Name: Federico Pistono at TEDx Vienna - Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK
Uploaded: 2017-08-09T12:00:21.000Z
Duration: 17 min 24 s
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TEDx Vienna. X= independently organized TED event

Hello everyone.  Hi, welcome. How are you doing today? Good?

Tag questions

Well, let me fix that for you. I'll talk about jobs.

Can I have please a quick show of hands? Raise your hand

if you either work or know somebody close to you

How about driving: That's trucks, delivery, buses, taxis, anything.

No one? No one knows anyone who works... Ok, good.

Secretaries, real estate, accounting, retail, manufacturing, journalism...

Ok, let's say it's about 70% of you. Good.

This is how I was greeted by the establishment of economists

about four years ago, when I first started thinking about these issues.

At that time, I helped start an organization called the Zeitgeist Movement,

and we were thinking of ways on how to build a better society.

At that time, nobody took us seriously, but things have changed now.

What changed? Well, very few people are laughing.

[In] 2009, Martin Ford comes up with [book] 'The Lights in the Tunnel',

where he paints a picture of an increasingly automated economy:

Lots of jobs are being replaced by machines,

[In] 2011, two MIT economists have pretty much the same thesis.

So, let's look at the evidence for this. Shall we?

Kodak, the once undisputed giant of the photography industry,

had a 90% market share in the US in 1976.

By the year 1984, they were employing 145,000 people, and in 2012,

they had a networth of negative $1 billion when they went bankrupt.

the importance of exponential trends when it comes to technology.

On the other hand, Instagram, a digital photography company,

[in] the same year (2012), had 13 employees;

and they were sold to Facebook for $1 billion.

This is kind of ironic because Kodak pioneered digital photography.

They actually invented the first digital camera

when they came out in 1975 with a 0.01 Mpix digital camera,

but they thought it was a toy and they didn't pay attention,

so that's what happens with exponentials.  We don't pay attention.

Let's play a little game with you.  Let's be a more interactive school: 30 Steps.

Imagine I take 30 steps lineary: That's one, two, three...

How about if I take 30 steps exponentially? 2,4,8,16...

By the way, this is not the scale.  The Moon is much further away

and back, and I still have enough steps to circle the Earth

That's what exponential means. How do I know this?

Foxconn [is] the world's largest manufacturer of electronic components.

They make pretty much anything, so if you've got something on your lap

or in your pocket that makes noises and is blinky and bright,

and it's probably tweeting right now, they made it.

It's a multinational corporation worth $100 billion,

What are they doing? They're automating, of course.

In fact, they are about to deploy an army of 1 million robots

to 'cut rising labour expenses and improve efficiency'.

Canon is doing the same, going fully automated very soon.

Lots of other companies are following.  Now, what if Walmart follows?

[It's the] biggest multinational corporation in the world, employs 2.1 million people.

Well, they can't, right? They don't have the technology to do that.

They most certainly do.  Amazon knows this very well.

This is a graph made by fellow-author Andrew McAfee from MIT.

As you can see, profits and investments are all going up and up and up

for corporate investments and multinational corporations;

but the red line, which is the employment to population ratio

and we both agree that when it comes to automation,

You know, the futuristic car that drives itself without a human driver.

I was inside, this is me at NASA a few months ago,

and it's a pretty neat piece of technology.  They have all sorts of sensors,

lasers, GPS, and machine learning algorithms,

drives itself.   It's safer, better than any human driver, doesn't get tired,

follows every street rule, never crashes, never breaks any rule whatsoever.

Basically it just works, and it's better than humans.

Problem is, 3.6 million people in the US alone

work driving, meaning they drive for a living.

[In] Austria and Europe, they have very similar numbers.

I think these people might be affected by this kind of technology, don't you?

Accounting, retail, manufacturing, translations;

Journalism, as the Wall Street Journal puts it

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Federico Pistono at TEDx Vienna - Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK

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