Good evening, very warm, welcome to the Oxford Martin School, I'm in Golden,
I was the founding director of the school and it's a huge pleasure this evening to welcome Daniel Susskind,
who's going to introduce us to his wonderful new book, A World Without Work.
I'm sure you've picked up in the media the many great things that have been said in
the very short period of time since this was released a week ago about the book,
including that it is this The New York Times required reading for every presidential candidate.
So first required reading for presidential candidates certainly is for all of you,
and there will be book sales and a drink which you are invited to afterwards.
As you may know,
the Oxford Martin School was established to deal with the great challenges of the 21st century and to apply interdisciplinary thinking,
including this question of the intersection of technology and society.
And we started the group with our friend Michael Osborne in 2012, which does exactly that.
We were somewhat criticised at times by being what people thought was rather pessimistic, saying that maybe half of US jobs were vulnerable.
And one of the many, many things I'm delighted about was Daniel's book is that it places that in a perspective,
it makes it seem not only prescient, but rather mainstream that work.
Daniels, a Oxford burial person, so am I, and I just see his doctoral supervisor, David Vines, walking in thanks to such excellent supervision,
David, which is a background to this book in one dimension, as Daniel will no doubt share with us.
He did economics and management here and then went on to do his doctorate.
He also worked in Downing Street in the Prime Minister's Advisory Unit.
Not for this Prime Minister, I should hasten to add, but a previous prime minister.
So he's been able to bridge that gap well. And what you will find in this book is absolutely remarkable ability to condense
extremely complex economic ideas in a language which is attractive to all readers.
It's a wonderful read, and it makes sense. And which can't be said of all my economics colleagues, and I commend it to you.
So Daniel will speak for about 45 50 minutes.
We'll have a short time for Q&A and then we'll have the book signing and drinks.
The floor is yours.
Thank you very much for that warm introduction, and it's a great pleasure to be with you this evening to talk to you about a world without work.
And what I want to do is begin with the story, the great man your crisis of the 1890s.
And it should have come as no surprise for some time in big cities like London and New York, the most popular forms of transport.
The end of the 19th century have relied upon horses, hundreds of thousands of them to heave a whole variety of vehicles through the streets.
And with these horses, of course, came manure and lots of it.
One enthusiastic health officer in Rochester, New York,
calculated that the horses in his city alone created enough manure to cover an acre of land to a height of one hundred and seventy five feet,
almost as high as the leaning tower of Pisa.
Apocryphal people at the time extrapolated from these calculations to an inescapably manure filled future.
A New York commentator who predicted the piles would soon reach the height of third story windows.
A London reporter who imagined that by the middle of the night,
by the middle of the 20th century, the streets would be buried under nine feet of the stuff.
And it said the policy makers didn't know what to do there. They couldn't simply ban horses.
They were far too economically important. But the twist in the tale, of course, is that in the end, policymakers didn't need to worry.
In the 1870s, the first internal combustion engine was built. In the 1880s, it was installed in the first automobile, and only a few decades later,
Henry Ford brought cars to the mass market with his famous Model T.
By 1912, New York had more cars than horses. Five years after that, the last horse drawn Horse-Drawn tram was decommissioned in the city.
The great manure crisis was over.
The parable of horse [INAUDIBLE], as Elizabeth Kolbert called it in The New Yorker, has been told many times over the years and in most tellings,
the decline of horses is cast in an optimistic light as a sort of tale of technological
triumph before resiliency of the Russian-American economist who won the Nobel prise in 1973.
The same event suggested a far more unsettling conclusion.
What he saw instead was how a new technology the combustion engine had taken a creature that
for millennia had sat at the centre of economic life and banished it to the sidelines.
Then, in a set of articles written in the early 1980s,
the to made one of the most infamous claims in modern economic thought well, technological progress had done to horses.
He said it would eventually do to human beings as well drive us out of work what cars and tractors were to them.
Computers and robots would be to us. Today, the world is gripped again by Deonte of fear.
Thirty percent of U.S. workers now believe that jobs are likely to be replaced by robots and computers in their lifetime.
A similar proportion in the UK think it could happen in the next 20 years.
And what I want to do this evening, drawing on my new book A World Without Work, is explain why we have to take these sorts of fears seriously.
Not always their substance, as we shall see.
But I do think some of the spirit will there be enough well-paid work for everyone to do in the 21st century?
I think this is one of the great questions of our time, and in our in the book,
I argue that the answer to that question is no, that the threat of technological unemployment is now real.
Now, I don't think there's going to be some big technological Big Bang in the next few decades,
after which lots of people wake up and find themselves without work.
I don't think that's going to happen at all. But what I do think is that as we move through the 21st century,
more and more people might find going to find that they're unable to make the sorts
of economic contributions that they might have hoped to make in the 20th century.
And I think this is a fundamental challenge to the way that we live together in society today,
and I want to explore this problem with you this evening.
And in particular, I want to do six things. The first is,
I want to say a little bit about the history of technology and what I then want to
share my general thoughts and technology and then explore one technology in particular,
which is artificial intelligence. I want to say what I think this means for work in the future.
I want to set out what I think the problems that this will create for us are going to be.
And then finally, I want to end on a note of optimism, explain why, in spite of all of this, I still remain optimistic about the future.
So first, the history, I mean, economic growth is actually a very recent phenomenon for most of the three hundred thousand years.
Is that human beings have been around economic life has been relatively stagnant,
but over the last few hundred years that economic activity came to an explosive end.
The amount each person produced increased about 13 fold and world output rocketed by nearly 300 fold.
So if you imagine that the sum of human existence where an hour long,
then all of this actually happened in the last half, second or so in the literal blink of an eye.
And it was Britain, of course, that led the economic charge,
thundering ahead of others in the industrial revolution in the 1760s over the following decades.
New machines were invented and put to use the greatly improved the way the goods were produced,
and these new technologies allowed manufacturers to produce to operate more productively than ever before, to produce far more with far less.
And it's here at the beginning of modern economic growth that we can also detect the origins of automation anxiety even back then,
when economic growth was just taking off.
People started to worry that using these machines to make more would mean less demand for their own work as well.
The anxiety that automation would destroy jobs spilt into a protest and dissent during the industrial revolution, as is widely known.
Technological vandalism by the so-called Luddites was rife.
In fact, in 1812, the British parliament felt felt forced to pass the destruction of stocking frames etc. Act,
which made the destruction of destroying machines a crime punishable by death.
In fact, the next year, several people were tried and executed for smashing these machines.
Importantly, though, this automation anxiety wasn't just confined to the 17th and 18th century.
It continued all the way through right up until the present day.
And in the last few years, we've seen a frenzy of writing and commentary reports on the threat of automation.
But what's interesting is that if you go back to 1940, for instance, the New York Times or the debates about technological unemployment was already so
commonplace that the New York Times felt comfortable calling it an old argument.
In fact, going through the archives and I managed to find in every decade, almost every decade since 1920,
an article in The New York Times engaging in some way with the threat of technological unemployment.
And yet, and this is the key key point, really.
And yet most of those anxieties about the economic harm caused by new technology turned out to be misplaced.
And looking back over the last few hundred years,
there's little evidence to support the primary fear the technological progress would create large pools of permanently unemployed workers.
Know it's true the workers have been displaced by new technologies, but eventually most have also found new work to do.
And so the question is why? How can it be that in the past, despite the fears of so many people, though,
that the technological progress turned out not to lead to the sorts of levels of unemployment that they worried about?
And the answer to that question, I think, is that when we look back over the last few hundred years,
what we see is the harmful effect of technological change on work.
The one that really preoccupied our anxious ancestors is only half the story.
You know, yes, machines took the place of human beings in performing certain tasks, but they didn't just substitute for people.
They also complemented them and other tasks that had not yet been automated, raising the demand for people to do those activities instead.
And this helpful force so often forgot about the second force worked in a variety of different ways.
I mean, perhaps the most obvious way that it worked,
the first way that this complementing force has helped human beings is by making people more productive, more efficient at certain tasks.
So a taxi driver, for example,
can use a sat nav system to navigate unfamiliar roads or an architect can use computer assisted design software to design bigger,
more complex buildings. But economic history also reveals a second way less direct way that this complementing force has helped human workers.
If we think of the economy as a pie, technological progress over time has made the pie far bigger.
As productivity increases, incomes rise and demand grows.
So the British pie, for instance, is more than 100 times the size it was 300 years ago.
And intuitively, it's possible to see how this might have helped displaced workers,
people displaced from tasks in the old pie could tumble into task relativities in this new, bigger, better pie instead.
And in turn, there's also a third way that the complementing force has health workers.
Technological progress is not only made the pie bigger, but has also changed the pie to again think of the British economy.
Not only is it for more than a hundred times larger than it was 300 years ago,
but that output and the way that help is produced has completely transformed by.
Five hundred years ago, the British economy was made up of farms. Three hundred years ago, factories and today of offices.
And again, we can see how this might have helped displaced workers in the past as the economy changes over time.
People displaced from tasks in the old pie could again tumble into performing different activities and tasks in this new changed bit of pie instead.
So distinguishing clearly between this substituting force in this complementing
force helps to explain why anxieties about automation were repeatedly misplaced.
In this clash between these two fundamental forces, our ancestors tended to pick the wrong winner, and time and again,
they either neglected the complimenting force altogether and just ignored it,
or they mistakenly imagined that it would be overwhelmed by the substituting force.
And that is why they repeatedly underestimated the demand for the work of human beings that would remain.
There has always been by and large enough to keep everyone in employment.
So I want to say a little now about technology. You know, every day we hear of systems and machines taking on tasks and activities.
Until recently, we thought only human beings alone could ever do draughting legal contracts and making medical diagnoses,
designing beautiful buildings and composing music, writing news reports.
Given the time constraints today, I just want to give you a general sense of how it is that I think about technology and the way
in which I think it's useful to think about technology when thinking about the future of work.
So although machines can clearly do more today than they can than they could in the past, they cannot do everything right.
You know, there are still limits to the harmful substituting force.
The problem is that those boundaries are really very unclear and they're always changing.
And lots of recent articles and books and reports have tried to work out the new limits to machine capabilities,
and they've done this using a variety of different approaches.
So one approach has been to try and identify which particular human faculties are hard to automate.
So a popular finding, for instance, is that new technologies really struggle to perform tasks that require social intelligence,
things like face to face interaction or empathetic support.
So from 1980 to 2012, jobs that require a high level of human interaction grew by about 12 percent as a share of the US workforce.
A different tack has been to consider not faculties the human body human beings bring to bear,
but instead to consider the tasks themselves and ask whether they have features that make them easier or harder for a machine to handle.
So, for instance, if you come across a task where it's easy to define the goal,
straightforward to tell whether or not that goal has been achieved and there are lots of data for the machine to learn from,
then chances are that task can probably be automated. The classic example of this is identifying cats, and the goal is simple.
Just answer the question Is this a cat? It's easy to tell whether or not the system has succeeded.
Yes, this is indeed a cat. And there's lots of photos of cats out there on the internet.
Perhaps disturbing things. Disturbingly so six point five billion photos of cats supposedly had access them.
So you can imagine the other tasks which are perhaps harder to define the goal, how to see the goals being achieved.
Well, there's not a lot, not a lot of data to learn from are harder to automate.
The obvious problem, though, with trying to identify the limits of machines in either of these ways is that
any conclusions you reach are going to become outdated incredibly quickly.
Those who try to identify the boundaries of machine capabilities are like the sort of proverbial painters of the Forth
Rail Bridge in Scotland Yard Bridge so long that those painters supposedly had to start again when they got to the end.
Because by the time they got to the end,
the paint and starts to peel and spend time coming up with a sensible account of what it is that machines could do today.
And by the time you finish, you're probably going to have to start again and readjust.
So the argument that I make is that a better way to think about technology is to stop trying to identify specific limits and repress that temptation.
Taxonomies and instead trying to make out the more general trends, and I think when you do that,
what you see beneath the particular ripples of progress that we see around us today are some deeper currency,
although it's very difficult to say exactly what it is the machines will be capable of doing in the future,
it's pretty certain that they're going to be able to do more than they can at the moment.
Over time, machines will gradually but relentlessly advance further and further into the realm of tasks performed by human beings.
You know, take any technology that exists today. Open your laptop, pick up your smartphone and you can be pretty confident.
That's the least advanced it's ever going to be. And I call this process task encroachment.
And I think when you look at the three main capabilities that human beings draw on in their work,
whether it's manual capabilities that involve dealing with the physical world,
cognitive capabilities that draw on our ability to think and reason or effective capabilities, our capacities for feelings and emotions.
I think what you see in each of those areas are machines gradually encroaching on more and more tasks that require those faculties.
Each of those capabilities from human beings. And if you have a look at the book, what you'll see are hundreds of examples of this at work.
I think it's important, though, to say that the examples I give in the book are not meant to be exhaustive.
There's some impressive ones almost certainly missing in a few years time when we look back at what I wrote.
Some will almost certainly look tired and out of date and the claims as well of the companies I talk about aren't meant to be taken as gospel either.
At times, I think it can be hard to distinguish serious corporate ambitions and achievements
from provocations drawn up by marketeers whose job it is to exaggerate for a living.
The icing on the cake for me was when someone asked me if I would like an artificially intelligent toothbrush for Christmas.
I'm quite sure how intelligent you need to be to brush your teeth.
The point is this, though, to dwell for too long, and it's just a general point to dwell for too long on any particular omission or exaggeration,
I think, is to miss the bigger picture of what's going on.
Machines gradually encroaching on more and more tasks and activities that in the past have required a rich range of human capabilities.
Now, economists are pretty reluctant to label any empirical regularity as a law or a rule.
But this process of task encroachment, I think, has proven to be as more like a zany historical phenomenon can be and barring catastrophe.
I think it's pretty certain to continue,
and I think this is how we ought to think about technology in general in terms of this process of task encroachment.
What I want to talk a little bit more about now. There is one technology in particular, which is artificial intelligence,
and it's something that has really captured people's imaginations in the last few years is something responsible,
I think, for the renewal of worries about what technology is going to do to work.
And I think something significant has happened in the field and I want to share that with you now.
And the story I want to tell begins in the first wave of artificial intelligence.
The first wave of artificial intelligence.
This was when my dad, who was my co-author on the previous book, that I wrote The Future of the Professions.
My dad was doing his doctorate here on artificial intelligence in the law.
So he was back then already trying to build systems that could solve legal problems.
And something quite interesting happened in 1986, which was a very difficult piece of legislation was passed in the UK called the Latent Damage Act.
And it turned out that the leading experts in the world at the time on this piece of legislation was a man called Philip Carter,
and Philip happened to be the dean of the law school here,
where my dad was doing his doctorate and Philip came to my dad and said, Look, this is absurd.
Any time anyone wants to understand if this legislation applies to them, they have to come to me.
You know, why don't we instead join forces, work together and build a system based on my expertise for other people to use it?
And that's exactly what they did. From 1986 to 1988, it was known as an expert system expert system because it was based on Philip's expertise.
This was the home screen designed for that system. My dad assures me this was a cool screen design in the 1980s.
Ever been convinced of that? Just to give you a flavour of what it was, they were up against the extract from the legislation.
Section two of this act shall not apply to an action to which the section applies.
And that's a more readily understandable piece of the law. And I love this.
They published it in the form of two floppy disks time with floppy disk was caused genuinely were floppy,
and essentially what they did together was they built a gigantic decision tree where you answered yes or
no questions and you navigated through this huge tree that literally had millions of branches through it.
And my dad and his colleagues had manually painstakingly crossed it, and they weren't just doing this at all.
This was the general approach in artificial intelligence. And in the beginning, like my dad,
most people in artificial intelligence thought that building a machine to perform
a given task meant observing how human beings perform that task and copying them.
So some people tried to replicate the actual structure of the human brain.
Others tried a more sort of psychological approach and tried to replicate the thinking, process,
thinking and reasoning processes in which human beings appeared to be engaged when they were performing a task.
And the third, and this is what my dad was doing in building those expert systems, was trying to identify the rules the human beings follow.
But all of these efforts in this first wave of artificial intelligence in all of them
human beings provided the template for machine behaviour in one way or another.
And what's interesting looking back, is that ultimately this approach of building machines in these different images of human beings did not succeed.
And despite the initial burst of enthusiasm and optimism and excitement,
really no progress was made in artificial intelligence by the really sort of serious noteworthy progress.
And as progress faltered, researchers found themselves at a dead-end reset.
Funding dried up. Progress came to an end. Interest in the field fell away.
A period known as the A.I. winter began when really a not not a lot happened in the field at all.
The great turning point, and it's a familiar moment, came in 1997 when Garry Kasparov,
who at the time was the world chess champion, was beaten by a system owned by IBM called Deep Blue.
What's so interesting about this, looking back on it, is that if you would ask my dad in the 1980s,
do you think something like this will ever be possible? He would have said emphatically, no.
And the reason he would have said no is very important. The reason he would have said no is because at the time they were on that first wave mindset,
they thought the only way to build a system to outperform a human expert was to identify human experts.
My dad's case with this man, Phillip Capper, sit down with him, get them to explain to you how it was.
They had all that, every problem it was. You were trying to build a machine to build a machine to perform.
And then you tried to capture the way that human beings were thinking and reasoning in a set of instructions for machine to follow.
But here's the problem, and Garry Kasparov is a great example of this problem.
If you sit down with Garry Kasparov and say, Garry, tell me how it is.
You're so good at chess. Tell me what you're thinking about. Walk me through your reasoning processes.
He might be able to give you a few clever opening moves or closing plays, but ultimately he'd struggle.
He'd say things like It requires your instinct, intuition, gut reaction experience.
I can't articulate how it is. I'm so good at chess.
And for that reason, my dad and his colleagues thought something like this could never be automated of a human being.
Can't articulate how it is. They perform a task. Where in us do we begin?
They thought in writing a set of instructions for mission to follow.
Of course, what they had a bank told in the 1980s was the exponential growth in processing power that would happen in the decades to come.
So by the time the Garry Kasparov sat, and this is just to give you a sense of quite how powerful this is,
that's a logarithmic scale there on the left hand side, which means each step up represents a ten fold increase.
So one step, ten fold, two steps, one hundred fold, three steps, a thousand fold.
So that is a really explosive growth in the computational power available for beginning in the 1950s,
but really taking off in the middle of the second half of that century.
So by the time Garry Kasparov sat down with deep blue in nineteen ninety seven,
deep blue was calculating up to three hundred and thirty million moves a second.
Garry Kasparov, at best, could maybe jog about one hundred and ten moves in his head on any one time he was blown
out of the water by brute force purchasing power and lots of data storage capability.
This system wasn't trying to replicate. His thinking process wasn't trying to mimic his reasoning.
It was performing the task in a fundamentally different way.
So the deep blue result was a practical victory, but it was also an ideological triumph as well.
We can think of most A.I. researchers up until that point as being purists and closely
observed human beings acting intelligently and trying to build machines like that.
But that was not how Deep Blue was designed.
Its creators didn't set out to copy the anatomy of human chess players, the reasoning they engaged in or the particular strategies they followed.
They were pragmatists.
They took a task that required intelligence work performed by a human being and built a machine to perform it in a fundamentally different way.
And that's what brought that, and that's what brought the world of AI.
I argue out of the air into what I call the pragmatist revolution, and a generation of systems is now being built in that spirit,
crafted to function very differently from human beings, judged not by how they perform and task, but judged by how well they perform it.
Advances in machine translation, for instance, have come not from developing a machine that mimics a talented translator, a human translator,
but having computer scan millions of human translated pieces of text to figure out the different correspondences and patterns on the road.
Likewise, machines have learnt to classify images not by mimicking human vision,
but by reviewing millions of previously labelled pictures and hunting for similarities between those in the particular photo in question.
I think this is also why, in the economics literature,
we've seen a systematic underestimation of the capabilities of machines and what the tasks of driving a car,
making a medical diagnosis and identifying a bird at a fleeting glimpse have in common.
Well, these were all tasks that at one point leading economists thinking about the future of work,
thinking about technology and its impact on work thought couldn't readily be automated.
And yet today they increasingly can be. So what went wrong here?
When again, I think these economists were purists believing that machines had to copy the way the human beings think and reason to outperform them?
They were exactly the same mindset that my dad was, which was that if you want to build a system to outperform a human expert,
you've got to sit down with them, get them to explain to you how it was. They do whatever task is.
You're trying to build a machine to do and try and copy that human explanation.
But if you ask a doctor, say, how is it that you make a medical diagnosis just like Garry Kasparov,
they would probably struggle to explain exactly how it is that they do it.
And this set of observations leads, I think, to one of the most important ideas in our in our work,
which is the fallacy and the artificial intelligence fallacy.
And it's this it's the mistaken assumption that the only way to develop systems to perform tasks
at the level of human beings or higher is to copy the way that human beings perform that task.
Now that was true in the first wave of artificial intelligence is simply no longer true,
and I think it clouds so many of our judgements about what it is that systems of machines will be capable of doing in the future.
So let me give you an example. Look, Daniel, you don't understand.
Here's a job that requires judgement and judgement is the sort of thing that simply cannot be performed by machine.
And again, in light of everything, I've just said the question Can a machine ever exercise judgement?
Is the wrong question to be asking? In fact, there's two more important questions we should be asking.
The first is to what problem is judgement the solution?
Why do we go to our fellow human beings and say, Look, I need your judgement, how help me, I need you?
Well, I think the answer to that question is because of uncertainty,
when the facts are unclear, when the information is ambiguous, when we don't know what to do,
we go to our fellow human beings and say, Look, I need your judgement based on your experience to help me make sense of this uncertainty.
So really, the question we've got to be asking isn't in this case kind of machine ever exercised judgement,
but it's kind of a machine to deal with uncertainty better than a human being.
And the answer is in many. Of course they can. That just again,
think of this system medical diagnostic system developed by a team of researchers at Stanford that
can tell you whether or not to freckle is cancerous as accurately as leading dermatologists.
How does it work? It's not trying to copy the judgement of a human doctor.
It knows understands nothing about medicine at all.
Instead, it's got a database of, I think,
about one hundred and twenty nine thousand plus cases and is running essentially a pattern recognition algorithm through those cases.
Hunting for similarities between them and the particular photo of a troubling freckle that you've given it is performing the task
in an unhuman way based on the analysis of more possible cases than any human doctor could hope to review in their lifetime.
It doesn't matter that a human doctor can't explain themselves how machines think love the question from a philosophical point of view.
But again, in light of all this, in light of all I've said,
I think it's not particularly helpful question to be asking when we think about the future of work to see why take a different system owned by IBM,
a system called Watson. It's claim to fame, of course, that was that.
It went on the US quiz show Jeopardy in 2011, and it beat the two human champions at Jeopardy.
And again, it was a remarkable achievement. What I loved about this, though, looking back on it, was that the day after Watson won on Jeopardy,
the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by the great philosopher John Self with the title.
Watson doesn't know it won a jeopardy. Right?
And it's brilliant. That is completely true.
You know, Watson didn't let out a point of excitement, didn't call up his parents to say what a good job I had done.
You know, didn't want to go down to the proverbial pub to have a drink with his friends.
The system wasn't trying to copy the way that these human contestants thought or reasoned, but it didn't matter.
It still outperformed them. And that's what I think is what the second wave of artificial intelligence is about.
And that's where we find ourselves today. Systems and machines, which are using lots of processing power,
lots of data storage capability and advances in algorithms designed to perform tasks that might
require faculties like judgement and creativity and empathy when performed by human beings,
but are able now to perform those tasks in fundamentally different ways.
And so a whole realm of tasks that we thought were once out of reach of automation.
More and more of those tasks appear to be within reach. So what does this then mean for thinking about what?
What are these changes in the world of technology mean for thinking about work?
Greek mythology tells the story of a man called tenseness who chops up his son and serves him as a meal to the gods.
This, given his dinner guests omniscience, turns out to be a very bad decision, and as a punishment,
he's made to stand for eternity in a pool of water up to his chin, surrounded by trees bursting with fruit.
But each time he leans down to take a sip, the water recedes away from his lips.
And every time he reaches out to take some fruit from the tree, the branches swing away from his grasp.
And this, I think, captures.
This story of 10 summers, which gives us the word tantalise captures, I think the spirit of the first kind of technological unemployment,
which we can think of as being a sort of frictional technological unemployment here.
There's still work to be done. The problem is that not all workers are able to reach out and take it up.
So friction a of technological unemployment doesn't mean that there's going to be fewer jobs for human beings to do.
It's important to remember that if we think again in terms of those two forces, I think for the next decade or so, at least in almost all economies,
that harmful substituting force that displaces workers will be overwhelmed by
the helpful complementing force that raises the demand for that work elsewhere.
I think that's going to continue. That historical story will continue. But for three reasons, and I set these out in the book,
I think that this in-demand work is increasingly going to be out of the reach of more and more people if we want to take it up.
What are these three reasons? The first is perhaps the most familiar.
It's the skills mismatch where displaced workers do not necessarily have the skills
and capabilities to do the new work that's created by technological progress.
And this is probably the most familiar reason why people might not be able to
take up the work that's available and how we can perhaps talk about it later on.
The second reason is a geographical one place mismatch where displaced workers do not live in the same place as the new work that is created.
I mean, it's interesting if we think back to the early days of the internet,
there was a moment where it seemed like these sorts of worries about location might no
longer matter that people spoke about the death of distance and how the world is flat.
But it turns out that really, in looking for work today, the place where you live matters more than ever.
I think the third reason for frictional technological unemployment is perhaps the least familiar.
And it's what I call identity mismatch, and this is where displaced workers have an identity rooted in a particular sort
of work and are willing to stay unemployed in order to protect the identity.
So think of adult men in the United States, for instance, displaced from manufacturing roles by new technologies.
Some say that they prefer not to work at all than to take up that it's an unfortunate term take up so-called pink collar work.
And it's a term that's meant to capture the fact that many of the roles currently out of reach of machines are disproportionately held by women.
So ninety seven point seven percent of pre-school and kindergarten teachers in the United States are women.
Ninety two point two percent of nurses are women. Eighty two point five percent of social workers are women.
So I think together those three mismatches pay to tell a story where there might be work for people to do.
But I think there are important worries. Two reasons to think that there might not be able to necessarily take it up.
And I think most economists tend to be comfortable with this idea of friction or technological unemployment.
I think many of them can picture a world where there's lots of work to be done because of these mismatches.
Not everyone can do it. But as we move through the 21st century, I think we might see the emergence of a second type of technological unemployment,
one that's not set, one where there simply isn't enough well-paid work to be done.
Full stop. And I call this structural technological unemployment, and this is, I think, is a less comfortable idea.
So can this be right? Can you? What about the fact that after 300 years of radical technological change, there's still enough work for people to do?
Does that not tell us there's always going to be enough work, enough demand for the work of human beings?
What I try and argue in the book is that, no, that's not the case,
and the fundamental reason why is that process of tasking encroachment that I described before.
So we think again, in terms of those two forces, you know, there can be little doubt is that as task encroachment continues,
that harmful substituting force is going to grow stronger. The workers are going to be displaced from a wider range of tasks than ever before.
So the key question is why can't we simply rely on that helpful complementing force to overcome that effect,
as it has done since modern economic growth began? And the answer, I think, is that task encroachment also has a second pernicious effect,
which is that over time, I worry that it might wear down that helpful complementing force as well.
So let's just think about that complementing force a little more. Take the productivity effect that I mentioned originally in the future.
New technologies are no doubt going to make some people more productive assets and tasks.
That's almost certainly going to happen.
But this is only going to continue to help workers if they remain better placed to do those tasks than machines.
And as task encroachment continues and continues, that becomes less and less likely for more and more tasks.
So you think about satnav systems again, just to see what I'm getting at today, as I said before,
they make it easier for taxi drivers to navigate unfamiliar roads, making them better at the wheel.
But that's only going to be true so long as human beings are better placed.
The machines to steer a vehicle from A to B and in the coming years of excitement about driverless cars is right.
That's no longer going to be the case. Your software is likely to drive cars more efficiently and safely than us.
And at that point, it's no longer going to matter how good people are at driving with or without signs.
The machines will simply do it instead. I'll think about the bigger pie effect in the future.
Again, economic plays will no doubt continue to grow. Incomes will be larger than ever before, and demand for goods is going to soar.
It can be pretty certain about that. Yeah, I don't think we can necessarily rely.
I don't think we can necessarily rely on this to bolster the demand for the work of human beings, as it has in the past.
Why? Because just as with that productivity effect, the bigger pie effect is only going to help if people rather than machines remain
better placed to perform whatever tasks have to be done to produce those goods.
And again, it's task encroachment continues that becomes less and less likely,
and we can already see something like this, in particular corners of economic life.
So think about UK agriculture UK agricultural sector.
This part of the British economic pie has grown dramatically over the last century and a half, but it's simply not created more work for people to do.
British agriculture now produces about five times what it did back in 1860.
Yeah, only requires a tenth of the workers to do it. Think about UK manufacturing a similar story since 1948.
Sector now produces about one hundred and fifty percent more than it did back then.
It requires 60 percent fewer workers to do it.
A growing economic pie doesn't necessarily mean in these particular corners of the economy growing demand for the work of human beings as well.
And finally, think about that changing pie effect.
You know, again, the economic pie may change, but in exactly the same way as this process of task encroachment continues,
it becomes more and more likely that machines, rather than human beings, will be better placed to do whatever new tasks have to be done.
And again, you know, if you look at you parts of economic life, you might worry that something like this is already unfolding.
So in nineteen sixty four, the most valuable company in the United States was AT&T, with seven hundred and seven hundred and sixty thousand employees.
Roll forward those of twenty eighteen and as Apple with only one hundred and thirty two thousand employees.
Twenty nineteen. It was Microsoft with only one hundred and thirty one thousand.
The economy has transformed when we look at some of the leading companies, but it's those companies require fewer workers.
I mean, the more general point is this, which is that in the year 2000,
you industries that were created in the 21st century accounted for just half a percent of U.S. employment.
Clearly, the U.S. economy has transformed, but that hasn't. Assertive use necessarily created lots and lots more work for people to do.
So this, I think, gives you a flavour of the argument that I'm making in the book about how we might find ourselves in a world with less work.
As time goes on, machines continue to become more and more capable, taking on tasks that once fell to human beings.
The harmful substituting force displaces workers in the familiar way.
And for a time, I think the helpful complementing force is going to continue to raise the demand for those displaced workers elsewhere.
And I challenge in that world is going to be frictional technological unemployment.
But a toxic encroachment continues and more and more tasks for to machines.
I worry that the hopeful complementing force is going to be can.
As well, the human beings will find themselves confined to an ever shrinking set of tasks and activities.
And there's no reason, no economic law that tells us there must necessarily be enough demand for those
residual activities to keep everyone who wants it and well-paid employment.
And then our challenge becomes structural technological unemployment.
And so the world of work comes to an end, not with some Big Bang,
not with robots taking everyone's jobs in a flash in an instant, but with a sort of gradual withering,
a withering in the demand for the work of human beings, as that substituting force gradually overruns the helpful complimenting force
and the balance between the two no longer tips in favour of human beings.
So what problems does this lead to? I just want to sketch out what I think are the main challenges that we're going to face as a result of this,
and we can perhaps discuss what we do about these in more detail in a moment.
The first is the economic challenge, the challenge of inequality.
You know, today the labour market is the main way that we share our economic prosperity and society,
that most people's jobs are their only source of income.
How do we share out material prosperity in a society where our traditional way of doing so came?
People for the work that they do is far less effective than in the past.
How do we do it? What's going to take the labour market place?
I see these worries about a world with less work as being very closely related to worries about inequality.
Today, the two things are very, very closely related.
So I think the economic challenge in the 21st century is increasingly going to be a distributional one.
But I don't think the challenges are just about economics. A big second challenge is what we do about the growing power of large technology
companies who are increasingly responsible for developing these technologies.
And I think what's interesting is that the 20th century, our main worry about large corporations was their economic power.
You know, we focussed on things like profit and crisis.
And we used competition policy and economists told us whether or not the economic power was excessive or not.
I think in the 21st century, our worry is going to be far less about the economic power of large technology companies
and far more about their political power is going to be far more about issues,
liberty and democracy and social justice, things that have often very little to do with prices and profits.
And it might sound like I'm shooting myself in the foot,
but things that economists who've traditionally dominated these discussions aren't necessarily best placed to talk about.
And so I think that is the challenge for the 21st century when we think about large companies, what we do about that growing political power.
The final challenge is the challenge of meaning. What do we do?
How do we provide meaning and purpose in people's lives when work?
For many people, a traditional source of meaning and purpose is no longer available?
What do we do? And that, I think, is again a challenge that doesn't have much to do with economics,
but it really is fundamental to the nature of the problems that we're going to face if we move into a world with less work.
So those are the challenges I think we're going to face.
Let me just in the final minutes explain though, why in spite of all of this, I do remain optimistic.
And the reason I think is simple, which is that in decades to come,
technological progress is going to solve or is likely to solve the economic problem that's dominating humanity until now.
And if we think again, if the economy isn't pie,
the traditional challenge has been how do we make that pie large enough everyone to live on at the turn of the first century A.D.,
if you had taking the global economic pie and divided up into equal slices for everyone in the world,
most people would have got a few hundred dollars.
Almost everyone lived on or around the poverty line roll forward a thousand years, and roughly the same was true.
But as we saw on those opening slides over the last few hundred years,
economic growth has soared and this growth was of course driven in large part by technological progress.
Economic policies around the world have got far bigger today.
If we take the global economic pie and divided up into equal slices for everyone in the world, everyone gets about $11000.
Thirty years, it'll be double that in 60 years. Double that again. It by and large, we come very close to solving the traditional economic problem,
the struggle for subsistence, as Keynes called that has dominated humankind until now.
And technological unemployment in a strange way, I see as a symptom of success a symptom of that success.
The 21st century technological progress is going to solve one problem,
how do we make the pie large enough for everyone to live on that is going to replace it with those three others?
These problems of inequality, problems of power and problems of meaning and purpose.
And clearly, I think there's going to be huge disagreement about how we meet these challenges about how we should share our prosperity and society,
about how we constrain the political power of large technology companies and how we provide meaning in a world with less work.
But I think these are and this is the argument I make in the book.
These are in the final analysis, far more attractive problems, I believe,
to have to grapple with than the ones the hope with and the wonderful things that our ancestors for centuries,
which was how to make that point big enough in the first place. So I will finish there.
Thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to hearing some reflections and taking some questions as well.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
You've heard wonderfully lucid summary of your book and clearly just touching on some of the key things, but hopefully enticing us all to read it.
I certainly have and commend to all of you. I think one person who's guaranteed to have a job in the future is here.
I don't see a machine doing anything as formidable as what you've just done.
And incidentally, if interesting in Garry Kasparov, view on what that was all about with deep blue challenging him.
You know, he's been a fellow here, visiting fellow and somewhere on a video archive.
You'll find him talking about that experience and what he thinks about the future.
And so we have about time for very few questions, but who'd like to go first?
Maybe we should collectively act. Thank you very much.
I think he touched on what I'm about to ask in the last few minutes about the distributional issues.
Yes. But earlier you said demand for goods is going to soar.
Yes. But I'm wondering who's going to demand those goods from a kind of consumption focus rather than a production focus?
We're just going to collect a couple of questions post them here. She's making down.
And John Hofmeyr from the Centre for Mutual and Cohn Business here at Oxford, as you talk about inequality.
One of the solutions people suggest is a basic income.
My suggestion is that that won't really help overcome inequality, and it's really at the base that wealth is produced by ownership of shares.
I wonder if you could just comment on whether you've thought about that and the personal view of the two people on that story where they.
Hey, I'm just curious, what do you think the implications of a world without work will be for challenges such as climate change?
I'm, uh, my name's Jasmine, I'm from Stanford University.
So I guess I'm wondering. It seems like work provides a set of intrinsic benefits to the job holder, such as meaning,
skills, et cetera, as well as a set of extrinsic benefits like training people to follow rules,
keeping people off the streets,
corporate provided health care and a host of other sort of public goods that having our current system of work provides.
So I'm so it seems that widespread unemployment would threaten the centralised political
power and the ability to keep regime stable because of those extrinsic benefits.
I'm curious how you think that will play out or how governments might be able to manage it.
Hmm. Yeah, so let me try. Let me try and respond to some of those questions at the same time.
I mean, the first two, just again, I see the economic challenge that we face as a distributional one.
Yeah, the labour market has traditionally been our way of sharing our prosperity and society.
If we are approaching a world with less work than that labour, then that mechanism that we've relied upon will be less effective than in the past.
And so the question is, well, what will replace it?
The argument that I make in the book is that I think we're going to see a growing role of the state in solving that problem.
And I call it the big state, not the big state of the 20th century.
Teams of smart people sitting with blueprints and central government trying to command and control entire economies and how they operate,
not in production, but in distribution. And I say that not coming from the left or right, just looking at the technical features,
the problem and just saying if the labour market is less effective at sharing prosperity, then we'll need the state to do it in its place.
And universal basic income is one thing that's proposed in the book Occupy critical of Universal Basic Income, and I propose quite different ideas.
But I think the general.
I think this is I think it's important to have debates and conversations about UBI because they are engaging with the based on the right diagnosis,
which is,
well, how can we maybe share our income in society if we can't rely on the labour market to do the meaning and purpose component of this problem is.
And I spent a lot of time in the book thinking about, I think it's very important.
I mean, just in response to your particular observation, one of the things I try and do is really explore this relationship between work and meaning.
I think we often assume that work is an important source of meaning and purpose for everyone when actually,
if you look at the data, lots of people don't get a sense of identity and purpose from their work.
Lots of people don't think that their work makes a meaningful contribution to the world that we live in.
And if you look back in history, you can see very different relationships between work and meaning.
So in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, you were banned from seeking political office if you had engaged in trade in work in the previous decade.
In Sparta, citizens were banned by law from engaging in productive work.
You know, Aristotle and Plato both thought that work was a sort of prohibitively grubby affair.
That meaning and purpose could only really come from certain types of leisure activities, and we could talk more about that.
But that's the sort of thing.
So I think the first thing we've got to do is begin with this assumption that many of us have that work is a source of meaning and purpose.
For everyone to be whether or not there might be alternative sources of meaning and
purpose and and if your answer to that first question is it's not for everyone to be,
there might be other sources of it, then it opens up a whole fascinating, I think, new set of policy possibilities, not about the future of what,
but about the future of leisure, not about labour market policies, but about leisure policies.
And how do we as a society shape how we spend our time when we're not at work?
It sounds quite radical, but we already do it in many ways today. Entrancing entrance to museums is free.
We try and stop the fine artworks from leaving the country. We encourage young children to learn to psycho and sweat and swim.
The pension system, in a way you could look at it and think, Well, you know, that's a form of leisure policy is essentially the state saying,
Where are you really going to really support leisure in the twilight of life?
That's when the only moment we're going to really provide financial support for leisure.
So I think as a whole, a fascinating set of policy possibilities that open up when we start looking more carefully at this meaning and purpose.
Part of the problem, and that's what I'm trying to do in the book. Climate change is very interesting.
It's not something I look at in in the explicitly in the book, but I see it as being a challenge on the same sort of scale.
I mean, you know, if we had had one of the reasons I've written a book is that because I think
that if we had had the right conversations about climate change 30 years ago,
we wouldn't be necessarily in the problem facing the problems that we face today.
And I think I think of this problem in a similar way that these are conversations about inequality and what we do about it,
that we need to engage with today to avoid finding ourselves in very difficult problems in a few decades time.
We've got time for one more question. If I would, actually I was just going to a Mike.
Yes. Mike, Mike, Mike. By I way, this is being webcast with the headset on those questions if you don't want to.
And it was a bit about your it was following on from your point about work as a way of
distributing income because we need income to get access to resources and services.
But actually, air is going to in many ways will it will it will lower the cost, the marginal cost of producing many services that we require now.
We won't be relying on expensive expertise.
That will just be what you know,
the access to medical diagnosis will be dependent on what those companies who hold power in the knowledge choose to charge us.
But the actual cost of it will be the marginal cost will be very low.
So actually, we could provide for people very, sort of cheaply in a way.
I mean, it could almost be a quid pro quo for those companies that they provide housing, they provide transport,
they provide energy for people because marginal cost of doing that should be much lower.
And this was some of what you're observing.
There was the argument that I made in the book that I co-authored with my dad the future of the professions,
arguing that the promise of a lot of these technologies is a liberation of the sorts
of expertise that traditionally has only been available to a very privileged, a very lucky few people.
Access to a good health care system, access to knowledge of their legal entitlements, access to knowledge of how to manage their financial affairs.
Suppose the observation we make in that book, though, is that this doesn't happen automatically and that you know,
there's a there's a fight to be had to make sure that this expertise is widely available and in theory, correct.
Well, it's always good to end the conversation like this with many more questions than answers than it will be around signing books,
but also hopefully have time to respond to the many of you that haven't had a chance to answer your questions.
And as I said, this is a wonderfully provocative and I think significant book and part of a much bigger debate,
which the Oxford Martin School is certainly engaged in on the future of work and economies.
It's, of course, engaged in many other things on the 28th of February.
We have a whole series of discussions panels chaired after a keynote address by Andy Haldane,
who's the chief economist at the Bank of England, and every Thursday in term time at five o'clock.
There's a seminar series as well, so I encourage you to look at the websites.
And if you want to ping tonight's, talk to your friends and others that haven't had a chance to be here or to look at it again.
That will be up on our website and thanks to you all for coming. And please do join us for a drink and in thanking Daniel.