Speaker unverified: belief

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…Yes, the robots are a kind of immigrant, so they’re competing with the other workers that provide some services that are being replaced by the machines or by the artificial intelligence systems. There is a big distributional effect, in my view. Those who own the robots, as it were, whether it’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin or others, make a fortune. And those who own the labor that is being substituted see a real decline of their income. Again, conceptually, the idea that machines could do the heavy lifting for us is a good thing for society. I don’t know if it’s a real insight or not, but I went to Virunga National Park in Rwanda [sic] a couple of years ago to visit the great apes, the gorillas. You spend this remarkable time in the bamboo forest watching them. What do they do all day? They play. They lie around. They eat some bamboo shoots. A little sex now and then. Basically, it’s a pretty leisurely existence. We’re told, by anthropologists, that that’s not so much unlike hunter-gatherer societies in the pre-Neolithic. We got into a different mode about 10,000 years ago. Became sedentary. Human populations rose. For the next 10,000 years, people broke their backs trying to stay alive growing food. We got into a kind of mode where, basically, very, very, very hard labor. The big quest of modern times is to get out of that hard, heavy physical labor. That’s what everyone in the world wants. As soon as you can get out of agriculture, people do. That’s why we’re down to 1 percent of our labor force in agriculture. It’s very hard work. When you watch people bent over for eight hours in the fields in Africa today, it’s no joy for their lives. It’s extraordinarily difficult. I say all of this because what machines do, what smart machines have been doing for 200 years, is allowing us to ease that physical burden. We’ve had robots for a long time now. They’re just getting smarter and smarter because they have microprocessors now and artificial intelligence. They’re allowing humanity to escape from a very heavy load. On principle, this is a nice thing. This is where we would like to go. If it leads to turmoil, massive inequalities of power and income and wealth, or, by the way, the other dystopian possibilities, which George Orwell depicted. We already have a mass surveillance state in this country, probably not too far from here. I hope they’re listening. I expect every time I pick up the phone — I used to say, “Hello, NSA, I know you’re listening.” Then I was told it’s probably six intelligence agencies listening. The water issue. California. Governor Brown has recently discussed water issues in California. When I was down in Texas, they have dry lakes around Austin, and they’re rationing the last two or three years I was out there. I think you mentioned Africa, the dryness in the countries. How is water going to impact our global economies? The water issue is a pervasive global issue. Colleagues of mine published in PNAS a few weeks ago and then another article. One on the fact that with climate change, the models show that the American Southwest and Great Plains are likely to dry very, very significantly during the 21st century. The climate models basically show massive water problems in many places in the world and for two big reasons. Many dry places now, which are often on the descending zone of convective forces like in Hadley cell, become drier with climate change because these convective forces become more powerful. Second, in general, with higher temperatures, evapotranspiration is faster so the soils dry out. All of this means that water crises will intensify. Even without the climate change, water stress is pervasive because population increases and agricultural demands are huge. We have 60,000 major dams in the world diverting runoff already. That means famous places like the ROC, which dried out irrespective of the climate change in the past. I can tell you about recent research, and it absolutely comports what I see with my own eyes in many places. Syria had a huge drought, the biggest in its modern history, from 2006 to ’10. It led to many social ramifications that contributed to the explosion of violence starting in 2011. This fact of these ecological crises turning into social catastrophes, I think, is a very real phenomenon. We should not presume that somehow we’ll just be able to handle this stuff. I’m told constantly, “Crisis leads to innovation and solution.” The truth is that’s sometimes true, and sometimes crisis leads to catastrophe.…

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