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Hi, it's Ted Talks daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh, whether we're factory workers, doctors or journalists, our jobs are changing fast because the age of A.I. and machine learning is here and a lot of people are worried about our robot overlords someday. In his talk from TED at BCG in 2020, tech journalist Kevin Rudd says, We've been preparing for the age of automation in exactly the wrong ways. Instead of trying to compete with machines, we should be doubling down on what makes us human compassion, moral courage and creativity.

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Hey, Ted talks daily listeners, I'm Adam Grahn. I host another podcast from the TED radio collective called Work Life, where we explore the science of making work, not suck. We're doing a special series right now called Taken for Granted, where I interview my favorite thinkers about the opinions and assumptions we should all be rethinking. My next guest is Brian Brown.

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I don't think we can make the mistake of assuming that everyone wants brave leadership, find work life on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen.

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Support for TED talks daily comes from Microsoft teams, Microsoft teams is helping priority bicycle's reinvent the way they work. When the pandemic hit, the bike shop had to close their New York City showroom. They found a way to reopen by doing virtual visits on teams. Now the team can meet with two or three times the number of customers than they could before. And people from all over the world can visit their showroom, learn more about their story and others at Microsoft, Dotcom, Augustines.

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I was in my mid twenties the first time I realized that I could be replaced by a robot at the time I was working as a financial reporter covering Wall Street in the stock market. And one day I heard about this new EHI reporting app. Basically, you just feed in some data like a corporate financial report or a database of real estate listings. And the app would automatically strip out all the important parts, plug it into a news story and publish it with no human input required.

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Now, these are reporting apps. They weren't going to win any Pulitzer Prizes, but they were shockingly effective. Major news organizations were already starting to use them.

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And one company said that its reporting had been used to write three hundred million news stories in a single year, which is slightly more than me and probably more than every human journalist on Earth combined. For the last few years, I've been researching this coming wave of AI and automation, and I've learned that what happened to me that day is happening to workers in all kinds of industries.

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No matter how seemingly prestigious or high paid their jobs are.

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Doctors are learning that machine learning algorithms can now diagnose certain types of cancers more accurately than they can.

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Lawyers are going up against legal eyes that can spot issues in contracts with better precision. And then recently at Google, they ran an experiment with an A.I. that trains neural networks, essentially a robot that makes other robots. And they found that these train neural networks were more accurate than the ones that their own human programmers had coded. But the most disturbing thing I learned in my research is that we've been preparing for this automated future in exactly the wrong way. For years, the conventional wisdom has been that if technology is the future, then we need to get as close to the technology as possible.

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We told people to learn to code and to study hard skills like data science, engineering and math, because all those soft skills people, those artists and writers and philosophers, they were just going to end up serving coffee to our robot overlords.

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But what I learned was that essentially the opposite is true. Rather than trying to compete with machines, we should be trying to improve our human skills, the kinds of things that only people can do, things involving compassion and critical thinking and moral courage. And when we do our jobs, we should be trying to do them as humanely as possible. For me, that meant putting more of myself in my work, I stopped writing a formulaic corporate earnings stories and I started writing things that revealed more of my personality.

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I started a financial poetry series. I wrote profiles of quirky and interesting people on Wall Street, like the barber who cuts people's hair at Goldman Sachs. I even convinced my editor to let me live like a billionaire for a day wearing a 30 thousand dollar watch and driving around in a Rolls-Royce flying in a private jet.

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Tough job, but someone's got to do it. And I found this new human approach to my job made me feel much more optimistic about my own future. Because you can teach a robot to summarize the news or to write a headline that's going to get a lot of clicks from Google or Facebook, but you can't automate making someone laugh with a dumb limerick about the bond market or explaining what a collateralized debt obligation is to them without making them fall asleep. And as I researched more, I found so many more examples of people who had succeeded this way by refusing to compete with machines and instead making themselves more human.

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Take Russ Rusko. Aflalo is my accountant. He helps me with my taxes every year. Russ is not a traditional accountant. He's a former stand up comedian and he brings his comedic sensibility to his work. I swear I've had more fun talking about itemized deductions with Russ than at actual comedy shows that I paid real money to see. Russ knows that in the age of Turbo Tax, the only way for human accountants to stay relevant is bringing something to the table other than tax expertise.

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So he started a company called Brass Taxes. Get it?

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He hired a bunch of other funny and personable accountants and he started looking for clients in creative industries who would appreciate the value of having a human being walk them through their taxes.

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Now, technically, I should be very worried about Russ because tax preparation is a highly automation prone industry. In fact, according to an Oxford University study, it has a ninety nine percent chance of being automated. But I'm not worried about Russ. Because he's figured out a way to turn tax preparation from a chore into an entertaining human experience that lots of people, including me, are willing to pay for or take through.

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Calli 60 years ago, but started as a junior trainee at a Toyota factory in Japan. He made car parts by hand. And this was the 1960s, an era when the auto industry was undergoing a huge technological transformation. The first factory robots had started coming onto the assembly lines and a lot of people were worried that auto workers were going to become obsolete. Mitsuru decided to focus on what in Japanese is called Moto, actually, basically human craftsmanship. He studied all the nuanced, intricate details of auto design, and he developed this kind of sixth sense skills that few of his other colleagues had.

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He could listen to a machine and tell when it was about to break or look at a piece of metal and figure out what temperature it was just by, what shade of orange it was glowing.

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Eventually, the service bosses noticed that he had all these skills that his co-workers did, and they made him really valuable because he could work alongside the robots, filling in the gaps, doing the things that they couldn't do. He kept getting promoted and promoted.

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And just this year, I was named Toyota's first ever chief security officer in recognition of the 60 years that he spent teaching Toyota workers that even in a highly automated industry, their human skills still matter or take Marcus books.

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Marcus Books is a small, independent, black owned bookstore in my hometown of Oakland, California. It's a pretty amazing place. It's the oldest black owned bookstore in America, and for 60 years it's been introducing overlanders to the work of people like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. But the most amazing thing about Marcus books is that it's still here, so many independent bookstores have gone out of business in the last few decades because of Amazon or the Internet.

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So how did Marcus books do it? Well, it's not because they have the lowest prices or the slickest commerce setup or the most optimized supply chain, it's because Marcus Books is so much more than a bookstore. It's a community gathering place where generations of Aucklanders have gone to learn and grow.

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It's a safe place where black customers know that they're not going to be followed around or patted down by a security guard as planned.

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For Sassen, one of the owners of Marcus books told me it just has good vibes. Earlier this year, Marcus books temporarily closed and like a lot of businesses, its future was uncertain. It was raising money through a go fund me page, and then George Floyd was killed. The streets filled with protests and orders poured in to Marcus books from all over the country for one hundred bucks a day. Then two hundred and three hundred today they're selling five times as many books as they were before the pandemic.

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And their Go Fund Me page has raised more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And if you look at the comments on its Go Fund Me page, you can see why Marcus Books has survived all these years.

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One person wrote that we have a duty to preserve gems like this in our community. Someone else said, I've been going to Marcus books since I was a child, and Blanch Richardson showed me many kindnesses. James Kinases, those aren't words about technology, they're not even words about books. The words about people. The thing that saved Marcus books was how they made their customers feel. An experience, not a transaction, if you like me, sometimes worry about your own place in an automated future.

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You have a few options, you can try to compete with the machines, you can work long hours, you can turn yourself into a sleek, efficient productivity machine, or you can focus on your humanity and doing the things that machines can't do, bringing all those human skills to bear on whatever your work is. If you're a doctor, you can work on your bedside manner so that your patients come to see you as their friend rather than just their medical provider.

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If you're a lawyer, you can work on your trial skills and your client interactions rather than just cranking out briefs and contracts all day. If you're a programmer, you can spend time with the people who actually use your products, figure out what their problems are and try to solve them rather than just hitting next quarter's growth targets. That's how we become future proof. Not by taking on the machines, but by excelling in the areas where humans have a natural advantage, by living and working more like humans, we can make ourselves impossible to replace.

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And the good news is that we don't have to learn a single line of code or deploy a single algorithm. In fact, you already have everything you need. Thank you. Support for TED talks daily comes from Microsoft teams, Microsoft teams is helping priority bicycle's transform the way they work. After closing their New York City showroom, they started doing virtual visits on teams. Now people from all over the world can come into their showroom, learn more at Microsoft dotcom teams.

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Ted Talks Daily, is hosted by Elise Hu and produced by Ted, the music is from Allison Layton Brown. In our mixer is Christopher Fazi Bogon.

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We record the talks at TED events we host or from TED events which are organized independently by volunteers all over the world. And we'd love to hear from you.

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Leave us a review on Apple podcasts or email us at Podcast's at Ted Dotcom PUREX.