Scott Santens

And if you look at the history of automation since essentially the invention of the semiconductor, you'll see that our economy has actually grown twice as productive as we were back in the 70s.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, um, and even though we're twice as productive, are we all working half as much?

No, we're not.

Are we all consuming twice as much?

No, we're not like all of this economic growth has actually flowed to the very top.

And most everyone else has seen stagnant wages to the point where it's harder and harder to live the American dream.

It's a, you have to work even more than you did back in the seventies.

You,

Back then, you could even have a one-person, one-worker household, and you could live a middle-class life with a high school degree.

And at this point, you now have to have essentially two earners in the household.

They really need college degrees unless they're working even like three or four jobs.

And so we've seen this economic dream kind of disappear for the American public.

And so this automation just goes right into that because it actually not only does it eliminate jobs, but it also presses down on wages.

That's another effect.

And there's also a skills polarization kind of thing going on

where we're eliminating the middle skill jobs.

So traditionally you can think of this as like the car manufacturing kind of workers who the robots took over and then robots make cars.

You don't need as many workers as you did back then.