The value of your humanity in an automated future Kevin Roose
Transcriber: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Camille Martínez
I was in my mid-20s
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 and the stock market,
and one day, I heard about
this new AI 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.
Now, these AI 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,
and one company said
that its AI reporting app
had been used to write
300 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,
no matter how seemingly prestigious
or high-paid their jobs are.
Doctors are learning
that machine learning algorithms
can now diagnose certain types of cancers
more accurately than they can.
Lawyers are going up against legal AIs
that can spot issues in contracts
with better precision than them.
Recently at Google, they ran an experiment
with an AI that trains neural networks –
essentially, a robot
that makes other robots.
And they found that
these AI-trained 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.
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.
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 formulaic
corporate earnings stories,
and I started writing things
that revealed more of my personality.
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 30,000 dollar watch
and driving around in a Rolls Royce,
flying in a private jet.
Tough job,
but someone’s got to do it.
And I found that 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.
Take Rus.
Rus Garofalo is my accountant.
He helps me with my taxes every year,
and as you can probably
tell from the photo,
Rus is not a traditional accountant.
He’s a former standup comedian,
and he brings his comedic
sensibility to his work.
I swear, I’ve had more fun talking about
itemized deductions with Rus
than at actual comedy shows
that I’ve paid real money to see.
Rus knows that in the age of TurboTax,
the only way for human
accountants to stay relevant
is bringing something to the table
other than tax expertise.
So he started a company
called Brass Taxes.
Get it?
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.
Now, technically, I should be
very worried about Rus,
because tax preparation
is a highly automation-prone industry.
In fact, according to
an Oxford University study,
it has a 99 percent chance
of being automated.
But I’m not worried about Rus,
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 Mitsuru Kawai.
Sixty years ago, Mitsuru started
as a junior trainee
at a Toyota factory in Japan.
He made car parts by hand.
And this was the 1960s,
an era where 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 “monozukuri” –
basically, human craftsmanship.
He studied all the nuanced,
intricate details of auto design,
and he developed these
kind of sixth-sense skills
that few of his other colleagues had.
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.
Eventually, Mitsuru’s bosses noticed
that he had all these skills
that his coworkers didn’t,
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,
and just this year,
Mitsuru Kawai was named Toyota’s
first-ever Chief Monozukuri 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.
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 Oaklanders
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.
So how did Marcus Books do it?
Well, it’s not because they have
the lowest prices
or the slickest e-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 Oaklanders
have gone to learn and grow.
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 Blanche Richardson, 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 GoFundMe page.
And then George Floyd was killed.
The streets filled with protests,
and orders poured in to Marcus Books
from all over the country –
first, a hundred books a day,
then 200,
then 300.
Today, they’re selling
five times as many books
as they were before the pandemic,
and their GoFundMe page
has raised more than 250,000 dollars.
And if you look at the comments
on its GoFundMe page,
you can see why Marcus Books
has survived all these years.
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 Blanche Richardson
showed me many kindnesses.”
“Gems.”
“Kindnesses.”
Those aren’t words about technology.
They’re not even words about books.
They’re 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,
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.
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 futureproof.
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.
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.