The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - No Mercy / No Malice: Luddites

Episode Date: February 4, 2023

As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgalloway.com/luddites/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I just don't get it. Just wish someone could do the research on it. Can we figure this out? Hey y'all, I'm John Blenhill, and I'm hosting a new podcast at Vox called Explain It To Me. Here's how it works. You call our hotline with questions you can't quite answer on your own. We'll investigate and call you back to tell you what we found.

We'll bring you the answers you need every Wednesday starting September 18th. So follow Explain It to Me, presented by Klaviyo. Support for PropG comes from NerdWallet. Starting your credit card search with NerdWallet? Smart. Using their tools to finally find the card that works for you? Even smarter. You can filter for the features you care about, access the latest deals, and add your top cards to a comparison table to make smarter decisions. And it's all powered by the Nerds expert reviews of over 400

credit cards. Head over to nerdwallet.com forward slash learn more to find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet. Finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. The hype around AI is staggering. In just two months after the release of ChatGPT, we're already into the they-took-our-jobs phase of the hype cycle.

However, we have 500 years of evidence that capitalism converts our ambition and our innovation into growth. And growth means more jobs. Luddites, as read by George Hahn. bigger iPhones, desirable mates. Our hunger for wealth and love drives us to work and create. Capitalism's genius is finding new avenues for that drive. The philosopher's stone of capitalism is technological innovation. It's no accident capitalism flourished and spread across the globe contemporaneously with the adoption of new technologies in production, transport, and information. Each technological advance unlocks more space for ambition,

new goods, better ideas, richer experiences. And that economic expansion creates more opportunities for ambition, more wealth, more innovation, more jobs. Wash, rinse, repeat. We relearn this lesson with every technological breakthrough. The latest is artificial intelligence, and in particular, the spectral chatbot ChatGPT. The media's verdict on AI is already in. We're about to lose a shit ton of jobs. Those headlines likely inspired more clicks than

2023 begins with unemployment at a 50-year low would have. The latter is true. They should have interviewed William Lee. In 1589, Lee invented the stocking frame knitting machine, a device that could do the work of several workers. Queen Elizabeth I dismissed his innovation. I have too much love for my poor people who obtained their bread by the employment of knitting to give my money to forward an invention that will tend to their ruin by depriving them of employment and thus making them beggars. Despite the queen's disapproval,

Lee's design led to the mechanization of textiles, and that led to the organized attacks on textile factories by a secret society of weavers called the Luddites, who destroyed every piece of machinery in sight. Parliament, by this point, all in on capitalism, made machine-breaking a capital offense and called in troops. At one point, there were more redcoats fighting Luddites at home than Napoleon in Spain. The Luddites are gone, but we are still afraid of the machines. Wharton economist Jeremy Rifkin wrote a bestseller, The End of Work, that predicted we would have to radically restructure society as robots would leave us with nothing productive to do. In 2014, half of workers in technology thought new technologies would be net job destroyers. Andrew Yang's 2020 presidential campaign was predicated on this notion,

and he can point to peer-reviewed research claiming that 80% of medical doctors' jobs would disappear by 2030 due to advances in AI What happened? America has more physicians than ever before And unemployment is near an all-time low Even if we get an AI MD, 500 years of experience tells us there will be more jobs in healthcare, not fewer. It's not intuitive, a function of our species' innate inability to think long-term. But the reality is that disruptive technologies cause employment instability for only short periods. The market crisply reorganizes itself around the innovation,

and job growth increases from there. Countless empirical studies have proven this. A technology is introduced, say, the car, and an existing sector is made irrelevant overnight, like horse and carriage. In the short term, we're fixated on how many horses will be out of a job. Harder to imagine, however, is how many jobs the car will create, as well as the different kinds of jobs it will create. It's hard to envision radios, turn signal lights, motion

sensors, and heated seats, let alone NASCAR, the Italian job, and the drive-thru window. In other words, disruptive technology results in demand for things we never knew we wanted. In 1850, farming made up three in five U.S. jobs. By 1970, that number was less than one in 20. From tractors to pesticides to preservatives, technological innovation was the creative destroyer that eliminated most jobs in America. But the void was filled by everything else. Entire sectors were created that employed tens of millions of Americans. Here we are again. ChatGPT is impressive, no doubt. Tell me the origin story of the knitting machine. Done. Write a blog post about AI in the style of Scott Galloway. Easy. ChatGPT's peers can also handle many other types of tasks, from digital artwork to

software engineering. Together, they will likely render millions of jobs irrelevant. Why hire an artist, copywriter, coder, lawyer, when you can license an AI bot for cents on the dollar? For many companies, the process has already begun. Last week, BuzzFeed announced it would start using ChatGPT to produce content. The stock more than doubled on the news. Meta, Canva, and Shopify are leveraging the technology for their own processes. Microsoft's bet on ChatGPT is the most significant. Ten billion dollars. The anxiety for the past couple decades has been over robots and automation.

And it's true that many routine, low-skilled jobs were automated away. What's also true is that new jobs, again again filled the void. One study found that between 1999 and 2016, automated technology created roughly 23 million jobs in Europe. That's half the increase in employment during that period. McKinsey estimates that future advances in automation will kill a third of American jobs, and that it will create more than it kills. Specifically, tech jobs, care worker jobs, building jobs, education jobs, management jobs, and creative jobs.

Net-net, technology expands employment. Disruptive technology has externalities, including short-term pain for workers on the wrong side of the innovation. During the Industrial Revolution, real wages stagnated for decades while productivity soared. This put many out of work for years, and the civil unrest that followed was understandable. Eventually, wage growth caught up, but the interim was not easy. History also teaches us that America has been terrible at acknowledging the pain and allocating some of the gains from increased productivity to worker retraining and support for those affected

during the transition. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, push for technological innovation and aid the people it affects. That means generating stability, i.e. employment, in the short term while the job market recalibrates. The ancient Greeks understood this. To offset technological unemployment from rotary mills, gears, water clocks, etc., Pericles started a government-funded public works program that commissioned many architectural and cultural projects and employed thousands. It also resulted in several masterpieces, including the Parthenon. We don't need to build temples, but we can put public money to good use. Roads, infrastructure, sustainability projects, etc. I say we start with demolishing and rebuilding LAX and Miami

International, but I digress. Jeremy Rifkin overestimated the scale of automation's job destruction. But he wasn't wrong about its intensity. And some of his ideas, along with those proposed more recently by Andrew Yang, merit attention. The long-term economic gains we're bound to realize from transformative technologies, including the car, telephone, internet, and AI, should offset short-term investments in social costs and despair that can sink a household when a family member not only loses their job, but their sense of purpose. We know technology will continue to bring prosperity.

The bigger question is, will it bring progress? Life is so rich. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT, presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series

about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.