YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Roose

lines on the record: 84
first: 2021-03-23
most recent: 2021-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, yeah, the ninth one is crazy. So I'm just going to read eight. No. Okay, let's go. Be surprising, social and scarce, resist machine drift, demote your devices, leave handprints, don't be an endpoint, treat AI like a chimp army, build big nets and small webs, learn machine age humanities, and number nine. I'm not going to reveal.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Verge plus subscribers. Well, I'll list them and we can leave some of the explanation to people who actually buy the book. Come on, man. This is like, I gotta, there's got to be a curiosity gap”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And I think companies are starting to realize this. I mean, one example I've been looking at recently is a company like Airbnb, which for many years had a very limited customer service department and ability. And then they started getting a lot of people who were angry at them. The pandemic hit and hosts were having their stuff canceled and people were showing up to residences and they looked nothing like what they looked in the photos. Like there was a lot of bad juju around that product and the customer service. And so they sort of essentially deautomated that process. They hired a lot of humans and trained them in sort of empathetic communication. And so now they have like many, many customer service people that you can actually call and talk to. So I think when businesses get into trouble with the automated model is usually when they start deautomating and bringing in humans because they're just like there's a lot that”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Several years ago, I talked to the CEO of a company called Ashurian, which is a Texas Court company in Nashville. And they sell phone insurance and all sells other stuff, but their fastest growing line of business is they just sell a subscription to tech support. And they just know every problem that you might have with Bluetooth on your iPhone. And you can call them and they'll just be friendly and help you. And people need it. And they're just like, there's just 10,000 people in Nashville who are helping people set up their Roku's every day. And that to me is like It feels like a huge amiss, right? Silicon Valley, particularly consumer products in Silicon Valley, they pride themselves in being easy to use, but there's an entire company that's built a business. Best Buy has built a business around how hard it is to actually use. And I, you can see that just bleeding into the enterprise space.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be there with you as kind of a personal tech consultant, and then they would sell you stuff on the back end. But the human connection was actually what drove the sort of renaissance of Best Buy. It was not that they competed with Amazon on price or logistics, but they did do those things. But the thing that set them apart was really that unlike Amazon, where everything is done by robots and sort of low-paid human pickers and warehouses, they would actually send someone to your house who would talk you through it and answer your questions.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we might all have a team of sort of IT tech coaches. One of the fascinating case studies I came across in the course of writing this book was Best Buy. And Best Buy was supposed to die. Amazon was supposed to kill Best Buy many years ago because they sold all the same stuff, like big box was going away, like Best Buy was largely dependent on new DVD and video game releases for profits, which like went away. So I was sort of interested in how they didn't die, what they did. And it turns out that they moved to like a very high touch customer service model. They started this in-home advisor program where, you know, for a fee, they would come to your house. A best buy rep would take a look at your, you know, your stereo system and your speakers and tell you which upgrade you needed or like they would sort of”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bespoke, sort of concierge model of something that is free when you just get it on the open market of Gmail, but people are willing to pay for that extra touch, that extra sort of part that involves relating to humans and also, you know, allows them to get what they see as a better product. So I think that model is transferring to a lot of industries where you'll have the kind of mass experience that is purely machine-driven and there are very few humans involved in it. And then there'll be kind of this luxury skin on top of it that involves much more human contact and connection.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's not obvious right now because I think a lot of companies haven't gotten very good at that. I mean, they're so involved in the mindset that, you know, customer service is a cost center that should be made as small as possible. But you see this sort of happening around the edges right now. I mean, let's take Google as an example. So one of the ways that sort of the only new successful email product, you know, successful being defined as like a lot of people I know are very excited about it of the past 10 years is this app superhuman, which actually is built on Gmail. It's like a subscription. It's like a high-end luxury subscription email product that's a sort of a skin for Gmail, but that includes all this extra functionality. And one of the sort of key pieces of value that you get when you subscribe to Superhuman is like a person, like a rep from the company does Zoom with you to walk you through how to use the email. It's like a very like.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't the counterexample of this already that customer service at big companies is horrible? Like, I use Google every day. I use all of their products and services every day. If something goes wrong with Google, my only real recourse is to Google it, which has always seemed like Kafka-esque to me.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Original idea. I've gotten that from a number of AI researchers because they point out this is already happening. You can already see this happening, this kind of artisanal boom in goods and services that sort of have more of a human touch to them than something that's mass produced in a factory by robots.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's the lesson of the past little while here is that experiences are really valuable for people. And so it's not just going to be that people are paying for experiences in travel and retail and hospitality. They're going to be paying for experiences when they hire a lawyer or go to a doctor or engage a marketing firm. I mean, they're not going to be paying for necessarily efficiency and expertise. They're going to be paying to feel something. And that's one of the sort of rubrics that I've used to figure out which jobs are going to be more stable as we get more and more automated as a society. The jobs that involve making things for people are going to become less and less valuable and as smaller and smaller piece of the economy. And the bigger piece, the growing piece, is going to be jobs that involve making people feel things. So that's not a”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the tropes of all coverage of Gen Z or millennials or whatever is we now pay for experiences over products, right? We spend more money on vacations. I think every generation does this, but these are the tropes of covering particularly people in their 20s because their dollars shift the economy very fast. But the idea that we pay for experiences over products that we pay for interactions over a fancier car is that what you're getting at is it at the end of the day, your account is still using Excel. And you could have TurboTax do that for free, essentially, but you want to talk to a person who's funny, so you're willing to pay a premium for that.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How you're able to differentiate yourself from turbo tax as an accountant if your Rust is by giving people an experience that they want and not necessarily being the most eagle-eyed tax preparer. It's about being the best human.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, it is genuinely an enjoyable experience. I have to call him soon because taxes are due in less than a month. And like, I'm looking forward to that. That's not going to be a chore for me because I actually enjoy talking to him. So the sort of human side of any profession is just getting more and more valuable as automation takes over more and more of the actual functional work of doing taxes.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my accountant is this guy named Rus Garophalo, and he is a former stand up comedian. And one of the things I was interested in when I was looking at this book is like finding this survival stories. Like who are the people who should have been automated out of their jobs but weren't and why? And Russ is a classic example of that. I mean tax preparation is largely an automated business now. Most people use turbo tax or some form of software to do their taxes. And yet Rus is there, his firms growing. He's doing well. So I wanted to figure out why that is. And it's because he's a former stand-up comedian. He's really funny. It's really interesting to talk to him and he's really good at sort of relating to people in a thoughtful and interesting way. And he hires other creative people and pays for them all to take improv classes because he thinks that those skills will make them better accountants. And he's right.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have a little vignette in your book of the guy who does your taxes and how he effectively competes with, I'm sure I've even read these ads on these podcasts with Quicken or QuickBooks that you just like dump the data on them directly from your horrible employee management software at work and then like some taxes are generated and it costs 50 bucks but you actually use a person and your vignette is like why his job still exists and how he saw competing with Quicken.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is something that I got from Jed Colco, who's an economist, and he is gay, and he talks about the sort of experience of growing up as an LGBTQ person and having to kind of fit in to read people's states to figure out how safe am I here? What do people, you know, what kind of code do I have to switch into? And obviously that's not great that they have to do that. I wish they didn't. He said basically that skill of being able to kind of quickly take the emotional temperature of a room is a really important skill for the future. And that doesn't show up in any kind of sort of skills inventory, but that's going to be very valuable for the people who are good at doing that. There are lots of others that I could go into, but they all kind of boil down to the sort of basic human skills that we nurture in little kids, sharing, playing well with others.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the big one that people talk about is empathy, and I think that is a key part of it. I mean, a lot of the jobs of the future will involve relating to other people. They will be interpersonal jobs, you know, nursing, therapy, social work, that kind of job. But I think that the discussion often stops there. I think there's a lot of pieces of empathy. One of them is sort of active listening, being able to sort of focus. I mean, that's like a really key piece of the puzzle here is like you have to be able to control and direct your own attention, which is why there's an entire chapter in the book that's just about how to have a better relationship with your phone and the other screen-based devices in your life. I think one prerequisite for being a human is being able to sort of control what you think about. Other skills in the book, one of them I talk about is the ability to kind of read a room.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And play and be creative and express themselves. And they're not idiots like they know that the skills that are going to be valuable in the future are those softer human skills.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are going to need to move toward jobs and activities that can only be done by humans. I mean, that just makes sense, right? When the robots come into your workplace, the stuff that's left is the stuff that the robots can't do. So I was trying to figure out what can't the robots do? What is only done by humans right now? And what is likely to only be done by humans into the future? And so, you know, those are by definition the very human things that I think we've been steering people away from, unfortunately, for years, telling them, you know, don't major in humanities. You know, I think Vinod Koslood Marque Dries have both made some form of tirade against how the liberal arts are worthless and everyone should major in engineering and anything else is a waste of your time. But that's really, I mean, if you look at just what the AI researchers are doing, they're not sending their kids to coding boot camps. They're sending their kids to the Waldorf School where they can learn to dance.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think it's important to give people the good and the bad news. The bad news is that automation is coming and it's going to displace people. But the good news is that there's something you can do about it and it doesn't require becoming a coder. It doesn't require going to back to school for a STEM degree. It doesn't involve sort of productivity hacking. What I found in talking to people who work on AI is that it's actually just about being more human. The things that we can do to protect ourselves I have nine of them in the book, but most of them revolve.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to take a break there, and I want to come back, and I want to talk about the second half of your book, which is rules to avoid that nightmare scenario. We'll be right back. Back with Decod So, the first chunk of your book, Kevin, is very much here's the conditions of automation. Pay attention to this. It's happening way faster than you think. The second half of your book is like an instruction manual as you as an individual how to dance around the wave of change that's coming. Walk me through that.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're going to be like, screw you. I don't like this. This is not making a material difference in my life for the better. In fact, it's made it much worse in my immediate circumstances. And so I think we have to look, yes, it's important to look at what happens in the long run, in the aggregate with new technology, but it's also important to just listen to the people who are telling us what it's doing in their lives right now.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experience for a lot of them. I mean, the Industrial Revolution was horrible for workers. There were these squalid boarding houses where the factory workers would be put and they would be paid barely subsistence wages and they would basically be tortured at work and they would all get sick. And it was like it was Dickensian and horrible. And so I think if you had gone to those people and said, well, on the plus side, 30 years from now, GDP will have risen 20%.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this is the big error that I think has resulted from giving this whole conversation about automation and AI over to economists and technologists because those communities in particular look at things in the long run and in the aggregate. So they'll say, yeah, the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't great in all ways and there was some child labor and some factories with like gross safety violations. But in the long run, people's lives improved. And we had more time to spend with our families and we weren't working back breaking jobs on the farms. And I think that when I went back and started researching kind of contemporaneous accounts of these past technological shifts, like what really sticks out is how much this sucks for people. It's like not a happy.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just, for better or worse, I'm thinking about Fight Club, right? Which is a movie that has been framed and reframed many times over the years. But at the heart of it, there's a guy with a really, really boring white-collar job that he hates. And he finds a community that is outside of that, and they blow up some credit agencies. I'm not saying that's happening here, but the population of disaffected people being pushed out of the workforce has second order effects, some of which can be positive, but many of which are negative. And that doesn't seem to be factored into the RPA equation, either at the consultancy level, certainly not, and definitely not at the political level.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. You know, there is no sort of one stereotype of a person who gets radicalized on the internet. But a lot of people that I've run into in reporting on extremist communities have a fairly Similar origin story, which is like I, you know, I graduated from college or community college. I had a lot of debt. There wasn't a lot of opportunity for me. And, you know, I needed a social life. And so this was sort of the way that I found status and meaning and friends and a purpose was by joining an extremist community. I don't know that the link is sort of causal, but I think it's probably correlated. There's a reason, you know, so many people are out of the labor force participation rate is quite low historically. And so there are just a lot of people who are sitting at home looking for things to do, things to entertain them, things to keep their attention a sort of mission to plug into. And so maybe for some people that's an extremist community.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the other things you cover for the Times is misinformation, the dark side of the internet. You're talking a lot about white collar workers, accountants, back office people. They're often men. It seems like there's a real apocalypse coming where a lot of sort of mid-level white dudes in seemingly safe corporate jobs get pushed out of the workplace and then literally the podcast is called Rabbit Hole fall down the rabbit hole of YouTube disinformation. Like, I can just add all that up in my head, but it's not very rigorous. Is that, do you see that connection?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you're arriving with this thing that they think is very fancy but is actually just like a couple lines of code that plug into their Oracle database. So it makes them look like wizards and it doesn't require a whole lot of new technology and innovation.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's how it's going a lot of the time that consulting companies end up sort of playing a kind of oversight role with the bots when they malfunction because there just isn't a whole lot of tech expertise in a lot of these companies and certainly not for things like this. So yeah, I mean, the consulting companies are making money hand over fist on this. There's no question about it. And this has been like a transformative line of business for them because it's actually like It's not that hard frankly a lot of the stuff is off the shelf. You can go into a company, you know, maybe they haven't updated their servers in 30 years”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that cost baked in? Like, I'm imagining, you know, the midsize bottling firm in the Midwest and the slick top five consulting companies selling RPA. Everything's going to be great. Then they leave. The software is going sideways. No one really knows how to use it. Is that all baked into the cost, right? Is that just the consulting company gets to come back in and charge you more money to fix it”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Words into them and then automatically generate the designs and list the SKUs on Amazon and make the ads for Facebook. And so he made a lot of money doing this. And then one day it went totally wrong because he hadn't cleaned up the Word bank that this algorithm drew from. And so there were people were noticing shirts for sale on Amazon that were saying things like, you know, keep calm and hit her or keep calm and rape a lot like just words that He had forgotten to clean out of the database. And so as a result, like his store got taken down, he like lost all his business. He had to change jobs. It was a traumatic event for him. And that's a colorful example, but there are, I'm sure, lots of more mundane examples of this happening in places that have implemented RPA.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, like, my other car is a flying bike or whatever. You know, it was just like the weirdest, most nonsensical combinations of demographic targeting ideas like plugged into t-shirt designs and uploaded to the internet. And Mike Fowler was one of the people who was making that. And he pioneered.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This guy, Mike Fowler, who was an Australian entrepreneur who came up with a way to automate t-shirt design. So like, I don't know if you remember like five or six years ago, but there were all these auto generated t-shirts on like Facebook that you were advertised. So, you know, it'd be like, kiss me. I'm a tech blogger who loves punk rock, you know, and those.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there's several stories like that in the book. There's a trading firm called Night Capital that had an algorithm go haywire and it lost millions of dollars in milliseconds and was never able to, there was actually just a sort of story in the financial markets. I think it was, I forget who it was, it was one of the big banks like accidentally wired hundreds of millions of dollars to someone else and couldn't get it back. So that was just like they just lost that. And I'm not sure whether that was, I'm sure that automation had some role in that, but that might have been a human error. But there are also sort of like lower level instances of this going haywire. One of the examples I talk about in the book is”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you've called them boring bots. You say the technology is not so sophisticated. The industry calls it RPA. There's a lot of pressure on making the seem not like not the most technologically sophisticated or exciting thing. It comes with a lot of change. But I'm wondering, are there any stories of RPA going horribly wrong? I'm just imagining the most consumer-facing automation that most people see is you call the customer support line and you go through the phone tree. It makes all the sense in the world on paper, right? If all I need is the balance of my credit card, I should just press five and the robot will read it to me. But like, I just want to talk to a person every time because that phone tree never has the options I want or it's always confused or something is wrong. There has to be a similar story in the back office where the accounting software went completely sideways and no one caught it, right?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And, you know, there's some precedent for this. I mean, economic disruption is often when big changes happen in the workplace. So, you know, you've seen already millions of jobs disappearing during the pandemic. And some of those jobs might not come back. It might just be that these companies are able to operate with many fewer people.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But during COVID, there's been no real backlash to that. In fact, customers want automation because it lets them get goods and services without coming into contact with humans who might potentially be sick. So it's kind of freed up executives to do the kinds of RPA automation that they have been wanting to do and have been capable of doing for years. And so the consultants I talked to said, yeah, we're fielding calls from a lot of people who are saying, yeah, let's do that automation project we talked about a couple years ago. Now is the right time.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money, it's not that much more productive or sort of accurate than the humans doing those jobs. And if they implement RPA in normal times, workers get freaked out. There's a backlash. Maybe the mayor of their city calls and asks them why they're automating jobs. Like it's a political headache in the instances when it happens publicly.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge amount. I mean, I talk to a bunch of consultants, people who get these calls to come in and automate the call center or the finance department at big companies. And they said they're basically two reasons why things have accelerated. One is that I think the pandemic has created a lot more sort of demand for certain types of services and goods and created some supply chain issues. And so companies actually need to automate parts of their operations just to keep up with the demand. But they also mentioned that there's been this kind of political cover that the pandemic gave the executives because a lot of this technology, the RPA technology is not new. Like this has been around. It's not sophisticated. It's not sort of mind-blowing in its complexity, but it's fairly obviously displacing workers. And so a lot of executives have resisted it because, you know, it doesn't save them that much.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I have talked about, and maybe every episode of the show is trends that have accelerated in the pandemic. And obviously we're moving to remote work. We're out of offices, even like maybe three years ago. I was at a Microsoft event and I saw Sachin Adela, the CEO of Microsoft. He was talking about all the things they were doing. And at the end, he's like, and I just heard about this robotic process automation. It sounds amazing. And now it's like, oh, everyone's doing it. Like Microsoft is in that business. He went from, I thought it was interesting to if you're writing robots to use Excel, we're going to write the robots for you. That is a huge business. That's a great business for Microsoft to be in. Google's doing it. You mentioned the other two companies that are already big. How much has the pandemic accelerated this curve?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perfect policy recommendations. I'm assuming sort of stasis on the government level and I'm trying to convince people that it's in their interest to take this into their own hands and come up with their own plans because I don't think the cavalry are coming.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a pretty good idea. I think, I mean, what we're learning now with the stimulus checks is that giving people direct cash transfers is a really good idea in times when things are perilous and you need to kind of give people a way to stay afloat. And I have, you know, there are other ideas that I think are wise too. I mean, right now the sort of tax rate for labor is a lot higher than for capital and for equipment. So companies are actually financially incentivized to automate more jobs because they get taxed less on money that they spend on robots versus unemploying humans. So I think equalizing those tax rates could be a way to deal with this on a policy level, but ultimately I think we have a long way to go on any of this stuff. There aren't really a lot of politicians agitating for this except for Andrew Yang. So I think my goal is not to sort of give people.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the same goes for self driving cars and taxi drivers and delivery drivers. I mean, there's going to be disruption there. But those are actually like gigantic technological achievements. And they will unlock huge new industries. I mean, you can just imagine when there are self-driving cars, like there will be self-driving hotels and restaurants and gyms. And like there will be all kinds of jobs popping up for, you know, people who are making and selling these cars, who are repairing them, who are programming them, who are developing the hospitality around them. It's like there's going to be a lot of dynamism in that industry. So while yes, like it will crush some jobs, it will also save lives because they'll be safer than the human drivers. And it'll open up new opportunities for people. So that's an area where I'm actually not as pessimistic as Andrew Yang is.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and I think this is a place where he and I disagree. I mean, I, like Andrew, I think he has, he was right on a lot. But I think when he's talking on the trail about automation, he's largely talking about blue-collar automation, and he talks a lot about truck drivers and manufacturing workers and even retail workers. I'm sort of sold on this idea that those industries are actually not the issue right now. The more pressing and urgent issue is white collar automation. And I think something like self-driving trucks is a great example of something that I am not as worried about as he is because absolutely there will be”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The politician who comes to mind first and most clearly in this conversation is obviously Andrew Yang, who ran in the Democratic primary. He only talked about automation, basically. He's advocated for universal basic income because he says automation is coming for all of our jobs. Is his approach more focused on this sort of boring bot white-collar automation, or is it at the manufacturing level?”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably, you know, about the kind of humans who are participating in them. You know, if you are a coal miner, your sort of skill set is not well matched to be, maybe it's not well matched to be a software engineer. It's not that they're not smart enough to do it. It's that they, frankly, sometimes don't want to do it. It's not rewarding in the same way that the old job was. So the long-term benefit of these reskilling programs is still something that we don't have a lot of evidence for. And there's been some estimates that say private sector reskilling, what the companies retraining their own workers. And there have been some estimates that something like only one out of every four private sector workers can be kind of profitably retrained. So we're really talking about something that needs to happen at the federal level if it's going to happen at all. And right now there's just no momentum on that from either side.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right there, telling journalists to learn to code. And you hear these sort of heart warbing stories about coal miners who got laid off and then went to coding boot camp and became python engineers and like started doing front-end software development. But those are the exception rather than the rule. There's a lot of evidence that reskilling programs actually don't have a long-term sort of positive impact on the people who go through them in economic terms. And some of that is...”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The data just isn't there on retraining. I mean, there have been that this is the sort of go to stock response when you ask politicians or corporate executives like, what do we do about automation and AI displacing jobs? There's reskilling, there's upskilling.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Center. It's like you're optimizing your workforce the same way that you would optimize your factory production. You're trying to do things as efficiently as possible. And I don't think there's a lot of appreciation for the benefit that even someone like an Excel number cruncher could have in the organization or maybe if you retrain that person to do something different that could be more productive and more valuable to the organization. But right now it's just a numbers game. They're trying to hit next quarter's targets. And if automating 500 jobs in the back office is the way to do that, then that's what they're going to do.”
2021-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The robots are coming for your office, with NYT’s Kevin Roose · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT