Zack Kass

I think we are...

actually missing the red herring and so much of what I make in the book, which is, and this will sound callous to some people, certainly those who have lost their jobs, but I have to say it anyway from an academic standpoint.

The longshoremen who went on strike declaring that automation harms families and robots don't pay taxes, that's what their picket signs read, were all able to acknowledge when I interviewed them that the world would be cheaper if we automated shipping.

And what we all forget as we have these debates about our job displacement is that we are all descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our economic benefit.

And we never pay them a second thought.

We don't think about what they went through in order for us to arrive at this moment.

Moreover, we actually wander the earth basically all day asking, when is this good or service going to be better, faster, or cheaper without realizing what we're asking is, when is a human going to be extricated from the manufacturing of this good or service?

And we don't ask that question because we're jerks.

We ask that question because we are rational economic actors conditioned to believe that everything should get better, faster, cheaper all the time thanks to technology.

And my argument is that automation is actually going to be one of the great boons, like a massive wave of job automation is going to be an economic boon that we can't even imagine.

And the problem is not going to be that there is not more and better food on the table.

The problem is going to be that people can't clearly say, this is who I am.

That actually what we're facing is not a job displacement crisis, it's an identity displacement crisis.

that at least a generation and maybe two will have to extricate the purpose and identity from work, which has been ingrained in us for thousands of years.

To such an extent that the two most common last names in the United States are Miller and Smith, because we used to name ourselves after our professions.

And I remind people of this not to sound like a jerk when they say, well, whose job is gonna automate?

Because I don't wanna say, well, yours, thankfully.

But everyone, it turns out, is wandering around right now, wondering when everyone else's job is going to automate, just not theirs.

Because they know that the world would actually be a whole lot better if taxes were easier to do.

So the accounts got automated.