 We're back. We're live. I'm Dave Bydel. It's the two o'clock rock here in likable science and our host and Co-contributor in this sense. Okay, this Ethan Allen. Hi, Ethan. Good to be here again today. We love seeing you on Fridays every Friday at 2 p.m. So we chose this discussion off an article that appeared In the New York Times this morning and it's a reflection on President Obama's farewell And I forget the title of the oh the title of the article was a darker theme in Obama's farewell Automation he said can divide us It's very true and and we're titling the episode here today as will automation Divide us and it's a follow-up in a large sense to our show was it last week on late December late December Which was actually pretty popular on on artificial intelligence That was an important discussion I thought and this is an important discussion to follow it and Somehow the notion of artificial intelligence and the notion of technology dividing us They're related and fact they're related to a lot of things in fact It's not just coincidental that President Obama would talk about it in his farewell because it is central to I Believe what happened in the election? It is central to the polarization We see in the country right and it speaks volumes about our efforts to deal with this new artificial intelligence revolution that is happening now And it's just as profound if not far more profound than the industrial revolution itself I think so this country has got to recognize that and I think that's what he's saying And it's got to deal with it and it's got to deal with it now or it will divide us right in fact Inarguably one could say it already is dividing us look what happened in the election right bubbles and you know polarities and disparities Right, and it was largely You know a whole lot of the voters who voted for mr. Trump were Less educated and lived in areas that were essentially socio economically depressed that where technology had sort of bypassed them in some sense Taken away a lot of jobs And not replaced them with anything good and these people were already Disaffected with the Status quo. Yeah now that's interesting because if you treat this election as a mandate and he treats it as a mandate for everything He ever argued right I find mind boggling You know whatever he said it must be right because he got elected even though, you know the popular vote did not elect him That's scary, but I think what we have is we have You know a large number of people who have not been swept up in the technology revolution Who cannot do technology on you know consumer products who don't know about technology as it is unfolding in industry or in government? And they're like on the other side of that coin and that means that they are not as marketable not as appealing and attractive in the job market Right and furthermore that the people who know how to do that stuff The machines that come and can do that stuff without human intervention. They're just placing all those jobs, right? So it's not a matter of China, you know doing manufacturing in lieu of American manufacturing It's really much more important to the economy that we do not have a trained workforce, right? Right and we've been developing automation our government supports it has thrown large amounts of money at it It's arguably made us a much more productive nation and yet the downside is yes There are people who haven't sort of been displaced by it, you know just Yeah, and this goes down to the education system exactly, you know I guess you'd say that you can find in general better education in larger cities and on the coast Sorry, that's the way it is and it's the same education system that You know has has essentially given Donald Trump his mandate and Does not understand for example global diplomacy or things like that that education system is the same system that did not teach The red states exactly how important technology was and how they really needed to make an effort and spend some money and time To get current than what the technology is, right, right, but the technology I mean more and more it's it's such a part of our lives now that you cannot afford to ignore it I mean you can't just sort of pretend it's Not they are world that we can somehow dial the clock back to the 1950s or whatever you're trying to do indeed But but we have we have ignored it. Well, we as a country have ignored it I mean for example, and this is really really interesting in the article The Times article and talk about the fact that we have not we've been spending less money on Technological, you know post post school education now that we did 30 years ago This is incredible, right? You know, we've had so much right in the way of advancing technology, but we are teaching people less about right How could this be yeah when the need for it is just exponentially greater than it was right yeah Yeah, and what that the danger course of that is exactly what you were talking at the start is there's going to be a small cadre of people who benefit immensely from this and a large much larger group who basically left behind in the dust Yeah, that's a piece on NPR yesterday about that This one woman was arguing for the notion of a class Society we have we have developed not necessarily race although it's certainly related and maybe part of it You know so overlapping issues But she was talking about a class of society But you know what between us just between us Ethan the class society that we should be concerned about are the tech Technological people and the non technological people because if you have technology if you use technology You will have a better life not only in consumer goods, but in making a living and in keeping your job Absolutely, and if you don't have that you will have a much worse life, right? No, you see this in the education system the children who do not have good access to the internet They can't search as well as effectively as broadly for the information They need for their homework assignments for their reports for whatever that they don't have the access to the online tutoring helping systems You know the Khan Academy well, whatever it may be and and they just get further and further behind and government has somehow Skipped up on that we have we have failed nationally, and I'll argue statewide also Nationally we have not seen the risk of having some people in the community fall into the non tech class And if you let that happen over time what happens is you develop these classes and develop a class of people who are poor And underprivileged and simply because they don't train themselves in the modern technology That could help them have a better life and their families have a better life I find it amazing that government in general and nationally and statewide has not recognized this and now they're talking of course about Eliminating the Department of Education perfect There's a solution to that problem back in the 13th century. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a story If I'm sure I'm back in around. Oh, I guess was the late 90s The legislature in its wisdom at the time it had some wisdom Created a program called the What was it the employees training system ETS? I think was the acronym and every man woman and child in the state Would have a lifelong allowance of five thousand dollars To go and train themselves on computer stuff, right? relative to their jobs and You as a result they sprung up all these little computer schools all over the plate little ones And so you can sign up and and go get trained and you know take an hour or two For lunch or whatever it was and you can learn about, you know Some spreadsheet products and word processing products and and help you advance yourself in your job because now you knew more about it Hmm Regrettably this was funded by at least in part by contributions from employers and they didn't like it much And they treated it as a tax and and senator Sam Sloan who's actually gonna be on the show on Monday By the way with with John why hey, I'm gonna be interested in seeing that He opposed it because he thought there was a tax and it was another burden of the state burden on small business and Employers and over time this five thousand dollars shrunk by half and then it got Defunded somehow and then you know as so many programs we know about it withered away for the lack of attention You know, nobody followed on the political will that was established at the at the inception the political will drifted away And the program drifted away and now there ain't no such thing Didn't take long, you know, I mean five or ten years and it was gone gone gone so that Now those schools aren't around much and people who would like to train themselves in spreadsheets and word processes and what have you on office products Really don't don't have the you know incentive to do it. The government isn't giving a nod anymore Employers don't have to make the contribution and people aren't getting trained right. Yeah, it's just an example You know of government not caring and not having you know Not having committed to building a better workforce of people who are more resilient, you know As the as the workforce, you know, must know more technology They don't right and I find it extraordinary in the military now you get trained every day And we have that at Pearl Harbor you can see that in all the bases These guys are being trained in everything all day long training is a really really big thing in the military and For the federal government, I guess mostly We don't have that and most employers are not going to spend the money to train their people And if you ask them they will say on the job you learn it on the job But you've never really advanced beyond the job that way and you don't become resilient in case your job goes away Right, so Hawaii has had a bad experience with this and we haven't learned But I think it's it's emblematic of state government all over the country we and federal government We have ignored the need to retrain our people surprise of surprises China is way ahead of us I think this workforce is better equipped and it's one of the three major recommendations from this White House report that Sort of was the underpinnings for that article was essentially that we must educate people better in Artificial intelligence and automation systems basically They need to learn about this stuff. They need to be the people who can control that technology. Yes Well, you know, I mean they got you know, it's really but it's kind of a bit of a loop may I So you need to know you need to know for your job and it's a simple kind of solution learn learn about this and You've got to get people to understand that their lives will be better even in Tennessee They'll especially in Tennessee, right their lives would be better if they have some training in this kind of stuff But then how do you do that? How do you do the political will? How do you give the governmental nod? How do you do incentives from all sides employers employees? Everywhere we should be on a national You know a national program right to raise up the level of tech knowledge, right and that's part of think tech, isn't it? Right, right. It's like there should be a war on ignorance or an ignorant And but this ignorance is a money. It's a directly related to your economic condition Absolutely, and whether you are in one part of the class the clear non-tech class You know going downhill or the class that knows technology and that it's going to make money, right? So you're looking for a reason for the disparity Either politically or economically or you know philosophically as we've seen in this election This is a big factor that the country has not kept up. Yeah, so the solution You got any ideas? Well, I mean the three simple solutions outlined in in this article were essentially You know one the government has to continue to invest their artificial intelligence and automation and be sure the good stuff develops Aren't you worried about automation? It takes jobs. It also creates jobs I know I think it's again like any technology. Yeah, we use for good. The second part is this education we all need to keep educating a broad swath of the public to move it ahead and Three recognize that this kind of change is going to be very dramatic There's gonna be who get did you say painful? I thought you said I said dramatic, but I can say dramatic I'm saying pain. Yeah, it's gonna be painful to some people particularly and we need to take care of those people be sure as they're Comfortable job drops away that they get the appropriate retraining so they can join this generation again, you know They'll learn some new thing or they get in some sense You know it gets made up to them that they don't you know if they have to go off and learn a new field They can do that. Yes, right and that's what we've got to talk about right after this break Ethan When we come back from this break, we're going to examine how those three things that Ethan mentioned can play You know they play together and how they are. Yes, we can do something about them. Yes, we can may I take a phrase? And furthermore we we have to be concerned about where they can be most appropriate how we can use technology Not only to make give people a better life to train them We have the technology to train and we're gonna talk about that too. We'll be right back after this break Hi, I'm Marianne Sasaki and I'm here today to tell you about the women's March on Washington on January 21st It's an incredibly significant march in which all both men and women are gonna stand up for women's rights Women's reproductive rights and all the rights we've accrued over the past 40 or 50 years There's also going to be marches in each city on each island is one in Oahu I urge you to join a march and stand up for women's rights So all this hacking has become a major topic I'm Andrew the security guy join me on Hibachi talk and learn a little bit more about it I have my friend Gordo and my puppet buddy Angus. Check us out on Fridays at one o'clock. I'm think-tech Hawaii Aloha, my name is Danelia D-A-N-E-L-I-A And I'm the other half of the duo John Newman We are the co-hosts of keys to success which is live on think-tech live streaming network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. Aloha We are back not only we're back, but we couldn't wait to get back We're bursting with ideas here You know the prop we can't go back to the 13th century in the 21st century doesn't work either internally I mean domestically in the country and it certainly doesn't work as against the world But it's learned largely from us about technology and is using technology and advancing with that You know my mother used to say thank God you live in the best country in the world Well, am I sure about that now? No You know, I think we've got it. We've got to get aware. We've got to raise up on technology our own technology The things that we invented and so how do you do that now? Well, some people are really terrified the technology will take their jobs Let's take a case study about the coal miners that Donald Trump has been encouraging so much He says we're gonna you know protect your job. We don't care about climate change We're gonna use coal and you guys can dig coal What an incredible statement because coal mining is very dangerous, right? The other thing about coal mining and this is really, you know a case study point I think about coal mining is its rote work, right? It is the perfect kind of work that should be replaced by technology You know if you hadn't heard we have robots, right? We do really well at robots and chew up rock Chew up rock. Can you imagine a robot going in there instead of a coal miner and taking the coal if you want coal? I'm not sure we do But you can have coal robots doing coal. They don't get black lung disease They don't get the rockstone for if it falls down in their head. It's okay. It doesn't matter 24 hours a day seven days a week So we should be developing robots to do the coal mining not having coal miners tell us not to do technology Yeah, it's back backwards. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's so you know one of the pieces in the New York Times article is that Whenever a job involves rote work, right? It is vulnerable, right and they point out for instance the food service industry is a great example There are these little blips where you see there are these completely automated Restaurants now where people come in they use their phones or iPads to order there. They pick up their food food Pops up in a cubby. They call it a cubby There you go. It reminds me of Hone and Heart at Cafeteria and restaurants back in New York when I was a kid The food would be in a little cubby right in the door and there it was right now But now a machine puts it in the cubby But yeah Why would you you know pay service service staff? When you can do all this with an automated system, there may be a tiny bit more initial investment But basically it works fine. It works great. You don't have to ever pay tips to it You don't have to deal with health health insurance for your workers, you know salaries. Da da da da. Yeah, just it's so yeah It's this this will ultimately sweep, you know sweep instead of paying You know what what are some legislators in the state want to pay $22 an hour for people in McDonald's my god McDonald's can't function that way no mom-and-pop restaurant operation food operation can function that way either the prices are going so high Nobody can afford it or that they'll just close because it doesn't work And so, you know, we don't we don't need to have expensive labor or increasingly expensive labor in restaurants We can have restaurants serve really wholesome food No human hands have soil that are contaminated it and we can we can eat out a lot easier cheaper even Using these machines the problem and I put it to you because you're gonna solve what you're a scientist What happens to the people who used to work in McDonald's what happens? Yeah, and that's this is this that third point. I was saying this for the report white house report pointed out There's always going to be these people get displaced and Part of making the whole AI and automation thing work is to recognize that the people are going to be displaced And you need to do something for those people you need either to give them better unemployment insurance and or Training opportunities that don't just sort of sit there, but training opportunities come to their door basically grab them and say hey Well, here's a brand new career for you. It's kind of you can make more money. You have a more fun work less whatever, you know I'm reminded of Singapore So my wife and I go to Singapore and we take a cab you'll learn a lot of caps And there's a guy in the cab driving the cab and we want to know about him You know and he tells us that he just arrived like a week or two ago from mainland China PRC and he you know, he got the visa to come to Singapore recruits people yeah, they want more population because they believe people are You know great assets and so he got the papers He came to Singapore upon arrival. They gave him a job as a cab driver. Okay upon arrival They gave my house a condo and now he's the owner He's got to pay it off and as an automatic paid deduction and all that to have him pay it off But job house on arrival, you know completely seamless. This is really really good No, no if we're gonna do it right we we can't just disrupt people's lives If we want to train them We have to give them an allowance or an incentive or a combination of allowance and incentive so that they take the time They need to take to get trained that has to be a place in their lives and in their schedule to do that Right, and we can't expect them to be trained in one day and then work, you know in another job the second day We've got to step them up over time. How do we do that? Well again? I mean it's a it is a question of finding sort of match of the person their skills or temperament to the appropriate kind of Technological Challenge, you know Yes, not not everybody is going to be a high-level programmer around build, you know spiffy apps that will sell a million copies No, but people can work in technology on a lot of different levels I mean there are again Technology as an industry basically high-tech AI automation has a whole support structure to that too, you know But what about the people who really? You know don't have the goods so you see that they're they're they're they're gonna be minimum wage their whole lives What do we do with these people? So yeah, I had this weird vision when you when you suggested this topic this morning Here's a whole group of people who work in a factory. Yeah now the machines work in fact Yeah, the energy to run the machine so all the people are sitting there peddling Stationary bike to generate the power to run the machines that were doing the jobs They were doing better than that and they're getting fit Be really healthy, but that doesn't raise the the whole thing We've seen a couple of a couple of times in iteration in in Europe I think in Scandinavia somewhere where you have an allowance You have an allowance, you know to work. They just pay an allowance to live and then one of the It was a city in California contemplating the same kind of thing an allowance, you don't have to work All right, and we think we're gonna have I mean if technology goes the way I think it's gonna go There can be a lot of people who are out of work and we have to take care of them some way out Exactly, and we have to modify this whole thing about social network social support rather Where we we actually give them a life In order to get trained or not so this is I mean one to me one of the really frightening things about this push to repeal Obamacare or nothing to replace it I mean that that trend you can sort of see if you're gonna be displacing workers anyhow you want some kind of Good system in place that's gonna cover everyone so regardless of their situation regardless if they change jobs whatever I mean currently we have such a weird if you think I'm healthcare. It's a weird system You know if I change my job tomorrow, I may have to change my doctors which like makes no sense Yeah, right because this new I'll put your health at risk right exactly exactly, you know You know and again, it's so the medical industry needs to be doing more automation You should you know you go from one doctor to another doctor in the same office complex You fill out the same form multiple times listing all the same information like why isn't that now done? Automated medical medical right exactly, you know But I think you raise an interesting point and that is this whole thing about disruption if I give you a society of 250 million people So I give you a society here may be and I say everybody's got a place somewhere We get we make sure they have a place to live This is important and we should make sure that you can eat and you're you know And we get some health care and all that that's good And this makes the society in general the 300 million people more effective more productive It's all about production right isn't economics all about production Okay, so now we have a productive society But if you take things away and you give you they can't they can't work because they have no home Right, they're sick because you give them no health care. They have no money to eat, so they're starving Um, this this by definition is what I would call disruptive right and if it's disruptive They can't produce so production goes down So it's in our common interest in the common good to make sure that as many people as possible Are producing are in good shape right and if that means giving them an allowance give them an allowance But one thing is you don't take away Elements of their stability right to make them unstable right you don't disrupt their lives Right exactly and some of these things the Republicans are doing are very disruptive to millions of people Yeah, and if that happens the whole country gets disrupted and our Productivity drops and our economy drops Nobody wins. Yeah, I'll tell you something that I've been noticing just you know I read the journal science every week. I say I read I said I would expect nothing less But in the back of it there is their their job section, you know their career opportunities and Years ago when I started reading that was virtually all u.s. Jobs a few smattering of European jobs Some illustrious occasion ones from Japan and all now every week. There are huge sections of jobs in China huge Jobs that you and I could take well I couldn't get a lot of these jobs saying this is kind of thing that they are just and they're multiple It's not just one or two universities not this Beijing University. I mean there are multiple universities There's page after page after page after page after page of the big recruitment pushes that they're all doing yeah It's truly alarming about what what's this all a matter of human resources Having an intelligent trained workforce and that gets me to the part of the show where we connect everything up You're ready. Sure. Okay, light all around. We've talked about artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence is very smart and it can make robots that can you know do amazing things that Where you can give it a mission give the robot a mission and it will do things There was a thing on 60 minutes about swarms of drones All right, so our Computer ability now is way beyond what it was say 10 years ago way beyond so I give you this We have you know x million people say 50 million people who need to be trained really bad for this country remain arguably productive How can artificial intelligence which was the connection we said we'd make here today? Help them get trained Well, yeah, now what you need and what our people are actually trying to work on this are building AI Systems that become good teachers, you know, and that's not as Impossible as it used to seem It used to be that all you could do is program in a bunch of answers and have a very patient tutor You know your computer just wait for your right answer. It would keep telling you know, that's not right It can give you a hint or whatever but now I mean they they can actually build machines that can really Help people learn as teachers in the world that they should be actually engaged with you They should know the level of your comprehension exactly. Yeah with the sensor technology. They can they can read your facial expression Yep, no when you're when you're worried me when you're like, huh, I didn't know you didn't get that let me let's go over another example of it You know, yeah, there's no reason that should not be Absolutely, right. Yeah, that'd be great. I hope somebody's listening out there Happens to be a very good idea the solution to President Obama's problem And this whole thing about how automation divides us is bring everybody in the fold and teach them all the things They have to know and make sure that the educational level is brought up to meet the 21st century. You heard it for me Thanks so much. Oh, hey a pleasure