Chapter 1: What does AI promise for the future of work?
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It has taken a job that would take months to do, and it can basically do it in an hour. And I said, we've got to get food delivered by a robot.
My name is Jake, but perhaps better known as RizBot. It's nice to meet you.
When you were a kid, did you daydream about the future? I thought it was gonna look like the Jetsons. Flying cars, video phones, robots to do our grocery shopping. Well, we're still waiting on those flying cars, but video phones are here, and so are the robots. In Austin, Texas, they're sort of everywhere, rolling down the sidewalk on their way to deliver food.
You'll also see autonomous cars on the street, and AI is even showing up in city government.
Us being able to better have an idea of where we need to deploy our firefighting assets, as well as being able to get warnings to people about, yes, fire, but also the smoke patterns that can go much bigger and broader than the actual fire does.
Daniel Collado works for the city's Department of Organizational Excellence, and he says AI is cutting through red tape and making things way more efficient.
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Chapter 2: How are robots currently being integrated into daily life?
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It's explain it to me. I'm JQ. And the International Monetary Fund estimates that AI could impact 40 percent of jobs around the world. And that number looks more like 60 percent in what it calls advanced economies like here in the U.S. If that turns out to be true, what will the future of work look like? UVA's Anton Kornick says there are clues in our past.
From a big picture economic perspective, you can say work as we have it today didn't even really exist before the industrial revolution. Because before then, the most important factor of production was the land that people worked in order to produce the food that they needed. And all of a sudden you had these new technologies that didn't rely so much on land as they relied on machines.
It started with spinning and weaving in the textile sector, but then soon we had the steam engine and electricity and so on. and what that implied was that what was really scarce in the economy the land wasn't as important anymore and the new thing that you needed to produce in addition to the labor that people had to put in were machines that you can easily copy and reproduce.
So you could easily build more spinning wheels, more weaving machines and that meant that there was nothing holding back production and that meant that we could suddenly produce a lot more because that bottleneck of land was overcome.
And in some sense, you can see that's the main reason why today people in advanced economies are something like 20 times richer on average than they were before the Industrial Revolution.
What did that mean for workers at the time, though? I imagine that transition wasn't easy.
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Chapter 3: What examples illustrate AI's efficiency in urban management?
In some sense, you can say the industrial revolution has kind of by accident created the system where our labor became more and more and more valuable because we were so scarce. And that has kind of underpinned all this material progress, all this increase in well-being that we have seen over the past 250 years.
But once the AI revolution really hits, there is no guarantee that we can earn a decent living based on the value of our labor anymore. I do believe that we are going to need a new system of income distribution at that point.
For example, universal basic income, compute allotments that everybody essentially gets a certain amount of computational power allocated that they can then either use or sell off. People are also talking about job guarantees. There's a whole range of options out there. From a big picture perspective, the primary concern has to be that we'll find some solution.
Because as you say, if labor does get significantly devalued by this technological change, And at the same time, we have much more abundance in the economy. It would be such a failure if we don't use that additional abundance to make sure that nobody's left behind.
So when the AI revolution arrives, what will we do with all that time? That's next. I'm JQ, and this is Explain It To Me. We're talking about our AI future, which, for a lot of us, is already here.
We have been using AI recently to basically read and summarize hundreds of pages long documents that we need. And it has taken a job that would take months to do, and it can basically do it in an hour. I've done the all-American task of pretending to be busy.
My fear is that, much like every other technological innovation, is that instead of working less and having more leisure time, we are just going to keep working the same amount and be expected to do even more.
One of the things that being busy and having a full life gives you is purpose. And we have a lot of time on our hands and we find ways to fill it, but those ways aren't as meaningful without the purpose that busyness gives you.
So if AI really does change the way we work, does that mean we'll have more time to do what actually fulfills us? That's the question I asked Tom Waite. He's a senior writer at Dazed and reports on the intersection of culture and tech.
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Chapter 4: How can AI transform our personal lives and responsibilities?
James Smith, who was an academic and an author of a book called Work Won't Work, kind of threw his banner in the works with this idea. Because he mentioned that people at the beginning of the pandemic had all of these great ideas about what they were going to do, get fit, have new creative outlets. And then his opinion was...
I think what most people did was just game and post and doom scroll and binge watch and cultivate their mental illnesses.
Which is like, it's a very harsh way of putting it maybe but I think yeah it does speak to the idea that like the fantasies did not always kind of match reality.
Okay, that's fair. But I still get the sense that you're pretty optimistic about how this could play out. So if AI abundance works the way people hope it will, what would a world with less work look like in practice?
I think we can still do the work that we are doing today without maybe the pressures of having to constantly monetize that work. I certainly would still write if I wasn't paid to write and if it wasn't my way of kind of like paying my rent.
I would still write because I value communicating with people and having that kind of like relationship that you have or discussion with other writers or with readers. And I find a lot of value in that work, enough to do it without a financial incentive. And I actually think I would have a lot more freedom as a writer if I didn't have to fit the specifications of the market.
And I think when I speak to a lot of artists, they say the same thing. A lot of artists are stuck in this cycle of having to Either create work that fits the market or even create content online that stops them from creating work in the studio because they have to do the work of marketing themselves constantly in order to sell what few paintings they then have time to kind of sell.
actually create and they would have so much more freedom and opportunity to do real meaningful work I think if they didn't have that like imperative to make money from it all of the time.
I know it's very unhealthy for us to be defined by our work But I also recognize that work can be something that gives our life purpose. And, you know, I think that's a cross beliefs. Capitalism, of course, thrives on it. But Marx argued that humans are productive by nature. Work doesn't have to be a bad thing, right?
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