What Happens When Work Winds Down?

Alright, I have got to be honest with you, this episode is probably the most anticipated episode for me to record. This is where it gets pretty fun. So welcome back. The question is, what do we do if all this magical stuff actually comes to fruition? What if full self-driving cars work, what if Tesla some eyes work, what if cybercams are everywhere, every city, maybe you own one, maybe it drives you to work and then spends the rest of the day making money while you're not using it. That's the promise, right? What if robots work, not a couple of robots walking around a factory somewhere, I'm talking about robots everywhere, a billion of them, right? I robots style, they're everywhere and everybody's homes, factories, warehouses, restaurants, hospitals, construction sites, maybe one climbs out of an autonomous delivery vehicle and walks your Amazon package up to the front door, puts it down and leaves. What if all that actually happens, not 50 years from now, not as some science fiction thought experiment, what if the stuff everybody keeps promising us actually scales out? Then what? Because if it does, a lot of jobs change. Some of them probably disappear. Trucking changes, delivery changes, warehouse changes, manufacturing changes, transportation changes, restaurants change, office work change, software changes, and I'm not saying everybody loses their job tomorrow, that's not the point. The point is, what happens when increasingly large pieces of human labor just aren't necessary anymore? What do we as humans do? There's a running joke, I just keep coming back to a few years ago when a whole industries were getting disrupted, the answer people loved to throw around was learn to code. Okay? Your disease dying, learn to code, your factory shutdown, learn to code. Your job automated, learned to code. Coding was supposed to be the next safe bridge and then AI showed up and started coding. At the age very well, did it? Now obviously programmers still exist, that's not what I'm saying, I'm saying the bridge moved again and that's a thing, everything we know today is a bridge. Sometimes the bridge gets you to a destination that lasts for a long term and sometimes the bridge itself becomes obsolete and sometimes the bridge just collapses underneath you, your career as a bridge, that's uncomfortable to say, but it is, maybe that bridge carries you 40 years, maybe it carries you for 10, maybe something comes along and changes the entire reason that bridge existed in the first place. And then when you've got to find another one, we've always done that. The question is, what happens if the next bridge requires fewer and fewer human? Now obviously programmers still exist, that's not what I'm saying, I'm saying the bridge moved again, that's the thing, everything we know today is a bridge, sometimes the bridge gets you to the destination that lasts for a very long time, sometimes the bridge itself becomes obsolete and sometimes the bridge just collapses underneath you, your career is a bridge, that's uncomfortable to say, but it is, maybe that bridge carries you for 40 years, maybe it carries you for 10, maybe something comes along and changes the entire reason that bridge existed in the first place, and then you've got to find another one. We've always done that. The question is, what happens if the next bridge is require fewer and fewer humans? You know, we go back 150 years, and I don't think any of the careers or jobs that existed then, I'm sure some do, but not many are left, and all the careers and things that we do today, we're completely foreign to them back then in their context. So this is not new. The question really, the lever is that if these new bridges require fewer and fewer humans, then what, right? Because right now the whole system basically works like this, you give somebody your time, they give you money, then you use that money to buy things that you need, housing, food, transportation, electricity, insurance, phones, clothes, whatever, human labor gets converted into money, and money gives you access to life. That's the arrangement. So if human labor, labor becomes less, so if human labor becomes less necessary, one of the first questions everybody asks is, how do people get money? And I think that's a completely fair question. At some point, the government probably has to get involved in that transition somehow. Maybe it's some form of UBI, universal basic income, maybe it's something completely different, I don't know, and I'm not trying to turn this into a policy episode, but I do think there's a possibility that some kind of income support becomes necessary during the transition bridge. Because if technology moves faster than the economy can reorganize itself, you've got people standing in the middle, and that's the rough part. But here's where I think this conversation usually stops too early. We ask, how much money will people have? Okay, but what will the money buy? That's a different question, because those two things are connected. We've already watched technology do this over and over again. When flat screen TVs first came out, they were insanely expensive. Now they're everywhere. Technology gets better, manufacturing gets better, automation gets better, production scales, prices fall, the thing that used, the thing that used to feel like luxury becomes normal. We've watched this happen with computers, phone storage, bandwidth screens, cameras, all kinds of technology. So it happens when we start doing that with labor, because labor is a huge piece of the cost of producing almost everything. Somebody drives a truck and gets a paycheck. Somebody runs a warehouse, somebody stocks a shelf, somebody answers the phone, somebody writes a software, somebody cooks the food, somebody assembles the product, somebody delivers it. Every one of those humans has to get paid. And that's the built-in price of the thing. So if robots, automation, and AI begin replacing portions of that labor, the cost of producing things should start changing too. Maybe dramatically. And now the money question gets weird, because maybe that amount of money you need tomorrow doesn't mean what it means today. Maybe a dollar buys you one thing today and something completely different tomorrow. That's why I think even something like universal basic income, if we ever go down that road, might itself be just another bridge. Because we look at the dollar amount today and think, how can anybody live on that? Maybe they can't. Today. But what if the housing construction gets radically cheaper? What if transportation gets radically cheaper? What if energy gets radically cheaper? What if food production becomes heavily automated? What if manufactured goods become incredibly cheap? What if intelligence itself becomes almost free? Now the equation changes. Not because money disappears overnight, but because the meaning of money changes. What it buys changes, and maybe eventually the stuff people spend most of their life struggling to afford just doesn't require as much human effort to produce anymore. That's a very different world. And I think the transition getting there is probably extremely ugly because those things don't happen evenly. Your job can disappear before your mortgage does. Your industry can get automated before housing gets cheaper. A robot can replace a worker faster than society figures out what that worker is supposed to do next. That's the bridge and that's probably where a lot of the pain is. Not necessarily the destination to transition. And we've seen that before as well. The entire talents have been built around an industry and then that industry disappears. That doesn't mean the next economy is worse. It just means that the people standing in the old bridge don't magically teleport to the new one and that's the part we have to figure out. But let's assume we do. Let's go all the way with the thought experiment. Let's say the technology works. Let's say the transition eventually settles down. Let's say basic things become easier to get cheaper. More abundant. And let's say people suddenly have something that most people today don't have enough of time. Then what? What do we do? Because I think we might actually start moving backwards in a weird way. And I don't mean backwards technologically. I mean backwards toward being human. Something we've done for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. It's only been in the last 150 to 200 years where this technical technology transition has really disrupted what it meant to be a human. Think about how much your life right now is structured around maintaining your existence. Get a house, pay the mortgage, pay the electric bill, get a car, pay for the car, pay for the insurance, pay for the registration, pay for the gas, pay for your phone by food, go to work so you can pay for all the things that let you keep going to work. That's a massive portion of life. And for most people, that's where the pressure lives. At the bottom, basic needs. Keep everything running. Keep everybody fed. Keep the lights on. Keep the bills paid. Just survive. And I've been thinking a lot about that old pyramid of human needs, the basic idea that when you're worried about survival, survival gets your attention. Of course, it does. If you're worried about food, then you're thinking about food. If you're worried about shelter, you're thinking about shelter. If you're worried about the electric bill, you're thinking about that electric bill. You're not sitting around contemplating the future of humanity. You're trying to make it to Friday. But as those basic needs become easier to satisfy, your attention moves. You start thinking about different things. Maybe you spend more time with your family. Maybe you travel. Maybe you learn something just because you want to learn it. Maybe you build something. Maybe you garden. Maybe you cook. Maybe you go for a walk every night because you're not getting home exhausted at a clock. Maybe you're healthier. Maybe you're not. I don't know. And that's a whole different conversation. But the point is what humans care about changes when survival isn't taking up as much space. And maybe that's where this gets really interesting because for thousands of years, humans needed each other. No internet connection. Actual connection. You needed your family. You needed your neighbors, your village, your community. People around you helped you survive. And technology slowly let us outsource more and more of that. Now I can get food without knowing the person who made it. I can get a package without knowing who delivered it. I'm going to talk to somebody across the planet without knowing the person living three houses down. We became hyper connected, while also becoming strangely independent of the humans around us. What happens if technology handles even more of this rival part? Maybe human connection becomes more important again, not because we need each other, not because we need another human to deliver our package, because we actually want the human. That's different. And I think that's where work changes too because maybe the future isn't nobody works. I don't believe that. Humans like to do things. People work on things right now that nobody pays them to do. They restore cars. They play music. They coach kids. They paint. They build furniture. They make videos. They grow vegetables. They start little businesses. They volunteer. They fix things. They obsess over hobbies that make absolutely no financial sense. Why? Because we like to do things. We like being useful. We like being good at something. We like making things. We like having people value what we do. So maybe the question isn't, will humans work? Maybe the question is, how much of our work will still be required for survival? That's a very different question. Maybe you work 20 hours a week because you love what you do. Maybe you work 40 because you're obsessed with building something. Maybe somebody works 10. Maybe somebody doesn't work for money at all and spends their time taking care of people. Maybe the incentive becomes I want more. Maybe it's status. Maybe it's access. Maybe it's ownership. Maybe it's purpose. I don't know, but I don't think humans stop doing things just because a robot can do the dishes. And there's a positive version of this future that I don't think gets enough attention. We spend so much time talking about AI taking jobs that we almost never ask what we wanted the technology for in the first place. Why automate everything? Why did we invent the washing machine? Why tractors? Why computers? Why robots? Why software? Why? Why any of it? Because technology trades technology for time. That's what we've been doing. We take something human. We take something a human used to spend time doing and we build a tool that gives some of that time back. That's generally considered progress. The problem is, we build a world where people also sell their time in order to survive. So now those two systems are running into each other. The technology is trying to give us our time back while the economy still expects us to sell it. That's the bridge. And maybe if we actually get across that, that's where abundance starts to mean something. Not everybody gets a gold-plated robot in a mansion. That's not what I mean. I mean basic compatibility. I mean basic compatibility becomes abundant. Intelligence becomes abundant. Transportation, manufacturing, maybe energy becomes abundant. Maybe connection becomes abundant. Maybe the things that currently consume most of our money in time become less difficult to obtain. And if that happens, then something else happens automatically. The things that we are still scared. And if that happens, then something else happens automatically. The things that are still scarce become more important. Because abundance doesn't eliminate value. It moves it. And I can already see some of those things. A real human being's time. A real human being's attention. Something actually made with a human hand. A physical place. A great piece of land. A real experience. A community. A relationship. Trust. Something that can't be generated a billion times with a push of a button. Those things start looking different in a world where everything else is cheap. And I'm going to put a pin in that one. Because I don't want to get too ahead of myself. That's another memo altogether. But I think that's where this goes. So what do we do if all of this comes from fruition? Cybercaps work, robots work, AI works, automation works, factory works. If all the vertical stacks, we talked about actually scale data centers in space using the sun to power them and cool them down. And all those things actually come to scale. And we're launching frickin of a rocket every hour and just keep building out and building out. We put a moon base up and all these things come together. And then regulation ultimately lets enough of it happen because we decide we need the capability. What do we do? I don't know. I think the bridge is a very rough bridge. I feel for my kids and my grandkids going through this process. I think some careers collapse before people are ready. I think government probably gets pulled into the transition whether it likes it or not. I think the meaning of money changes. I think the price of a lot of things goes, a lot of things goes down. I think humans keep working but maybe work stops being the thing that defines whether we get to survive or not. And if we actually reach that point then the question changes again. Because of technology makes more and more things abundant. What then becomes valuable? What stays scarce? Because whatever stays scarce. That's probably where the value goes next. I have some ideas. I think some of them are going to look surprisingly human. But that's next. I don't know where this bridge goes but I sure as hell want to find out.