Something You Should Know - The Lure of Cheap Crap & Will Artificial Intelligence Take Over Your Job?

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

There is an art and science to flattery This episode starts with a look at how powerful it can be if you know how to give and take a compliment and offers advice on how to execute a great compliment. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evidence-based-living/202109/the-psychology-compliments-nice-word-goes-long-way Americans buy a lot of cheap crap. Knick-knacks, souvenirs, gadgets and who knows what else. What is the lure of this cheap crap? Why are our closets and drawers full of it? That turns out to be a fascinating topic for discussion with my guest Wendy Woloson, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of the book Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (https://amzn.to/3M9M9WM). Listen as she explains what encourages us to buy these things and why they are often so very disappointing. We’ve long heard about how artificial intelligence will replace humans in many jobs. What about your job? Certainly there must be some careers that are immune from this. What are the ramifications of AI replacing workers? That is what Kevin Roose is here to discuss. Kevin is a technology columnist for The New York Times, host of the Rabbit Hole podcast https://rabbitholepodcasts.com/ and author of the book Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation (https://amzn.to/42U861T). Why would it be more dangerous to drive on the day your income taxes are due? Listen as I explain the reason and reveal the other days of the year that are more dangerous than most. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-people-die-in-fatal-car-crashes-on-tax-day-study-finds/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Zocdoc is the only FREE app that lets you find AND book doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance, are available when you need them and treat almost every condition under the sun! Go to https://Zocdoc.com/SYSK and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, the power of giving and receiving a great compliment. Then, why is it Americans seem to love knickknacks, gadgets, souvenirs, and all kinds of cheap crap? Certainly the market in the United States has been the most enthusiastic. We are key purchasers of crap, and we have been over time since the 19th century. I would say that we do crap better than any other culture. Then, some days are more dangerous to drive your car than others. And one is coming up. And artificial intelligence, AI, it will take over a lot of jobs.

Which makes you wonder, what kinds of jobs are maybe not entirely safe, but more safe? I went and asked some of the best AI researchers in the world. And I was sort of shocked by what they told me. They said there are three kinds of jobs that are relatively safe. All this today on Something You Should Know. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets.

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Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I want to start today by talking about the importance of compliments, because it turns out that flattery really can get you somewhere. The art of a compliment is a powerful social skill, and it can generate some significant

positive energy if you do it correctly. According to Psychology Today magazine, you don't need to be an expert on this. You just need to be genuine. The more specific the compliment is, the better. For example, it would be better to say, the way you handled that question at the meeting was brilliant, rather than say, hey, nice job in there. Compliments on appearance are fine. They can make people feel good and put them at ease. If you're the recipient of a compliment, try not to take it for granted. Women in particular often discount a compliment by downplaying it or denying it.

That just sucks the energy away from someone else's good intention. Take advantage of that positive moment. Smile and say thank you and accept the compliment for both your sakes. And that is something you should know. I bet that if I went into your home and looked around, I would find drawers, boxes, closet shelves full of crap. Knick-knacks, gadgets, toys, souvenirs from trips. A lot of cheap stuff that you've purchased over the years. And I'm not being judgmental here, because if you came to my house, you would find the same stuff.

Well, different stuff, but, you know, same crap. Why? Why do we buy this cheap stuff? Why do we keep it? And why don't we ever learn that buying and keeping this cheap stuff is a total waste of money and space? Well, that is a fascinating topic, and one that my guest has researched thoroughly. Wendy Wallison is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, Camden, and author of the book, Crap! A History of Cheap Stuff in America. Hi, Wendy. Glad you could be here. Hi. Thanks for having me.

So, what makes crap, crap? What's your definition of it? To me, crap consists of goods that are cheaply made, made not to last, made of inferior products, and are what I call cynically produced. They often promise more things than they actually deliver and end up disappointing people in the end. So what might be crappy to me isn't necessarily crappy to you. You know, my sense is that we're much more forgiving of ourselves and the crap that we buy compared to like your neighbor buys something and you're like, oh my God, why would he ever buy that crap? But you've got crap that he's probably saying the

same thing about. In my research, I came across people in the 19th century complaining about other people's consuming decisions and the fact that other people didn't know how to spend their money, but they themselves were very good judges of how to spend their money, but they themselves were very good judges of how to spend their money. And I think that's true today too. We can justify our own frivolous purchases much more easily than, to use your word, than we can forgive other people's dubious purchases. And some things, a lot of crappy things are kind of inexplicable. It's really hard to figure out why they were produced, what they're for, why they even need to exist. Beer koozies with boobs on them, plastic vomit, like why do we need this stuff?

Well, clearly we don't, but we have it anyway. So, but why do we have it? Why do we have plastic vomit and crass beer cozies? Why? I'm not sure if I have ever been able to answer the plastic vomit question, but those are like props for humor. And I think we feel sometimes like we need to have these humorous outlets and things like those objects are kind of easy to purchase and they're easy to understand and they're easy to deploy. It's not only cheaply produced, but it's cheap to purchase. So there's very little risk in purchasing these things, even if we only think we're going to use them once. It's easy for

me to take a chance on this thing that might revolutionize my life in some way, and it might not. But if I only pay a few bucks for it, that's no big deal. So when you look back, when did crap start, if there's a starting point? In the United States, I think the first crappy things that I've seen would include costume jewelry, which starts to be produced in the late 18th century. Really? So costume jewelry is the beginning of crap. And then what happens? Very quickly, the cheap goods market expands. A lot of that is because with the lifting of the embargo after the War of 1812, we were importing a lot of goods from Great Britain. Those goods were shut up in British warehouses. Then there was this like pent up surplus. And so British goods were dumped onto American markets in the late 18-teens, 1820s. And a lot of these things were manufactured as

cheap goods, sort of shoddily made, produced goods. And others were things like textiles that had sort of faded over time, books whose pages had gotten brittle, things that couldn't be sold in the British marketplace. So they brought them over here. And Americans loved this stuff. So stuff nobody wanted in Britain fed the desire in America for crap, which makes me wonder, is crap, is the collection, the purchase and collection and storage of crap an American thing primarily? You know, that's a really good question. And I get that a lot.

And it's a question I can't really answer fully. What I can say is that certainly the market in the United States has been the most enthusiastic. Our key purchasers of crap, and we have been over time since the 19th century, and we devote more of our domestic space to our crap and our clutter. Even just if we think about in today's terms, we are the largest consumers of storage units. So I see it as we rent little apartments for our stuff, the stuff that we can't accommodate in our own households. I would say that we do crap better than any other culture. We win the award. There is something about buying crap, particularly like when you go on a trip, like if you go to Hawaii, you want a souvenir of your trip. And one way to get a souvenir of your trip is to buy the key chain or the little hula dancer to hang on your mirror or the coasters that say Waikiki on them.

And they're really kind of lousy souvenirs, and you're probably going to end up throwing them out, but you feel compelled to buy it. Oh, for sure. I mean, that's really kind of the basis of souvenir culture, isn't it? For the most part, we do buy these crappy little mementos of our trip, of this extraordinary time that we've had to bring back to our kind of normal everyday lives to remind us. Yeah, magnets, keychains, funky hats, of course, ironically, usually not made in the place where you buy them. Most of the stuff is made in China, whether you buy it in Hawaii or at Niagara Falls. But that doesn't seem to matter so much as this token kind of being a memory object of our experience. One of the characteristics, it seems to me, of crap is it's always disappointing.

Like it never lives up to what you think it's going to be. The souvenir you bring back from your trip never really reminds you of your trip that much. And it's just so many of these things don't live up to the hope or the promise, right? I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of examples. A gadget, you know, will promise to make some task quicker, easier, more enjoyable, or a lot of gadgets promise to do like eight things in one. But the reality is that the eighth thing in one gadget might do one thing okay, but probably doesn't do any of those things very well. And the gadget that promises to make our work more enjoyable and easier will often create more work. You know, if it's a kitchen gadget, it might require like all this cleaning,

or it just might not work very well, or it just takes more time in some other way. So the promise, the gadget falls far short of what it promises. In the case of collectible objects, those are kind of crappy in a different way because they promise to be investment objects often, but the kinds of mass-produced collectibles that people like to purchase, collectible coins, figurines, you know, Beanie Babies. In my book, I talk about the Beanie Baby bubble. People had a promise that these things were going to appreciate in value. And some people even invested their retirement money in these collectibles. And in the end, there was no resale value for a lot of these things. So those things were crappy in a different kind of way.

There are some things that I think you would categorize as crap. There's a picture of them in your book, like the little porcelain dolls that you think of, you know, grandma has on her piano kind of thing. But they're not cheaply made, or many of them are not cheaply made. They last forever. They don't fit the real description of, your description of crap.

And they do exactly what they're supposed to do. They sit on the piano. That's it. So, you know, promise delivered. Right. It probably sounds like I'm being really judgy. And by calling these things crap, of course, there is a judgment in that word. But I'm really trying to understand these objects rather than being so judgmental about them. And as I said before, like what might be crappy to me might not be crappy to you. So something that to me is just kind of a worthless knickknack that I have to dust

might be this really sentimental figurine to you. We're talking about crap today, the crap in your house, and why it's still there. And I'm speaking with Wendy Wallison. She's author of the book, Crap, A History of Cheap Stuff in America. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly.

In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. So, Wendy, when you talk to people about their crap, what do they say? In the light of day of

looking at these purchases that were clearly not the savviest purchases. How do people feel about their crap? What do they tell you? That's a great question. What I find is that people are often really bemused by their stuff. They'll just admit, yeah, this thing is crappy. Yeah, I shouldn't have spent money on it. Or can you believe that I bought this thing? And sometimes people will make ironic purchases. They'll buy things specifically because they know they're crappy. I think because a lot of the things I'm talking about are so inexpensive, they become this very kind of throwaway thing. And so there's a frivolity to them that I think people are comfortable laughing about. So I don't encounter a lot of shame with people with crap. They mostly just laugh and admit

that, yeah, they've got crappy stuff. I don't know if this is human nature or what, but every home, I think, in the United States has something like a junk drawer where we keep this stuff. It's like a tribute to your topic of crap. We keep broken things. We keep broken pens and pencils. We keep watches that don't work anymore. We keep them in our junk drawer and there's this resistance to getting rid of them. And by putting them in our junk drawer, and there's this resistance to getting rid of them. And by putting them in the junk drawer, kind of that's where they belong, but they still don't work. They don't do anything, but we can't let them go. You know, it's funny you mention that. For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about junk drawers lately, And you're absolutely right. Like the objects in junk drawers live in a kind of purgatory because we put them in this thing that we call the junk drawer and they're

just miscellanies, right? Rubber bands and thumbtacks and toothpicks and twist ties and pens that don't work to your point. And yet we just can't throw them away. There's something about our needing to hold onto them. I don't know if it's because we think that maybe they'll have some use value at some point, you know, like, oh, as soon as I throw that twist tie away, I'm going to need it and then I'm going to regret it. But we often consign these things to a specific drawer. And it's kind of a smaller version, I think, of how we think about storage units. You know, we can't get rid of that stuff either. But yet we don't want to live with it. We don't want it in our houses. So we cons sign it to like a big junk drawer, a storage unit instead.

Well, it does seem, and I don't have any evidence to prove this, but it does seem that today more than yesterday, we have a lot more disposable junk. We live in a more of a disposable society where is in earlier days, people had like quality stuff. They had really good stuff that they held on to. We're no longer caretakers of the stuff that we have. And I think that that's a real, that marks a real difference in how we used to live in the past. Things were handed down. People had fewer objects and they took better care of them. Clothes were refashioned, recut, restyled, sized down, handed down. Things could be repaired. Now, you know, everything is made of plastic or pressed wood. So you can't, you know, like an Ikea cabinet can't even be repaired. So our relationship to

our material world is much different and it's a much more disposable world now that we're living in. It seems to me that one of the big drivers for all of this crap that we buy is the novelty of it. We see some new gadget that does things we've never seen before. Ooh, I've got to have that. I've never seen that before. And that's what drives the purchase of a lot of this, along with the advertising that puts it in front of our faces, because if we didn't know it existed, we wouldn't need it. Right.

Novelty. Novelty plays a big role in this, and it has over time as well. We like new things, and we have very short attention spans as consumers. So as I mentioned before, a lot of our attraction to cheap goods I think is because it allows us to just constantly have this churn of the new we have a desire we can satisfy it and then we can move on to a new desire which is then easily satisfied as well and even if even if goods disappoint us especially crappy goods which are gonna disappoint us that's okay because my which are going to disappoint us, that's okay. Because my loyalty really isn't to this object, which I can easily cast off. My desire becomes aimed at

something new. And so I can always sort of look for something different, novel, and, you know, always be changing up kind of the objects around me. Talk about some of the most unusual, just subjectively that you discovered, some of the fun things that you found that people actually buy or have bought. You know, there are things like the hydraulic potato peeler, which had a moment in the 1950s where it promised to peel potatoes instantly. And all you had to do was hook up this device to your faucet and turn on the water. And what it really did was it just sprayed this sort of macerated starch all over the kitchen and created a mess. I'm actually really kind of interested in the infomercials that are on today.

You know, extra laminated copper nonstick pans or the brownie pans in the shape that gives you like crust all around, the garden weasel, the lawnmower that like mows the lawn and collects the leaves and mulches and does all these things. I just think, I think even if ultimately they're useless, they're really kind of wonderful at the same time. Is there, was there a golden age of crap? Or, you know, what is the trend of crap? If there is such a thing, or just is crap is just crap and it comes and it goes?

Since the 19th century, we've always had a lot of crappy stuff. And we still have a lot of crappy stuff. And we still have a lot of crappy stuff. And we have stores dedicated to selling it like dollar stores, which are not new. They emerged in the 19th century as well. So I suppose you could say that crap now has become even bigger business with chains dedicated to selling cheap stuff. We have places like dollar stores and Five Below. We have IKEA that sure sells cheap furniture that allows people to furnish their apartments if they can't afford to buy higher quality furniture. But people who are old enough to remember can remember stores like Woolworths, you know, the Five and Dime.

And these were stores on, you know, Main Street, USA. These were not dollar stores that were kind of like on the outskirts of town. These were, you know, Main Street stores that did very well. But clearly they sold a lot of town. These were, you know, Main Street stores that did very well, but clearly they sold a lot of crap. Yeah. So Woolworth had this sort of brilliant insight, which is that if you put a lot of low-priced goods together and seed what he called seeded the lot with a few nicer objects, people are going to want to buy everything. The cheap goods become as desirable as the more expensive goods because people kind of feel like they can find a treasure in there. And he had this really, really brilliant

insight and created entire stores that were filled with low-priced goods and a variety of goods. So you mix the variety, this sort of idea of miscellany, infinite novelty with low price. And it creates this thing in people's minds that they think they can find the secret treasure, the one like hidden thing of value in the store. And so that continues today in dollar stores. there's an interesting sort of consumer psychology there where you know you just sort of mix cheapness with variety and that that sells it's sold in the 19th century and it still sells today one of the things that's that's interesting to me is that the way consumer psychology worked 100 200 years ago is not that much different than how it still works today. Well, it's quite a story, and I just find it so strange that we're so attracted to crap, and even after a lifetime of crap, we still buy more crap. I've been speaking with Wendy Wallison. She's an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, Camden,

and author of the book, Crap, A History of Cheap Stuff in America. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Wendy. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no.

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There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Artificial intelligence has been in the news a lot. Lately, there have been warnings by some very prominent people that AI is dangerous, that we need to slow this down. But we've been hearing about AI for a long time, mostly in the sense that it's going to replace or is already replacing people in a lot of jobs and in some jobs that previously seemed immune,

jobs that you would think you would need a human being. From all the coverage it's getting, it appears to be a very important topic, and yet it's also a topic that's kind of difficult to get your head around. So let's attempt to get a better understanding of it with Kevin Roos. He is a technology columnist for the New York Times. He is host of the Rabbit Hole podcast, a regular guest on the Daily, and author of a book called Future Proof, Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. Hey, Kevin, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me.

So we've all heard about AI for a while now, how it's creeping into our lives more and more. But why is it now such a big concern? Why are alarms going off about it? Well, I think there are a couple answers to that. One of which is AI is really exploding right now. We have what some AI researchers are calling a golden decade of AI research and progress, the last 10 years have just seen an incredible expansion of the kinds of things that AI is capable of doing. So we started off with AIs that could play chess and board games and rank news feeds and Facebook algorithms.

And just in the last couple of years, we've had things like GPT-3, which is a text completion engine where you type in some words and GPT-3 will finish it for you. We've also seen AI that can make art, these new sort of text-to-image generators where you plug in a prompt and the AI draws it for you.

And we've also seen much more direct forms of labor replacement AI, so things like automatic coding programs where you type in, you know, build me a JavaScript application that does X, Y, and Z, and it will just do that for you without you having to learn any code. So AI really is progressing quite quickly relative to historical norms. It's also threatening to replace a kind of worker that hasn't traditionally had much to fear from technology.

So previous waves of automation, you know, factory automation during the Industrial Revolution, the robotics revolution of the 20th century, the PC revolution of the late 20th century, these previous waves of technological change really targeted kind of working class workers, manufacturing workers, people working in auto plants,

things like that. But what's happening now is that AI actually is really good at doing the kinds of repetitive cognitive labor that a lot of sort of middle class and white collar workplaces have a lot of. So there was a study a few years ago by the Brookings Institution in Stanford, where they basically analyzed which jobs are first in line to be automated. And what they found was it actually wasn't the blue-collar retail or manufacturing or trucking jobs. It was actually these high-paid technical jobs in fields like sales and insurance and even in the tech industry itself. So the kind of target of AI, the kinds of jobs that it's capable of replacing

has really expanded and is doing so quite quickly. And so it sounds like the best jobs will be the jobs that take care of the machines that replace everybody else. I mean, that's one kind of job that I think will be relatively safe, you know, if you build and maintain these AI models. But even those really aren't that safe, because now we have things like AutoML, which is a Google tool that is basically a neural network, a kind of AI model that builds and trains other AI models. So even the work of making the AI now increasingly is done by AI. So what kind of jobs are safe? It would seem my job's pretty safe. Any job where, you know, the person, the personality, you know, a comedian, an actor, you kind of need real people, I think. Yes? Right. Well, I think there's some safety in what you and I do. But I don't think we should get too cocky. Because I, you know, I think the world is, you know, history is full of people who thought, well, my job is safe. Everyone else is, is up as a

candidate for automation, but but me, I'm safe. And we are seeing AI that's being used to make podcasts, to write newspaper articles. It is capable of doing some of that stuff quite well. But I think the question is a good one. So what kinds of jobs are maybe not entirely safe, but more safe? And that's what I went and when I was reporting this book, I went and asked some of the best AI researchers in the world. And I was sort of shocked by what they told me. They said, you know, basically, there are three kinds of jobs that are relatively safe. The first one is what I call surprising work. So that's work that isn't regular. It's not patterned. You know, it's not the same day to day, it's not repetitive in any way. These would be jobs like, for example, a kindergarten teacher. That's a quite hard job to automate,

to give to an AI, because it's so chaotic. And that's a job that is never the same from day to day or hour to hour. And so the more surprising your work is, no matter what field you're in, the safer it is from being automated. AIs really like to do things that are repetitive, that you can do a million times and get a tiny bit better every time. The second category of safe work is what I call social work. And this is what I mean by that is work that fulfills social need for companionship and information, that's a much safer kind of job than jobs where you're making things. Instead, you're making people feel things.

And that's something that we're going to want humans to do for the foreseeable future, I believe. And the third category is what I call scarce work, which is work that involves rare skills, rare combinations of skills, or as you said, just extreme, you know, talent. So this is why, you know, we still have, you know, Olympic swimming competitions and people, you know, millions of people watch them, even though we now have boats that go faster than even the fastest swimmers. We're not purely interested in watching things go fast. We purely interested in watching things go fast. We're interested in watching humans go fast in the water. And so that's a kind of job that is relatively safe from being replaced by AI. So those are the three categories, surprising,

social, and scarce. What's interesting, there are, I imagine, machines, computers that can, for example, write music. But I don't think people want machine-written music. They want it coming from somebody's heart. They want it to be real people, just as there are movies now that are all computer-generated characters. But I don't think people want that so much, or at least not exclusively, that they want, people need people. Well, yes and no. I mean, if you think about, let's just take music, your example. You know, there's a lot of music that we really don't care or know anything about the humans behind it. So the music that's playing in the supermarket as you do your shopping, the music that you're listening to when you're studying or writing, the kind of lo-fi beats type of music, that music, we don't sort of consider

that classic artistic music. But there are a lot of musicians who make a living as studio musicians, making those kind of backing tracks, making those, that kind of sort of ambient music. And that is all going to get replaced. I mean, that's, that's already in many cases being replaced. You know, the music that plays when you play a video game, like that kind of thing can very easily be automated. So yes, will there be human artists going on tour, giving concerts, putting out albums? I think that's pretty safe to say. But that is actually a pretty small fraction of all of the music that we might listen to in a day. Yeah, but for the music that matters, for the music people love,

it just seems like you want that music to come from a person, from the heart of a human being. But that's just the norm today. And I imagine, you know, people can adapt. If music comes from a machine and you like it, you like it. Yeah, I think people will adapt. You know, we've seen people, you know, really enjoying some of these AI-generated art pieces, for example, that are coming out. And in many cases, it's revealing that there are a lot of human artists who aren't as special and unique and irreplaceable as we thought. And I think a lot of what we would consider art, I think art has the same

sort of dynamics as music where, you know, yeah, you can point to your famous painters and your sculptors, but most art is not that. Most art is, you know, a picture of a sunset that's printed out and, you know, put up in a hotel room, or it's a Thomas Kinkade, or it's, you know, something that we might, you know, art connoisseurs might turn their noses up at, but that is actually like, you know, quite a large part of the art that people see on a daily basis. So I think we make a mistake if we assume that just because our jobs feel creative and human and artistic, that they're not also replaceable. So what's the optimistic part here? Because it sounds like from what you're saying

that a lot of people will lose their jobs and a lot of the things that people do, machines will be able to do and nobody will really notice or care. And that leaves a lot of people out. Well, I think the optimistic part is that this is not written in stone. This is not automatic. This process is driven by people. So, you know, robots don't just replace us because they decide one day, like, I'm going to go into a factory and start doing work. They replace us because, you know, managers, executives, people who run factories decide that that's what they want to do. So those people can make different choices. But it's also not true that automation is going to, and AI are going to wipe out entire job categories overnight.

What will happen is that AI will actually be wonderful for the people in every field who are doing the kinds of deeply human work that robots can't do, that surprising social and scarce work. Because those people will not only not lose their jobs, but they're going to have all these new tools. So if you are a designer who, you know, makes storyboards for Pixar or another movie studio, and, you know, your job

to this point has involved lots of hand drawing and sketching, and then all of a sudden, this computer program comes along that can take text prompts and turn them into hyper-realistic images. Well, you could look at that one way as like, oh, I'm gonna be replaced, but another way to look at it is, well, I'm a person who has so much more to add in value than just my drawing skills, so I'm gonna take this thing and I'm gonna do my job 10 times faster than I used to. So I'm going to take this thing and I'm going to do my job 10 times faster than I used to. And I'm going to be more creative and I'm going to be more ambitious.

And it will really empower the people who are doing the human work inside these industries to be able to do that work much faster and more efficiently. But isn't it, there's also, it seems like a balancing act in the sense that you could replace a lot of people eventually and put them out of work, but then the whole system fails. If people don't have money from working, they don't have money to buy the things the machines are making and everything falls apart right and historically if you look at what happens after big waves of technological change um it does result in some job loss but it also creates many more jobs so with the industrial revolution for example a lot of the the people you know who were farmers um you know and plowed land by hand or you know did the kind of uh manual repetitive labor that the machines were were now capable of doing a lot

of those people you know were forced to find other work they moved to cities they worked in factories but because those factories could now make so many more textiles, so many more goods, the market for those things increased radically because prices came down. All of a sudden, people who might buy one shirt a year were buying 10 shirts a year. And so you had many more people employed in those factories. So the question, as always, is how long is the gap between the disappearance of the old jobs and the appearance of the new jobs and are those jobs accessible to the same people can the people who are displaced from say you know being studio musicians can they get some of the new jobs are they eligible for and qualified for and have

the skills for some of the new jobs that are going to be created in fields that we can't even really imagine yet well how has that some of the new jobs that are going to be created in fields that we can't even really imagine yet. Well, how has that gone in the past? Has that always been the case that there's always, it seems like the thing kind of works itself out somehow. It has to. Well, it has in the past worked itself out. The problem is that it really varies how long it takes and how difficult the transition is. So after the Industrial Revolution, there was about a 50-year period where corporate profits were growing, but workers' wages weren't. So all of these factory machines, all of this new industrial equipment, it made a lot of money for the people who owned the factories. But most workers didn't see any fruits of that

progress for 50 years. And that's, you know, in that time, that's a whole lifetime. It's certainly a whole career. And so I don't think we want to wait 50 years this time. I think we want to put processes and systems and laws in place so that they don't experience this 50-year gap between the sort of value of their labor and the wages they're actually taking home. Which kind of jobs, besides the manual labor tasks, but which kinds of jobs seem to be right in the crosshairs of AI. I actually think the kind of worker who has the most to fear from AI is the middle manager. And there's some studies that have borne this out that actually the people... So if you look at a place like Amazon, for example,

or an Amazon warehouse, that's one of the most highly automated workplaces in America. And yet there are tons of people doing the packing and the, you know, taping up the boxes, the stuff that machines can't quite do yet. But what's not there is this whole notion of the foreman. Like in old factories, there used to be a guy called the foreman. And he would, you know, make sure that everyone was, you know, on their line at the right time, that they weren't, you know, dawdling, that they weren't taking breaks, they were too long. You know, there were these people who were sort of the middle managers of

the factory. And all of that has already been automated, right? Like now, Amazon workers, they have apps and algorithms and wristbands that tell them when they're not meeting their packing targets that, you know, can automatically generate the paperwork that tell them when they're not meeting their packing targets that, you know, can automatically generate the paperwork to fire them if they, you know, if they're not performing well enough. So that whole layer has kind of been abstracted into technology. And so that's who I think has the most to fear in the near term. So knowing what you know, and looking into the future, knowing that that's not always reliable, but you know more than most, what's the advice? I think the advice is to get to safe ground.

So what I said before about these three categories of work, surprising, social, and scarce. So those are not fixed, right? Anyone in any job can be more surprising, social, and scarce than they currently are. Whether you're a factory worker or a podcast host or a sales director or a programmer, you can put more time and energy into improving the parts of your job that are uniquely human and being more human at those things and developing the kinds of skills that are going to be very hard to automate. And so I think that's, you know, if I'm worried about keeping my job, that's the first thing I'm doing. I'm saying, okay, well, if an AI can learn to write newspaper articles, then I

better go on some podcasts. I better make some TikTok videos. I better do some things that robots can't do because that's got to be there as a sort of safety net for me. If I was worried about losing my job as a journalist to text writing AI, I would think, okay, what are the parts of that job that robots can't do? If you are a doctor, spend more time working on your bedside manner rather than reading scans on a screen, that part of the job is going to be much easier to replace than the part that involves talking to people, listening to them, giving them advice. That's the part of the job that is the least automatable.

So I would focus all of your time and attention to the degree that you can on making your job as human as possible. And that's where I would start. I would, I would go through a list of, you know, what you do in a day, sort of an inventory. And I would say, you know, where should I be investing my time and energy into getting better? What are the things that can't be replaced? As this story develops, what would you say is the most important thing to keep your, keep your eye on the ball? What is the ball? I go back to these three categories of surprising, social, and scarce. And these are not things that I made up. These literally came from talking to the best AI researchers and engineers in the world

and asking them, if you were telling your kids what to study, how to prepare for the workforce, what would you, you know, tell them to do? And, you know, they didn't say go to coding bootcamp. They didn't say, you know, learn to be an AI engineer. They said things like teach them to be empathetic, to be kind, to listen to people, to share all those sort of lessons that you learn in kindergarten and then you never study again, those actually turn out to be the things that are really hard for a robot to do as well as a human.

So that's the kind of thing that we should all be making a bigger part of our lives and our work, not just because it makes us harder to replace, but because it makes us more human. Well, the topic of AI is certainly on the minds of a lot of people, and I appreciate you coming on and explaining the way you look at it and the way you see how it's going and what could be coming in the future. I've been talking with Kevin Roos. He is a technology columnist for the New York Times. He's host of a podcast called The Rabbit Hole, and he is author of the book Future Proof,

Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. And you'll find a link to his book and to his podcast in the show notes. Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Mike. Really been a pleasure. Well, here's some advice you may have never heard before, and that is to stay off the roads on tax day, which this year, 2023, is Tuesday, the 18th of April. According to research, and this was published a few years ago, but probably not a lot of reason to think it still isn't true, but it was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that there are more fatal car accidents on tax day than any other day in April.

They looked at data over 30 years and found a 6% spike on tax day. That's 13 more fatal crashes than usual, about the same as Super Bowl Sunday. Some people attribute that spike to distracted taxpayers rushing and taking routes that are not part of their normal routine in order to get their taxes filed. The next most dangerous driving days, according to the study, are July 4th and Election Day. And that is something you should know.

It's always nice and it's always helpful to hear what people think of this podcast. If you haven't, or if you haven't lately, please leave a rating and or review of this podcast wherever you listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up for hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or

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