Name: 【TEDx】A BIG idea, a bot idea -- How smart policy will advance tech | Albert Wenger | TEDxNewYork
Uploaded: 2017-08-10T15:11:11.000Z
Duration: 17 min 42 s
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they were all developed during an era of scarcity.

Scarcity means that when you want more of something,

And that was always true for physical products,

but it is no longer true for digital information.

That extra view of the funny cat video on YouTube,

And it is that zero marginal cost of digital information

It used to be, for instance, that we would select first,

Now we can publish many, many things, select a few, and edit those.

It used to be that people had to go to investors,

raise money, then make a product and hope that people would buy it.

Now you can present your vision for your product to thousands of people,

to make a product that you know people want.

It used to be that people were very guarded

Now we have open-sourced software, hardware, and even biotech.

These are all inversions, things that are being turned upside down,

because the zero marginal cost of digital information.

And we are just at the beginning of these.

Traditional big publishers still dominate music, movies; crowdfunding is tiny;

But if you take these trends and kind of extrapolate them out a little bit,

what you'll get is a kind of digital abundance.

A world in which we can learn anything we want to online for free.

A world in which all the world's medical know-how

is available to anybody, anywhere in the world for free.

Where you can listen to music, enjoy art, read books online for free.

How? For instance, by 3D printing only products that people actually want.

Also by taking existing things like cars, buildings, lab equipment

and sharing them much more efficiently than we've ever been able to do.

So this is a world that I am very, very excited about;

but we are not going to get to this world simply through more technology.

We are not going to get to this world simply through some businesses

We are also going to need to invert our public policies.

I am going to speak about two examples of such public policy inversions today.

The first is a Basic Income Guarantee, or "BIG";

and the second is the right to be represented by a bot.

And as I talk about them, you may think these are crazy, far-out ideas.

"Hey Congress, we need these as national laws in the US tomorrow."

"These are interesting ideas that we should be discussing."

And more importantly, we should be experimenting with them

Let me start with the Basic Income Guarantee.

Quite a simple idea. The idea that the government should pay everybody

above a certain age, say 16, some amount of money every month or week.

It is called basic because it is supposed to cover your basic needs:

It is called guaranteed because it is supposed to be paid to you

no matter what, no matter your gender, no matter your marital status,

no matter your wealth and, most importantly, no matter what you do.

The inversion is that it used to be that you had to work first

under Basic Income Guarantee you get paid first

It doesn't do away with the labor market at all.

You can still work in a job where you get paid more.

It simply puts a floor under everybody's income.

Now you might say, "Why would we want that?"

Well, because it would let us embrace automation instead of being afraid of it.

I have been around computers for thirty plus years,

and for many decades we've had these promises of artificial intelligence.

But we now actually have major breakthroughs.

And we have machines that can do many of the things

that humans currently do for work and as a source of income.

make a living driving a truck, a taxi, or a bus.

But we also know we have self-driving cars now.

So it is not a question of "if" any more, it is just a question of "when"

some of these jobs will be replaced by machines.

a million people working in legal professions.

But we now have machines that can very efficiently read

through reams and reams of legal documents,

Again it is not a question of "if" anymore; it is just a question of "when."

Now you might say, "Why do we want to embrace automation?"

And the answer is: Because it gives us time!

And time is great in the world of digital abundance.

It is the time you have to watch TED videos.

It is the time you have to make TED videos.

So in a world of digital abundance, we want people to have time,

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【TEDx】A BIG idea, a bot idea -- How smart policy will advance tech | Albert Wenger | TEDxNewYork

ultimately

content

guarantee

basically