Matt Miller has started a new podcast called This Is Interesting. I just listened to the first one and it’s good. I’m a big fan of his political conversation podcast Left, Right and Center, where he moderates as the political centrist between a liberal and conservative pundit. I’ve listened to him do that show hundreds of times, so I am very familiar with where he’s coming from and interesting in his take on things. (I’ve written about LR&C here.)

I think this show will stand on its own, though. So far it’s a bit like a “deep read” episode of Planet Money, talking in some depth to authors about their topic. In the first This Is Interesting–“The Robots are Coming!”–Matt talks to Martin Ford of The Lights in the Tunnel and Erik Brynjolfsson of Race Against the Machine.

A couple of the ideas I’m left with:

Outsourcing jobs is just a stage in the direction of mechanizing them, so countries like China and India stand to be hit the hardest by the rise of robots.

What a job pays is not a great indicator of whether it is in danger of robot-takeover. Radiologists will be robots pretty soon, but housekeeping staff will not. Auto mechanics are safe for a while too, combining the physical dexterity and cognitive flexibility that is difficult for now to mechanize. (I’m guessing I’m safe as a therapist (though they’re working on it) for the time being. I hope we get some county-approved-paperwork robots, though.)

If education is about creating the ability to add value to the economy (i.e., have a paying job) then we need to be focusing education on what machines can’t yet do. This may be tough–a quickly receding horizon.

There is no reason to believe that market forces will create as many jobs as there are people, and this is likely to happen less and less. If we lose the massive wealth redistribution system that is jobs-with-mechanizable-routines, we will end up having to massively expand our welfare system.

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