open up, you create probably 10 times more jobs. But I'm not protecting them. I'm just trying to give you some dilemmas in Denmark about this issue, also concerning Airbnb, that has been a great success in Denmark, a huge success worldwide. But of course, now hotels and that kind of companies are coming to me saying, oh, it's not a fair competition because they don't have the same regulations that we have to fulfill. I wonder if there's possible to have innovation that can collaborate it with the human sort of aspects that the humans are good at and amplify that at the same time, allow the innovation to move forward, to bring those qualities of human talent and robotics together. I mean, do you see such sort of entrepreneurship rising or possibilities? I think that's a great thing for us to focus on. There's a tendency to focus on machines substituting for humans, but machines can also complement humans. And many of the great technologies, I mean, think of when airplanes were invented. Before that, there was no need for pilots. But to fly an airplane, you need a pilot. And so that became something that augmented our ability. We couldn't fly before. Now, with a machine and a human together, we can fly. So that's impressive. Going forward, there are things. I was talking to some people just earlier today about using Google Glass and to have what they call augmented reality, where it can give you guidance so that if you are a plumber or you are repairing a car or you're doing surgery or whatever, it can overlay some of the guidance so that you do things correctly. Even nurses may be able to do things that they previously weren't able to do, new sets of skills by having the machine augment them. And instead of replacing labor, it makes labor more valuable, allows workers to do new things. And there are many other examples where machines are complementing humans. And the more we see of that, the more we'll see wages going up instead of down. Can you try to, should we try to sort of have policies lead towards that than just automating? It's difficult. But let me just, in terms of the policies, I think one of the things we do right now is we tax labor very heavily. And so if you're an entrepreneur and you have $2 billion ideas and you're trying to decide this billion-dollar idea or that billion-dollar idea, this is a problem a lot of people have in Silicon Valley. Then the way it currently set up is if one of them hires thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers, there's a huge tax burden associated with that. There's a whole set of taxes that are associated and benefits and so forth. If the other one requires no workers, then you don't pay those taxes. So the government right now has their thumb on the scale saying, we're going to penalize the business that creates a lot of jobs and not the other one. And so that's probably not what we want to do. If anything, we'd like to do it the other way around with say like an earned income tax credit, the rewards people for working and creating jobs. We can also do things in the private sector. At MIT, we have created something we call the Inclusive Innovation Competition, where we are launching now and the winners will be announced in September. People who got companies and innovations that are using technology to create shared prosperity as opposed to narrow prosperity. And we think that by spurring more innovators and more entrepreneurs to do that, we'll invent a lot of new ways of doing that. Just as the DARPA Grand Challenge invented, helped invent the self-driving car, we're trying to do that for business models. So now, on the taxation, I mean, I was taking it away a little bit from our main topic, but switching from labor tax and income tax to consumption tax would deal with the problem. And it's not difficult to monitor your consumption tax. You know, just like now, we declare our income and we pay tax on our income. We'll declare our savings as well and we'll pay tax on the difference between income and savings as a consumption tax. Mr. Fujimori, you've been talking about we should deregulate and try, be able to try to incorporate innovations. Other than that, what should corporations start thinking about with regard to this employment? We have to, you know, we talk a lot about retraining. And retraining is responsible for the cooperation. If we know the future, and I think we're almost crystal clear that we know the future, that's what we're talking about, that we have to start to retrain the people. And also, we have to work with the government to really create the future talent to be more adapted to the future trend. So if we need more digital science or cognitive science that we have more education to generate those people as opposed to the traditional electrical, mechanical engineering, which is not gonna be a major force in engineering side of it. So the education, but what the corporate can do is to retrain them to be more innovative, to be more creative so that a creativity and innovation can match with the technology advancement that Dilip and their work has been talking about. Eric, you talk about in your book that communities where people are working are much healthier. Although we've been talking about what's wrong with more and more wealth with less and less labor. But communities tend to be much more healthier if people are working. Yeah, this is one of the things that concerns me. Voltaire put it very eloquently. He said, work solves three great ills, boredom, vice and need. Now we've been mostly focusing on the third one, the need that work will provide income. But it's also a way of giving people a sense of meaning and keeping them out of trouble. And the data show, I was very influenced by Bob Hutnam, a sociologist at Harvard, who described that when communities lose work, you see drug use go up, alcoholism, teen pregnancy. There's just a whole set of negative social indicators as people lose faith. And perhaps the most disturbing one I just saw just came out a couple of months ago. Ann Case and Angus Deaton did a study looking at what was happening to the mortality rates of lower and middle skilled white Americans, especially males. And while mortality had been improving for everybody for most of the century, about 15 years ago, it started getting much worse for that particular group. And it's not just general mortality, it's specifically suicide, alcoholism, drug use, liver failure, things that indicate that maybe these people are feeling very depressed, perhaps in part because their job prospects are getting worse. I have a comment on that. That's a study of the society as it exists now where the majority of people are employed and the minority are unemployed and they feel left out and they will feel depressed because socialization is part of employment. We also go to office to meet people and have social life. And the social life is tied very closely to employment right now. There are cases where some Greek islands why I read about where people work much less and they spend more time on social life. And if majority of people are doing that, maybe the adverse effects of not having to work will go away. I think it is connected to the social interactions. The more social interactions we have, healthier we are. And probably currently the unemployed are left out of the social interactions. I can add more on the diversity side of it. Especially in Japan and in some of the countries there was still not accelerating this diverse culture. But if the productivity goes much higher and let's say anybody can do the work the same work in like a 60% of what they spend today, they can more focus on childcare. They're more focused on what they can do together to generate more population. That would help the accelerating diversity as well as maybe for Japan declining population. So I think it's a good thing. So I think we have to think about sharing prosperity also, right? And this is where government has the very active role to play. There's no other way of doing it. Well, the session is on a world without work. So I'd like to ask the panelists, what's going to be determining whether or not we will have a world without work or not? Anybody want to go? What's going to be the determining factor? Well, let me tell you what it's not going to be. It's not technology. It's our choices of how we use the technology. Technology is and always has been a tool. We have more powerful tools now than ever before, which means we have more power to determine what our future is going to be. And we should never forget that, that ultimately the choice is in our hands and it's going to be the choice of the politicians and the people who elect them and the people who influence them, many of them at Davos this week. So let's just remember that ultimately it's our choice, not something that happens to us externally. It's our choice there. Technology will probably, in high productivity, will probably give us fewer hours of work overall, but not necessarily fewer employment. I mean, we're saying about the Netherlands. They have, if you look at annual hours of work that are performed in the Dutch labor market, you'll see that it's one of the lowest in Europe. Their employment level is one of the highest. They found a way of indirect sharing that labor and it's also one of the countries that shows one of the highest job satisfaction levels in service they're doing. This is one way of sharing work and in fact I'm very disappointed to see a lot of the American literature. Recently I was reading a book by a very successful startup in California, criticizing Europeans for being so lazy they take six weeks vocation and they only work, you know, 35 hours a week. But in fact that's the future that's what ensures that we're sharing prosperity. Okay. Well, on that note I'd like to thank all the panelists. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.