Hi, and welcome back to Bloomberg Benchmark. It is October twenty two, Wednesday. Oh God, why are dates so hard for me? I mean, would never make that mistake. Hi, and welcome back to Bloomberg Benchmark, a podcast about the global economy. It is Thursday, October twenty two. I'm Tori Stillwell, a US economics reporter in d C with Bloomberg News. I am with my colleagues and go hosts. Dan Moss, our executive editor for International Economics who just landed in Ottawa, and Akiedo, our editor for Benchmark in San Francisco. Hey guys, you guys are always traveling. I'm just stuck here in d C. Dan, send me to Sydney. I'm ready to beat it up there. Well, I'll have to give you some great recommendations before you go. Okay, deal. So Aki, you've been in Japan for part of the last week. When did you get back and what perspectives on the news did you bring back with you? Well, I got back late Saturday night and had a wonderful time there. I thought i'd talked about the Bank of Japan or maybe Chinese economic statistics today because I was in Asia all week. But then I just saw this piece of news roll in this morning that was really interesting. It's a little nerdy and a little niche, but there's this government committee that oversees Sweden's central bank and apparently they're getting together to potentially revisit the central bank's mandate there, which sounds like really technical jargon and really boring, but it could potentially be a really big deal if it does end up leading to some legal changes to the way Sweden's central bank operates. UM. And right now Sweden has this inflation target of two. Some people are saying maybe Sweden needs to raise the central bank inflation target to create more of a cushion between the target and zero percent UM. Some people we're saying, maybe you need a lawer the inflation target because you shouldn't really have the school that you can't achieve at the end of the day. Um. But it comes down to this question of what happens when you have the school but you're not able to deliver on it for years and years and years. So I'm gonna be watching this really closely. Yeah, I agree with you, that's really quite sexy. That country central bank, the ricks Bank was one of the first to adopt the flesh inflation targeting, and more recently, they found themselves in the crosshairs um principally but not only, the cross hairs of Paul Krookman for raising rates quickly once what appeared to be the worst of the global recession was over, only to find themselves in a situation where they had to reverse and not only cut but do que So it's quite fascinating. There's almost a parable of moderns in full banking day. Yeah, definitely, they're really ahead of the pack. Um, Tori, what's your what's your current event chatter of the week. Well, I am focused as always on the US and right now we're in the midst of this like monthly cycle of housing data that we get, and it actually turns out things are looking pretty good. Um. Home builder confidence is at a decade high, which is great. We got housing starts data on Tuesday that showed that construction of new homes rose to the second highest level in eight years, So that's great news. We're gonna get more data over the next week, so I'm definitely keeping an eye on that. Cool. So, Tori, the idea is housing will help underpin things while manufacturing and exports of suffering. Precisely, consumers have really been doing the heavy lifting for growth in the US, and this shows that housing is no exception. Well, I want to talk this week, Tory about a story that you published on Monday called Social skills are the Last Line of Defense for humans seeking work? And what better date? We're recording this on Wednesday, October, the date Marty McFly arrived in the future. Now, we've all written and read stories about robotics and their increasing news in say, vehicle assembly lines, but most of that commentary has also suggested that more people focused softer emotional intelligence skills in the workplace. They're still some years away for robots. But you had an interesting adventure with somebody or rather something called Amy Ingram when you were developing this story. Why don't you talk about Amy and how she is essentially what this story is about. Yeah, So, when I was doing research into this story, I initially saw a great paper out by David Demming over at Harvard University about social skills in the job market, and he basically found that almost all the job growth since nineteen eighty has been in work that is social skill intensive. So um, while I was doing a little more research. I wanted to reach out to this founder of a technology startup. They do virtual personal assistance. I send him an email. Can we set up a time to chat over the phone. He's like, no problem, I'm gonna have Amy set it up. Amy, can you just take it from here. Um. So she sent me preferred day and time. This is around seven PM, and I actually had an event that night, so I wasn't checking email. Then at three twenty one am, she emails me again and it's like I wanted to follow up. Of course I didn't see it because I was sound asleep. And four hours later she sent me another mel This is about seven twenty. At this point, it's like, I haven't heard back from you about this meeting. So fortunately for Amy, I'm up and getting ready for work and I'm checking my emails. I'm already stressed about getting out the door, and Amy keeps bugging me about this meeting that I could handle like as soon as I got to work, and so I think I got a little irritated with her. I thought it was there's no way that a humans going to email me at three am about a meeting. Um. So it was at that point that I was like, all right, this has got to be a machine. And when I brought up this whole experience to Dennis Mortenson, who is the founder of AMY, I guess I should say. Um. He was like, this is exactly the thing that we're looking to figure out. You know, how many social skills do we need to embed these agents, these machines with and how do we do that? Okay, So just so we're clear, Amy Ingram, Um, she's a she's a machine. She's a virtual person assistant. UM, she answers emails, she sends emails as she sets up your meetings. And for AMY, ingram stands for artificial intelligence. Yeah, they share the share of the same initials UM and ingram is actually, God, this is like so over my head he was trying to explain it TV. But it's like a model used in natural language processing that helps machines understand human speech. UM. So you know, for all like the suber Nerds out there, they're probably oh, yeah, that's so cool. But but yeah, she's she's a robot for sure. And every any listeners who are interested in this, it's uh. The website is x dot ai. If you guys want to check it out. You know, one of the things that intrigued me about this story is it suggests that because Amy is sort of groping for some emotional and empathetic characteristics, that it's not that far off in the future. Yeah, I mean, I think computer scientists will quickly tell you that they are trying to figure out how to at least get robots to mimic social skills. Well, actually, you're in San Francisco, You're in the heart of all this, and you've spent a lot of time writing about the impact of technological advances on the economy, not just the macro economy, at what's happening in the micro economy at an enterprise level. Did tory story mesh with your experience? Didn't resonate with you? Yeah, definitely. I mean, so I wrote this big story about artificial intelligence UM about a year and a half ago, and even since then, even in that year and a half, there's been a remarkable amount of progress in that field. It's amazing how quickly scientists are making progress in this field. But at the same time, you know, one thing that I learned that was really important is that there are a lot of things that computers can do, but there are many, many, many other things that computers cannot do. Um Our human brains are amazing. They're so complex in ways that you never would have thought before, and are capable of doing so many things that robots aren't able to do. Daniel said, Like, it feels like we're not that far away from computers being able to replicate the full social skills of a human being. UM. From the conversations that I had with artificial intelligence experts, most people felt that this was something that was decades and decades away. We should probably define what where, what social skills aren't, what qualifies as social skills? What you guys think, Yeah, definitely, I mean, let's let's start with this. So, like, you know, imagine this kind of spectrum between of tasks. Some's tasks are really repetitive. You're doing the same thing over and over again, and it's easy to write out a full instruction manual of what you're supposed to do. There's this, you know, on the other end of the spectrum, there are tasks that are really complex, really diverse. You're doing something different every single day. It's really creative. You're you're coming up with novel solutions all the time. The kind of tasks that are on the repetitive end of the spectrum are really easy to replicate, and those jobs are already gone. You can think of something you would do in a factory and like an auto factory, for example, where you're putting on the same part over and over again. Those kind of jobs are gone. But you think of something really complicated, like um being an executive editor like Dan, where you're making all these different decisions every single day, you're providing oversight, You're coming up with new things. That's the kind of thing a computer hasn't been able to do yet. Right, So it's a sense of collaboration, reading people like, kind of working off of social cues. All those things qualify social skills, and at least one expert that I talked to said that upward of the workforce needs at least some sort of collaboration to get their job done. So it's a lot. If we've advanced this quickly, what makes us think that that final stage is still some steps away? Because zacky, this made me recall a story you wrote in twenty fourteen about robots being deployed in lawyers offices doing legal work. You know, that's a whole other step away from the generic shot of a robot putting an engine head into an suv. Yeah, definitely. So this was you know, a very specific task in that lawyers UM currently are performing called you know, it's document reading in this initial stage of litigation where you have to decide which documents are relevant and which documents aren't relevant to your case. Before, it was impossible to have computers do that because it was just too complicated of a task. Every case of litigation was too different in order to kind of come up with this like master set of rules. But they found a way to do that do that by um giving a small group of lawyers the small subset of documents and having them say whether something is relevant or not relevant, and the computer is watching those humans make those decisions, and then the computer learns from that experience and is able to amplify that experience across a much broader set of documents for that specific case. UM. This leads to a lot of savings and dollars you know, in terms of like the labor that you have to employ, and it also makes the litigation process go a lot more, um go much faster. But I feel like to really illustrate how far away robots are in terms of just really being able to moot very well, maybe we should try to have a little bit of a conversation with Siri and see how that goes. Yeah, let's do it. Let's see, Siri, I'm feeling really sad today. I would give you a shoulder to cry on, Victoria if I had one. Thanks, that's really nice, but it didn't really make me feel better. You're welcome, okay, all right, Well, I'm not sure that has quite the same effect as if you know, Aki was asking me exactly why I was sad. I feel like if if I told you I was sad and you didn't ask me why or try to make me feel a little bit better about it, I might have to unfriend you. So that's that's a you know, a kind of social skill that Siri has been unable to learn yet. Can we follow or um framed Amy? I mean, let's talk a bit about Amy. Does she or it exists inside a computer, inside a micro ship or in this chap's office tory? Is there a humanoid look machine typing away to keyboard and her or it the name happens to be Amy. What are the dimensions that we're dealing with here? Amy is a machine. I mean she's not. She's not a robot sitting at a computer typing. You know, she she recognized. The machine recognizes patterns in the emails, you know, today, tomorrow, a time, and they use that very similar to how Google does. If if any of the listeners out there have Gmail, I'm sure they see when when someone sends an email with a time and a date, they'll see these dash lines under it and you can add it to your calendar. Um. You know, Amy is analyzing these these dates and these times and these words, um and being able to respond to that and and added to your calendar. So UM, I don't think you should think of it as like a robot sitting at a at a computer, like slaving away at a keyboard. Should we be scared of Amy? Well, I don't think we should be scared of Amy. As a Dennis Mortinson again, the creator Um said he's just trying to sort of eliminate this email back and forth that any human has to do. Whether you're lucky enough to have a personal assistant and your personal assistant does it, or like Aggie and I have to do it. Um, he just wants to eliminate that, so it frees you up to do things that are more productive and more worth a humans time. So I don't think we should be scared of amy. It's really interesting because I was doing research for this story, I was able to talk to people about what they think the future looks like in terms of how much work robots will be taking over, et cetera. And Paedro Domingos over at the University of Washington. He's he's the author of a new book on machine learning called The Master Algorithm, if any of you guys want to check it out. Um, but he sort of envisioned this world are robots will be able to do basically everything that humans currently do now in their work, but they're going to be certain things that will want a human touch for. So, you know, you don't want to go to the bar and like pour out like your feelings about how your girlfriend dumped you to a robot bartender. You want a real bartender who can take a shot with you and who you can like go back and forth on how terrible she was. Like. You want someone who really understands what you're looking for. And he says that these things are going to start to command a premium in the labor market, and there's gonna be way fewer of them, but they will still exist. They'll be a luxury sort of. But also in that new world, we're gonna totally have to rethink how people get money, how people live. Um. There's this idea floating around about basic income, and it's this this theory that you know, as robots basically take over the way that we earn a livelihood, and you're gonna have to be able to guarantee people some sort of fixed amount of income um that they can spend, whether that comes from the government, whether that comes from taxing the people who create robots that are gonna take all our jobs. We're gonna have to change sort of the distribution of capital because right now, you earn money based on you know, the scarcity of your labor um, and and once robots are taking that over, the money is going to be held by the people who control the robots, who invented them. So we're gonna have to rethink that. Going back to your bartending example, like if you're really really amazing bartender with these incredible, interpersonable skills and you're really warm and you make these really cool creative cocktails, then yeah, your future is golden. You're gonna be fine, and if anything, you're probably going to be making even more money in the future. But if you're kind of like the middle of the road bartender, like you know, you're you're kind of friendly, but not that friendly, and your cocktails aren't that created of it's pretty much, you know, the same stuff as what's on other menus around the city, then uh, your future isn't that bright. That probably means that your job is um much more vulnerable to robots and software. Right, creativity is going to be just a huge game changer. It already is now, but that's going to be really how you can leverage yourself, is what these experts said. Right, So I can't help but feel like it would lead to more inequality in terms of who wins and who loses. Yeah, you know, it reminds me of some of the issues we talked about in our inaugural episode with our friend Barry Bosworth of Brookings. He sketched for us a history of automation going back to the spinning wheel, steam engine, electricity, personal computers, where do you think Amy and machines like her fit into that historical sweepe. There's this weird dichotomy where we have people who are both afraid that robots are going to take all our jobs and also afraid that we're not innovating enough. Uh, that productivity is just gonna be sluggish forever. I don't I don't know which one is right. I don't think it's probably either extreme. I think it's going to be somewhere in the middle. Um, the so called Internet of things is really changing how we look at productivity and how we use technology to get data and to drive decision making and to to make our processes more efficient and smarter. Um. It just it may take some time for these things to show up in the data. I think that's what people are trying to figure out. But Dan, I think I have a more important question, and that is are you a robot? And Victoria we should probably wrap up, Tori. Tori, you know we started this episode with a question of whether a robot will be able to take our jobs? Should we ask Sirie? Oh? Yeah, we should definitely ask Seria. Okay, let's see what she says. Is a robot going to take all of our jobs. Interesting question, Victoria, all right, that was a super late answer, Siri. Yes, yes, old technology for the win. Sirie needs some work. Thanks again for listening to Bloomberg Benchmark. We will be back next week and you can find us on Bloomberg dot com, iTunes, Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, all the places um as well as on the Bloomberg terminal. And if you're on any of those platforms, please take a moment to rate and review the show so other listeners can find us and let us know what you thought of this show. You can reach us and follow us on Twitter at Daniel mass d C, Tori Stillwell, and Kita seven. We'll see you next week. And I am not a robot.

Hi, and welcome back to Bloomberg Benchmark. It is October twenty two, Wednesday. Oh God, why are dates so hard for me? I mean, would never make that mistake. Hi, and welcome back to Bloomberg Benchmark, a podcast about the global economy. It is Thursday, October twenty two. I'm Tori Stillwell, a US economics reporter in d C with Bloomberg News. I am with my colleagues and go hosts. Dan Moss, our executive editor for International Economics who just landed in Ottawa, and Akiedo, our editor for Benchmark in San Francisco. Hey guys, you guys are always traveling. I'm just stuck here in d C. Dan, send me to Sydney. I'm ready to beat it up there. Well, I'll have to give you some great recommendations before you go. Okay, deal. So Aki, you've been in Japan for part of the last week. When did you get back and what perspectives on the news did you bring back with you? Well, I got back late Saturday night and had a wonderful time there. I thought i'd talked about the Bank of Japan or maybe Chinese economic statistics today because I was in Asia all week. But then I just saw this piece of news roll in this morning that was really interesting. It's a little nerdy and a little niche, but there's this government committee that oversees Sweden's central bank and apparently they're getting together to potentially revisit the central bank's mandate there, which sounds like really technical jargon and really boring, but it could potentially be a really big deal if it does end up leading to some legal changes to the way Sweden's central bank operates. UM. And right now Sweden has this inflation target of two. Some people are saying maybe Sweden needs to raise the central bank inflation target to create more of a cushion between the target and zero percent UM. Some people we're saying, maybe you need a lawer the inflation target because you shouldn't really have the school that you can't achieve at the end of the day. Um. But it comes down to this question of what happens when you have the school but you're not able to deliver on it for years and years and years. So I'm gonna be watching this really closely. Yeah, I agree with you, that's really quite sexy. That country central bank, the ricks Bank was one of the first to adopt the flesh inflation targeting, and more recently, they found themselves in the crosshairs um principally but not only, the cross hairs of Paul Krookman for raising rates quickly once what appeared to be the worst of the global recession was over, only to find themselves in a situation where they had to reverse and not only cut but do que So it's quite fascinating. There's almost a parable of moderns in full banking day. Yeah, definitely, they're really ahead of the pack. Um, Tori, what's your what's your current event chatter of the week. Well, I am focused as always on the US and right now we're in the midst of this like monthly cycle of housing data that we get, and it actually turns out things are looking pretty good. Um. Home builder confidence is at a decade high, which is great. We got housing starts data on Tuesday that showed that construction of new homes rose to the second highest level in eight years, So that's great news. We're gonna get more data over the next week, so I'm definitely keeping an eye on that. Cool. So, Tori, the idea is housing will help underpin things while manufacturing and exports of suffering. Precisely, consumers have really been doing the heavy lifting for growth in the US, and this shows that housing is no exception. Well, I want to talk this week, Tory about a story that you published on Monday called Social skills are the Last Line of Defense for humans seeking work? And what better date? We're recording this on Wednesday, October, the date Marty McFly arrived in the future. Now, we've all written and read stories about robotics and their increasing news in say, vehicle assembly lines, but most of that commentary has also suggested that more people focused softer emotional intelligence skills in the workplace. They're still some years away for robots. But you had an interesting adventure with somebody or rather something called Amy Ingram when you were developing this story. Why don't you talk about Amy and how she is essentially what this story is about. Yeah, So, when I was doing research into this story, I initially saw a great paper out by David Demming over at Harvard University about social skills in the job market, and he basically found that almost all the job growth since nineteen eighty has been in work that is social skill intensive. So um, while I was doing a little more research. I wanted to reach out to this founder of a technology startup. They do virtual personal assistance. I send him an email. Can we set up a time to chat over the phone. He's like, no problem, I'm gonna have Amy set it up. Amy, can you just take it from here. Um. So she sent me preferred day and time. This is around seven PM, and I actually had an event that night, so I wasn't checking email. Then at three twenty one am, she emails me again and it's like I wanted to follow up. Of course I didn't see it because I was sound asleep. And four hours later she sent me another mel This is about seven twenty. At this point, it's like, I haven't heard back from you about this meeting. So fortunately for Amy, I'm up and getting ready for work and I'm checking my emails. I'm already stressed about getting out the door, and Amy keeps bugging me about this meeting that I could handle like as soon as I got to work, and so I think I got a little irritated with her. I thought it was there's no way that a humans going to email me at three am about a meeting. Um. So it was at that point that I was like, all right, this has got to be a machine. And when I brought up this whole experience to Dennis Mortenson, who is the founder of AMY, I guess I should say. Um. He was like, this is exactly the thing that we're looking to figure out. You know, how many social skills do we need to embed these agents, these machines with and how do we do that? Okay, So just so we're clear, Amy Ingram, Um, she's a she's a machine. She's a virtual person assistant. UM, she answers emails, she sends emails as she sets up your meetings. And for AMY, ingram stands for artificial intelligence. Yeah, they share the share of the same initials UM and ingram is actually, God, this is like so over my head he was trying to explain it TV. But it's like a model used in natural language processing that helps machines understand human speech. UM. So you know, for all like the suber Nerds out there, they're probably oh, yeah, that's so cool. But but yeah, she's she's a robot for sure. And every any listeners who are interested in this, it's uh. The website is x dot ai. If you guys want to check it out. You know, one of the things that intrigued me about this story is it suggests that because Amy is sort of groping for some emotional and empathetic characteristics, that it's not that far off in the future. Yeah, I mean, I think computer scientists will quickly tell you that they are trying to figure out how to at least get robots to mimic social skills. Well, actually, you're in San Francisco, You're in the heart of all this, and you've spent a lot of time writing about the impact of technological advances on the economy, not just the macro economy, at what's happening in the micro economy at an enterprise level. Did tory story mesh with your experience? Didn't resonate with you? Yeah, definitely. I mean, so I wrote this big story about artificial intelligence UM about a year and a half ago, and even since then, even in that year and a half, there's been a remarkable amount of progress in that field. It's amazing how quickly scientists are making progress in this field. But at the same time, you know, one thing that I learned that was really important is that there are a lot of things that computers can do, but there are many, many, many other things that computers cannot do. Um Our human brains are amazing. They're so complex in ways that you never would have thought before, and are capable of doing so many things that robots aren't able to do. Daniel said, Like, it feels like we're not that far away from computers being able to replicate the full social skills of a human being. UM. From the conversations that I had with artificial intelligence experts, most people felt that this was something that was decades and decades away. We should probably define what where, what social skills aren't, what qualifies as social skills? What you guys think, Yeah, definitely, I mean, let's let's start with this. So, like, you know, imagine this kind of spectrum between of tasks. Some's tasks are really repetitive. You're doing the same thing over and over again, and it's easy to write out a full instruction manual of what you're supposed to do. There's this, you know, on the other end of the spectrum, there are tasks that are really complex, really diverse. You're doing something different every single day. It's really creative. You're you're coming up with novel solutions all the time. The kind of tasks that are on the repetitive end of the spectrum are really easy to replicate, and those jobs are already gone. You can think of something you would do in a factory and like an auto factory, for example, where you're putting on the same part over and over again. Those kind of jobs are gone. But you think of something really complicated, like um being an executive editor like Dan, where you're making all these different decisions every single day, you're providing oversight, You're coming up with new things. That's the kind of thing a computer hasn't been able to do yet. Right, So it's a sense of collaboration, reading people like, kind of working off of social cues. All those things qualify social skills, and at least one expert that I talked to said that upward of the workforce needs at least some sort of collaboration to get their job done. So it's a lot. If we've advanced this quickly, what makes us think that that final stage is still some steps away? Because zacky, this made me recall a story you wrote in twenty fourteen about robots being deployed in lawyers offices doing legal work. You know, that's a whole other step away from the generic shot of a robot putting an engine head into an suv. Yeah, definitely. So this was you know, a very specific task in that lawyers UM currently are performing called you know, it's document reading in this initial stage of litigation where you have to decide which documents are relevant and which documents aren't relevant to your case. Before, it was impossible to have computers do that because it was just too complicated of a task. Every case of litigation was too different in order to kind of come up with this like master set of rules. But they found a way to do that do that by um giving a small group of lawyers the small subset of documents and having them say whether something is relevant or not relevant, and the computer is watching those humans make those decisions, and then the computer learns from that experience and is able to amplify that experience across a much broader set of documents for that specific case. UM. This leads to a lot of savings and dollars you know, in terms of like the labor that you have to employ, and it also makes the litigation process go a lot more, um go much faster. But I feel like to really illustrate how far away robots are in terms of just really being able to moot very well, maybe we should try to have a little bit of a conversation with Siri and see how that goes. Yeah, let's do it. Let's see, Siri, I'm feeling really sad today. I would give you a shoulder to cry on, Victoria if I had one. Thanks, that's really nice, but it didn't really make me feel better. You're welcome, okay, all right, Well, I'm not sure that has quite the same effect as if you know, Aki was asking me exactly why I was sad. I feel like if if I told you I was sad and you didn't ask me why or try to make me feel a little bit better about it, I might have to unfriend you. So that's that's a you know, a kind of social skill that Siri has been unable to learn yet. Can we follow or um framed Amy? I mean, let's talk a bit about Amy. Does she or it exists inside a computer, inside a micro ship or in this chap's office tory? Is there a humanoid look machine typing away to keyboard and her or it the name happens to be Amy. What are the dimensions that we're dealing with here? Amy is a machine. I mean she's not. She's not a robot sitting at a computer typing. You know, she she recognized. The machine recognizes patterns in the emails, you know, today, tomorrow, a time, and they use that very similar to how Google does. If if any of the listeners out there have Gmail, I'm sure they see when when someone sends an email with a time and a date, they'll see these dash lines under it and you can add it to your calendar. Um. You know, Amy is analyzing these these dates and these times and these words, um and being able to respond to that and and added to your calendar. So UM, I don't think you should think of it as like a robot sitting at a at a computer, like slaving away at a keyboard. Should we be scared of Amy? Well, I don't think we should be scared of Amy. As a Dennis Mortinson again, the creator Um said he's just trying to sort of eliminate this email back and forth that any human has to do. Whether you're lucky enough to have a personal assistant and your personal assistant does it, or like Aggie and I have to do it. Um, he just wants to eliminate that, so it frees you up to do things that are more productive and more worth a humans time. So I don't think we should be scared of amy. It's really interesting because I was doing research for this story, I was able to talk to people about what they think the future looks like in terms of how much work robots will be taking over, et cetera. And Paedro Domingos over at the University of Washington. He's he's the author of a new book on machine learning called The Master Algorithm, if any of you guys want to check it out. Um, but he sort of envisioned this world are robots will be able to do basically everything that humans currently do now in their work, but they're going to be certain things that will want a human touch for. So, you know, you don't want to go to the bar and like pour out like your feelings about how your girlfriend dumped you to a robot bartender. You want a real bartender who can take a shot with you and who you can like go back and forth on how terrible she was. Like. You want someone who really understands what you're looking for. And he says that these things are going to start to command a premium in the labor market, and there's gonna be way fewer of them, but they will still exist. They'll be a luxury sort of. But also in that new world, we're gonna totally have to rethink how people get money, how people live. Um. There's this idea floating around about basic income, and it's this this theory that you know, as robots basically take over the way that we earn a livelihood, and you're gonna have to be able to guarantee people some sort of fixed amount of income um that they can spend, whether that comes from the government, whether that comes from taxing the people who create robots that are gonna take all our jobs. We're gonna have to change sort of the distribution of capital because right now, you earn money based on you know, the scarcity of your labor um, and and once robots are taking that over, the money is going to be held by the people who control the robots, who invented them. So we're gonna have to rethink that. Going back to your bartending example, like if you're really really amazing bartender with these incredible, interpersonable skills and you're really warm and you make these really cool creative cocktails, then yeah, your future is golden. You're gonna be fine, and if anything, you're probably going to be making even more money in the future. But if you're kind of like the middle of the road bartender, like you know, you're you're kind of friendly, but not that friendly, and your cocktails aren't that created of it's pretty much, you know, the same stuff as what's on other menus around the city, then uh, your future isn't that bright. That probably means that your job is um much more vulnerable to robots and software. Right, creativity is going to be just a huge game changer. It already is now, but that's going to be really how you can leverage yourself, is what these experts said. Right, So I can't help but feel like it would lead to more inequality in terms of who wins and who loses. Yeah, you know, it reminds me of some of the issues we talked about in our inaugural episode with our friend Barry Bosworth of Brookings. He sketched for us a history of automation going back to the spinning wheel, steam engine, electricity, personal computers, where do you think Amy and machines like her fit into that historical sweepe. There's this weird dichotomy where we have people who are both afraid that robots are going to take all our jobs and also afraid that we're not innovating enough. Uh, that productivity is just gonna be sluggish forever. I don't I don't know which one is right. I don't think it's probably either extreme. I think it's going to be somewhere in the middle. Um, the so called Internet of things is really changing how we look at productivity and how we use technology to get data and to drive decision making and to to make our processes more efficient and smarter. Um. It just it may take some time for these things to show up in the data. I think that's what people are trying to figure out. But Dan, I think I have a more important question, and that is are you a robot? And Victoria we should probably wrap up, Tori. Tori, you know we started this episode with a question of whether a robot will be able to take our jobs? Should we ask Sirie? Oh? Yeah, we should definitely ask Seria. Okay, let's see what she says. Is a robot going to take all of our jobs. Interesting question, Victoria, all right, that was a super late answer, Siri. Yes, yes, old technology for the win. Sirie needs some work. Thanks again for listening to Bloomberg Benchmark. We will be back next week and you can find us on Bloomberg dot com, iTunes, Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, all the places um as well as on the Bloomberg terminal. And if you're on any of those platforms, please take a moment to rate and review the show so other listeners can find us and let us know what you thought of this show. You can reach us and follow us on Twitter at Daniel mass d C, Tori Stillwell, and Kita seven. We'll see you next week. And I am not a robot.