 Oh wait, thanks. Appreciate the call. I'm going to take one more call and then we're going to go and discuss kind of the macroeconomic issues. Hi, you're new on Book Show. Who's this? Good afternoon, Mr. Roach. I'm enjoying your show and I'm a long time fan of that brand, despite being 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 as humans just sit around and chill. Is that fair? Alright, great. I don't know who that was, but that was the coolest call I've ever got. Alright, so the robots are complaining because they're going to be taxed. Yeah, I wonder if that's Jonathan, I don't know. 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 do 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 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 will kind of resolve 200 years ago and that we know the answers to and there's no question that for example, the 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've answered 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 going to develop, how it's going to evolve. And something that is on top of the hysteria that's involved with trade and regular automation, now robots. And what are you going to get? You're going to get much worse I think. And this is going to become politicized and it's the Luddites are going to 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 going to 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, have always complained that no matter how much success automation has had, no matter how much progress automation has made, it seems like there are always Luddites and there are always people who reject that and abandon that. So we're talking robots today, we're talking this trend, but I also want to 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 want to take kind of a macro economic perspective, but then much more importantly, I want to 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 timescale, 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 going to change your life. Robots are going to change your life unless you're in the verge of death, unless you're going to die in the next 10 years, robots are going to 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 going to 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 going to be really, really cool. 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 going to do and they can't think of what they could do and they're unemployed or they're undemployed or they're partially employed and they're just frustrated by the world and it's machines and it's Chinese and they 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 19th century. This is exactly what kind of the existentialist 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 in order 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 entitlements. And it used to be said and people understood the world was necessary to survivors to use their mind to use their reason to think, to innovate, to be entrepreneurial at whatever level you can do it. It will ever, ever you can imagine. But not to sit around and bitch and complain and moan and demand and have your hand out, but actually, 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. There's a, you know, 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 will guarantee you an income. So if you don't want to be ambitious, if you don't want to retrain, if you don't want to reskill, we are not going to penalizing you, we're not going to penalize you for all that. You're still going to get a basic universal income. You're still going to 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 going to create and build something. We're going to 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 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 intellectuals response to it. If you go back to the intellectuals back then, you know, even even some of the industrialists themselves who who are panicking and were worried about about what they were doing. And just like today, you've got the Elon Musk's 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, well, you know, is is 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 going to fail again. And why are they going to fail? They're going to fail, because there's no limit to human needs and human wants, you know, 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. You know, imagine the day where we have an entire tourism industry built on going into space. And they 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, you know, I don't have a good enough imagination for it. But it's just a limit of the human mind of the 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, 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, 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, you know, 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, just as reliable, probably much more reliable than any pilot would be. Right? A lot of tax preparation today is 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 they can see finer, the finer details within an x-ray within a CAT scan than a human eye can see. Right? So, so you know, jobs today, the human do, but they're gonna, 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 relatively easy into an 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 are going to 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? The robots can do. Very, very fine, very, very like nanotechnology type things. Like, you know, you couldn't build a 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, they're going to be so many things that we 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. You know, the AI, you know, what's called artificial intelligence, their ability to analyze these vast quantities of data, the ability to, to, to, you know, to map the human genome, the ability to, to simulate different things around the human genome and understand what all these genes actually do. You know, once we get big data in it, well, we have big data, once we improve the tools to analyze them. So the ability to do more things. So one, robots are going to take our jobs to robots are going to do jobs that we can't even imagine today, robots are going to do them, not us. Right? Now, that is probably going to require new jobs on our behalf, right? So you know, there are certain, there are certain tumors that are removed today by robots. You know, robots drive carts on Mars. They couldn't have patterns on fabrics automatically that you know, 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.