Transcribe your podcast
[00:00:00]

Sumba Chan works at a warehouse, picking orders from miles of shelves. This is his co-worker. I'll call him Wally.

[00:00:11]

It's a robot powered by artificial intelligence and he isn't alone.

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Doctors are beginning to rely on A.I. for diagnosing disease. Machines are taking the wheel from truck drivers and chefs are handing their labels to robotic line cooks.

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Doesn't matter whether you're working in a factory or sitting at a desk or working in the service sector. If you're doing something that is fundamentally routine and predictable, that job is ultimately going to be threatened by a machine. Learning will work.

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Ever be the same? Where are we heading towards a jobless future.

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So in here, this is where we assemble the robots. Here's your your future job as a robot builder. Melany Wise is the CEO of Robotics. Her team builds autonomous robots that use sensors, cameras and mapping algorithms to navigate warehouses.

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So instead of a picker walking several hundreds of miles over the course of a week, they would give the goods to the robot.

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The robot does all that transportation and they say only about a couple of hours in the day to make my job easier.

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At R.K. Logistics, which supplies High-Tech companies with semiconductor parts, Fach robots have become part of the workforce.

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It wasn't about trying to replace people. It was about trying to use the people that we have, the employees that we have for the tasks that they are good at and are interesting and that they want to be doing.

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We've not laid off one person because of robots and in fact because it's made us even more competitive.

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We've actually only been hiring.

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Even so, mounting evidence suggests that the risk of robots replacing humans in the labor force is real, according to one study. About half our jobs are at high risk for automation. And it's not just manual labor.

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It's also white collar things. It's jobs done by journalists and radiologists and all kinds of other, you know, professional people that often have lots of education.

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Historically, new technology has increased productivity and created new jobs. But this time could be different.

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The machines are moving into that cognitive space. They're thinking, they're learning, they're adapting. They're doing things that used to be uniquely human. And eventually we're going to see an unprecedented disruption.

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That kind of disruption is what concerns workers like Robert James.

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Yes. And worries me because of automation causes people to lose jobs.

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James, as a forklift operator at the carrier factory in Indianapolis, where they manufacture furnaces and air conditioners. He's also the vice president of the local union.

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These jobs pay well. The benefits are good, so you do need them.

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This factory may be a good indicator of where the manufacturing industry is heading. Last February, Korea's president told employees at the Indianapolis factory that their jobs were moving to Monterrey, Mexico.

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Then in November, the company struck a deal with President elect Trump to keep around 700 jobs at the factory. No, we're not leaving, but those jobs still aren't safe. Here's what United Technologies CEO Greg Hayes told CNBC a few days later.

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We're going to make a six million dollar investment in that factory in Indianapolis to automate.

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That ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs, I think, than UTC will attempt to automate every job that they possibly can.

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We are, in some cases in factories come back. But of course, what happens is that the factories are then almost entirely automated. So the production is here. They're building something here, but there are very few jobs.

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So what can we do if machines take our jobs? One potential solution is something called a universal basic income.

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A universal basic income is the idea of income unconditionally given to everyone, regardless of how much work they do, where they work, where they live.

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It may sound unrealistic, but something like it has been in place for decades in Alaska, where every resident gets an average of a thousand dollars a year thanks to oil dividends.

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What's radical about that is it's money that Alaskans didn't work for and they believe that they deserve.

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Critics say that it will make people lazy, but Foster disagrees.

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Will people work if they have economic security is a very good question. The science shows that people, in fact, do work. But the other thing we have to ask ourselves is what constitutes work? There are people who have worked without pay for a long time. I think of parents, I think of caregivers. And so I think the thing that basic economic security would allow is the kinds of work that people want to do and they're passionate about if this idea doesn't catch on.

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There may be other ways to prepare, like retraining programs or taxes on companies that replace workers with robots. But one thing is clear, there's no going back.

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The worst thing to do is just to pretend that it's not going to happen and sit there and do nothing. Our challenge is to figure out a way to adapt to this future where people may be working less.