James Manyika

What we actually had was the number of bank tellers in the US economy had actually grown since the early 70s to about 2006.

And that's because the demand for bank tellers went up, not on a per-bank basis, but on an economy-wide basis, because we ended up opening up so many more branch banks by 2006 than we had in 1968.

So the collective demand for banking actually drove the growth in the number of bank tellers, even though the number of bank tellers per branch might have gone down.

So that's an example of where a growing economy can create its own demand for work, back to this virtuous cycle that I was talking about, as opposed to the vicious cycle that I was talking about.

So this phenomenon of

jobs changing is an important one that often gets lost in the conversation about technology and automation and jobs.

To come back to your original question about substitutes, we shouldn't just think of technology substituting for jobs as the only thing that happens, but also that technology can complement work and jobs.

In fact, one of the things to think about is, particularly for

AI researchers or AI people who develop these automation technologies, I think on the one hand, while it's actually certainly useful to think of human benchmarks when we say, how we build machines and systems that match human vision or human dexterity and so forth, that's a useful way to set goals and targets for technology development and AI development.

But in an economic sense, it's actually less useful because it's less likely to lead to technologies that are more substitutes because we've built them to match what humans can do.

Imagine if we said, let's build technology machines that can see around corners or do the kinds of things that humans can't do.

Then we're more likely in that case to build more complementing technologies and substitutive technologies.

I think that's one of the things that we should be thinking about and doing a heck of a lot more to achieve.

Your observation makes sense.

I don't know if I fully share it, but just to back up a step.

Yeah, so if you ask me over the next few decades, I mean, our research has looked at the next couple of decades.

If you generalize over the next... Because others have looked at this too, by the way, and come up with...

obviously slightly different numbers and views, but I think they're generally in the same direction that I just described.

So if you say over the next couple of decades, what do I worry about?

I certainly don't worry about the disappearance of work, for sure.