My coauthor Erik Brynjolfsson and I are both at MIT, and we have a colleague at MIT who
said something that really helps me understand some of the last human work that I think is
ever going to be automated by even really sophisticated technology.
Our colleagues name is Deb Roy.
He's at the media lab.
And he points out that we humans are incredibly deeply social creatures, we're just a social
species.
And you say okay so what?
So are ants, so are honeybees, so are chimpanzees.
Deb's point is that the nature of human social interaction involves some really deeply rooted
social drives that don't appear to be present in any other animal.
We came across a great quote when we were writing Machine Platform Crowd from a sociologist
or a primatologist who said, “Look, you will never, ever see two chimpanzees carrying
a log."
That notion of cooperation is absent from even our closest nonhuman relatives.
So that gives me a whole new way to think about the kind of work that's most innately
deeply human, it's the work that taps into our social drives.
And those drives are both positive—there’s solidarity and pride and compassion for other
human beings—and they're negative—they can be envy, they can be shame, they can be
jealousy, they can be antipathy towards some kind of other group out there—but we have
these drives they are very, very deep, they're very strong and they're kind of hard to fool
with technology.
So there are a lot of jobs out there that tap into, that makes use of, that try to harness
those social drives.
And one of my favorite examples of a job that we don't think of as this incredibly elite
job or this incredibly prestigious job but a job that is very unlikely, I believe, to
be replaced by technology anytime soon is just a girl's soccer coach.
And that girl's soccer coach may or may not be a strategic genius about the game of soccer,
but what that person can do, if they're any good at their job, they can motivate a group
of girls to come together to overcome rivalries and jealousies and different kinds of pettiness
and play together as a team.
They can teach the value of some of those social drives like solidarity.
They can help some girls who are natural leaders but might be going through a difficult period
in their lives get past that and assume the roles that they're going to be good at.
They can just deal in this incredibly rich mix of social things that are going on.
Let's say we could build a computer that could figure out all the different social things
that are happening among a group of twenty-five 12-year-old girls.
I think that computer is actually a long way off, but let's say we can even build that
computer.
Would that computer, would that robot be able to motivate those girls, draw them together,
tease out what each is really good at, get them to overcome fatigue and self-doubt and
all these things, realize if they were having problems in the rest of their lives and how
to help them through that?
Again, one thing I've learned with technology is “Never say never.”
That automatic soccer coach feels like it's a long, long, long way away from me.
So if I take that example and I project it out there are a lot of people who do some
work that feels a lot like that and those are teachers, those are managers, those are
folk who might be taking care of our more vulnerable populations and I think about the
very young, the sick, the elderly, the infirm.
There are a lot of those vulnerable people out there, and because of the richness of
our social lives and our social drives I just don't see anyone, even really great innovators,
coming up with technologies that could just substitute for the people who are currently
doing those very, very social jobs.