Chewing the Fat with Jeff Fisher - 8/5/17 - Interview With Nigel Cameron

Episode Date: August 5, 2017

Technology writer and think-tank director Nigel Cameron joins Jeffy to discuss his book "Will Robots Take Your Job?" In the book, Cameron argues it's naive to believe we face a smooth transition. Whether or not there are "new" jobs, we face massive disruption as the jobs millions of us are doing get outsourced to machines. A twenty-first-century "rust belt" will rapidly corrode the labor market and affect literally hundreds of different kinds of jobs simultaneously. Jeffy reaches the conclusion that robots will be taking all of our jobs. Follow Jeffy on Twitter: @JeffyMRALike Jeffy on Facebook: www.facebook.com/JeffFisherRadioFollow Jeffy on Instagram: @jeffymra Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Blaze Radio Network. On demand. The Jeff Fisher Show. Saturday mornings, 9 to noon Eastern. On the Blaze Radio Network. So with the poll on the Glennbeck website, glenbeck.com, does AI make you nervous? 87% of you answered yes. It's creepy and a huge unknown.

And yet we use AI every day, voice technology. It's already in our lives. The military is using it. But we still have people who believe that the collapse is coming and society is coming. We got word from a former Facebook executive saying he believes society will collapse within 30 years as robots put half of humans out of work. Well, the society collapsed with only half the humans out of work? I'm not sure. but I have a book in my hands

Will robots take your job Nigel Cameron goes through the idea and the process of will robots take your job who's looking into it what can happen what we can do about it and what needs to really be done

for the future to you know either make it happen or not make it happen Nigel thanks for joining us on the broadcast today how are you sir great to be here thank you very much So the question, will robots take your job? Before we get to that, you know, so many people, as in the poll,

think that, you know, AI is creepy and a huge unknown, and I'm sure that they're actually, they're not referring to what we all know is under the AI tent. They're referring to, you know, the creepy robot that comes in and says, I want to kill you. you have said that we as here in the United States anyway are far behind the eight ball on preparing the masses for what's going to happen. Is that still true today? Absolutely true. You know, I mean, we had election cycle I sat through every single one of the debates, both sides, the whole lot.

Not one word was said about this question. This is a huge, huge question. Do you believe that How many years? How many years do we have? Well, I mean, there are some big reports out there saying something like 15 years, 25 years. We aren't quite sure. But, I mean, big changes ahead and certainly in our lifetime.

So when let's use the Teamsters, for example. We hear stories all the time about the driverless trucks. And I've seen videos of the trucks actually working. And I see that they've started where they're making. the test runs actually have a human sit in the truck. I mean, that saves the Teamsters job for maybe four years, maybe. After that truck drives accident-free for about two years, the company's going to go, yeah, we don't need you anymore, get out.

Yeah, the thing about trucks is, you know, I mean, they're very expensive things to operate. And so, then often you'll get, you know, 24-hour operation, cut accidents, cut insurance costs, you know, cut environmental issues, lower gas, all that kind of stuff, you know, and cutting it on labor. I mean, it's incredible. We're going to begin with trucks.

I mean, a lot of this stuff we don't know. We don't know whether there will be new jobs or bad. We do know there'll be no jobs driving trucks down freeways. I mean, that's a dead suit, 10 years' time. And I actually talked about this with someone from AFL, CIO. I said, what would you, doesn't it worry you? The teamsters might have zero members. And the guy just said, no, no, it'll all be all right.

I don't understand why people aren't getting worried. I mean, that's a complete dream world that it'll all be all. right. I mean, we should already be... One of the things that really worries me about the truck driving. I mean, this is the leading single occupation for men in the United States. Truck drivers. Right. It's the most popular job.

Yeah, so, I mean, we still need truck drivers. Obviously, we'll still need truck drivers to deliver to places outside of where most GPSs and computer drawn maps have drawn, right? I mean, the highway system is good, and you'll be able to drive for. from one populated area to another populated area, but to deliver the things, you probably will need, still need truck drivers, not cross-country truck drivers,

but you still need delivery people. For the moment, for the moment. Right, yes. Right. But, of course, one thing is leading to another. I know, but even with the driverless cars, and that's coming too, which leads to a whole other topic

right next to the driverless trucks, is that, you know, you're going to end up, the people who are driving are the ones that are the problem, not the computer. Oh, yeah. I mean, one of the things, people often say, well, you know, these are really difficult things. I don't know how computers can be smart enough.

Humans are terrible drivers. We are awful drivers, you know. We kill, I mean, you know, the number of accidents on the U.S. roads is going up. It went up 25% in the last couple of it. 40,000 people killed. We're terrible drivers. It's not going to be that hard for computers to be better than we are.

Right. And so we're the problem. So when, I mean, it won't take long before you're not going to be able to drive for sure inside a city, right, before inside the city limits. Well, at least you'll be paying a premium in your insurance because you'll be a riskier driver than the machines. That's what's going to happen first. Big discounts if you use the machines.

Right. So, I mean, so anyway, once we get outside, I mean, there's so many places in the United States that still want to be able to drive. They're not going to want to give up their vehicles. So, I mean, at first we're talking about, as far as driverless commerce, and delivery trucks and, you know, you're talking about the metropolitan areas, because the people outside of the metropolitan areas, they're not going to want to give up their pickup truck.

They're just not going to want to. I mean, I don't want to. Well, I think a lot of us like driving. I think it's ultimately, it'll be economics, first of all. I mean, insurance rates will change. And then people will, you know, there'll be a new way of looking at this. I mean, for example, if you can get into your pickup and you can still drink, you know. Right.

get in and you can watch a movie, you know, I mean, the content's going to change. I'm all for that. I mean, I took the, I worked in Manhattan for, you know, for a while and lived in Pennsylvania. I took the train in and out of the city every day. And while the train ride itself gets kind of agonizing, I got a lot of work done on the train. I mean, when we moved, when we moved the company to Texas, I had to change the whole focus of how I worked because while I drive to work, that took work time away. It's enormous amounts of time spent commuting, you know. And it's going to shift.

Now, of course, maybe there'll be also new jobs to make up for these jobs, and maybe we'll get used to this new way of working. But, I mean, insurance rates are going to go down. There'll be far fewer jobs, for example, for people in emergency medicine, because there were fewer casualties, you know. I mean, insurance agents, I mean, there are millions of insurance agents. I mean, their retail insurance will basically be over because this will be fleet-based and so on. I mean, what worries me most?

I mean, I think some of the changes will be wonderful. But why is no one up there in the top end of government actually even, talking about these things and what they're going to mean for us. Well, do you think that they will end up, and I'm talking to Nigel Cameron, by the way, author of Will Robots Take Your Job? Do you think that maybe that by not talking about it, they just believe that, hey, we're just going to give everybody a men come and they can just shut up? Well, that's an interesting point.

And interestingly, I mean, people have been arguing this from the right as well as the left for a long time now. The most interesting thing recently was Charles Murray, you know, his big conservative intellectual, made a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, you know, top sort of pro-business think tank, printed it in the Wall Street Journal. And he says, you know, we're going to have to think about a universal income. So we basically pay people whether they work or not. I'm not sure whether that's going to happen.

I mean, I think there are other ways we could do this, for example, reducing retirement ages. But it's certainly a real possibility there'll be fewer jobs. I mean, we've had for a long time, you know, what we call full employment. that basically means anybody who really wants a job can usually get one. That's really what it means. If that ends, we end up with a huge, huge new kind of problem, which is people who really want jobs and are hardworking and want to get jobs, and they're not going to be able to get them.

The government isn't even talking about it. Right. And that's where we're talking about, now, while the income would be, you know, I guess if we're talking about, okay, saying the men come is a good thing, it's a good thing if you take away all the other help that the government provides. You know, so you say, you know, we'll give everybody. You can still work and you can still do whatever you want. We're going to give you so much a month to this is what we believe you can survive on.

And we're going to give you so much a month, but all the other help goes away. People have argued for universal income from both ends of a spectrum. That's the conservative view of it. It doesn't cost us any more money. We just take all the benefits and we divide them all up. And that's the kind of thing that people like Murray want. From the progressive end, it's more we need to add new benefits. And, of course, well, one of the things we just,

don't know is whether all these robot AI stuff will produce far more money, whether ultimately these will be highly profitable things that produce, you know, much bigger tax income for government and so on, so there's more to go around. We just don't know that. Well, I mean, that's why... We have to plan as if that's not going to happen, and that the pie remains the same size. Well, that's what, I mean, Gates was talking about taxing the robots, right? That's what he believes as long as they're going to create more income than we tax them, so we have more tax revenue from that. It's an interesting argument because basically, I mean, what governments do, I mean, you know, we all agree there have to be some sort of tax for something,

and government's basically tax where value is... I don't know that I want to agree with that. I don't know that I want to agree with that, Nigel, but you go ahead. You know, the government's tax where you add value. And if you take away a worker and put it in a machine, and you were taxing the worker previously, it makes sense to tax the machine. That's Gates of view. I'm not sure whether he's right, but at least he's putting ideas out there,

and boy, do we eat ideas? Absolutely. Where do you see, where do you see us at in five years, then 10 years, then 50, 15 years. The next five, you know, we'll triple it out. Five, 10, 15. Well, I think in five years' time, this is going to be a really hard issue. And politicians and other sort of civic leaders who've thought about it will have a big advantage because they find something to say about it. I think in 10 years' time, we're certainly going to be seeing some self-driving trucks and that kind of stuff really happening.

A lot more automation in the home, you know, smart homes, systems controlling all your heating and all that kind of stuff. That's going to be the norm. It almost is now, really. I mean, it almost is now, really. I mean, I guess maybe in the, you know, the masses around the country doesn't have it. But, boy, so many municipalities sure have it. I mean, if you're living in any kind of a city, you have access to so much, so many things like that that it's made life pretty good. I think a lot of things have been creeping up on us, and they're going to come together in much more obvious ways.

Some people find exciting. some will find challenging and will certainly be very disruptive to business because this is going to make big changes in the way in which pretty much everything in the economy operates. I mean, you know, one of the interesting stories recently is, you know, John Deere, you know, the fights with John Deere tractors because, I mean, they're now basically laden down with computer software. Right. I mean, you can, you see the, I love the fields when you go to, you know, Idaho or Utah or

Montana, wherever the giant fields are and you have the John Deer tractors and you see the fields actually plowed in certain geometric forms. That's all computer, man. That's all GPS. It maps out. We can use this much ground, and it goes. It's beautiful. It's amazing.

The accuracy that they have now, and the big fights on now, because John Deer, the farmers can't fix their own tractors because basically all the stuff owned by the company. So they're hacking. They're getting stuff from the Ukraine to hack into their systems. I mean, this is not farming like, you know,

like our grandparents farmed. But now, So, all right, let's say they're doing that. Wouldn't it be better for John Deere just to say, hey, we're now hiring people to fix these, and we'll send them out to your farm. So that's creating new jobs, right? Well, it is. And, of course, they've been what they, what they're always going to have criminals.

There's always going to be people trying to hack and get in. I get that. And whenever you have disruption, you have change. People look for new ways. They look for workarounds. But I think one of the things it illustrates is just how dramatic this is. I mean, nothing was more traditional in farming a generation ago. and now it really is on the cutting edge of these new AI technologies.

And this is going to happen to every single occupation in the country. I mean, it already is, right? I mean, we're talking about robots doing lung surgery. I saw a headline last night talking about the robotics of lung cancer surgery, how it makes it so much, how it's going to make it so much easier. I mean, we're creating robotic legs for paralyzed people. I mean, that's the good side. Right?

I mean, that's the good side. We're extending life. But on the other hand, we're extending life to do what, to sit in a room and wish they had a job? Well, I mean, this is the point. It isn't just people like drivers. I mean, if it's going to be lung surgeons, you know, what are they going to do with themselves? I mean, I think this is what's really interesting about this. It's right across the economy.

It's top to bottom. This isn't just certain kinds of jobs. Everything's going to get easier and cheaper and smarter and therefore require less human effort. All right, so 10 years? I think, I think 10 years, this is going to have arrived. going to be a huge issue. And I just don't know how it's going to happen to our politics, because I mean, I don't know whether this is a GOP issue, whether it's a Dem issue, it's right across the board. It's a new kind of issue. It doesn't really fit left and right. This isn't pro-tech, it's

ultimately how we have an economy in which sort of jobs are people to do. And I don't want to, you know, I know, I don't want to talk about, you know, the one world order, but it's really a global thing. I mean, while the United States can say, hey, we've put, we've stopped work on computers of these particular AI robots because they started to create their own language. That doesn't mean that Japan stop and work on those. It's a huge problem. And the point is it's a global competitive environment. I think one of the interesting things, though, is going to be its countries that really put all the pieces together that will really do well.

People are concerned about the human end of this, about how people need jobs, they want something to do with themselves all day long. It's not just going to be people who go all up for technology who are going to win. And I think this is a terrific opportunity for us to think more about how we want to put the pieces. together. So we automate all we want to automate. But we leave things for people to do. We leave an environment in which ultimately is about people. I mean, technology is all about people. People aren't all about technology. And I think if we get that right way around, I think this gives us economic competitiveness quite apart from anything else. I'm going to leave it at that. I love that. It was optimistic. It was beautiful. I like the

way that sounded. Nigel Cameron, author of Will Robots take your job. Thank you so much for your time, sir. I appreciate it. Great to talk. You too. Nigel Cameron. Will robots take your job? Now basically what he said is we're all doomed.