What Happens If Robots Automate The World? - John Danaher - #291

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, wonderful people. Welcome back. My guest today is John Danaher, and we're talking about what happens if robots automate the world. Having a job is valorised in modern society, but if our jobs are taken over by robots, will we find a sense of purpose in other things outside of work, or are we just doomed to lead a meaningless life? So today, expect to learn why technological unemployment might be desirable, what a cyborg utopia might look like, why John thinks losing work might not result in a loss of purpose, the risks of sacrificing human values in pursuit of utopia, and much more. Just all the robot episodes at the moment. You know, if it's from a sex robot to a self-driving car, to robot overlords and us existing in a vat somewhere. It's cool. I like thinking about this stuff. I like thinking about the future and where society might end up. Lots of challenging and difficult assumptions that we need to get past around what it means for the human race to be the lords of this earth. Anyway, but for now, it's time to learn about our robot overlords with the wise and wonderful John Danaher.
John Danaher, welcome to the show.

**John Danaher** (1:35)
Well, thanks for having me on. It's a great honor and privilege to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:39)
Before we get started, there is a very famous Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu teacher who shares your name. Did you know this?

**John Danaher** (1:46)
I am all too aware of this fact, yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (1:49)
Yeah, so I posted a big list of upcoming guests on my Instagram. And they're like, mate, I didn't know that you're interested in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And I'm thinking, does a guy who talks about that automation and robots also do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training? But it turns out that it's just two different, interesting people.

**John Danaher** (2:11)
Yeah, your fans probably got very excited when they thought it was the other John Danaher. He's got a much higher profile than me.

**Chris Williamson** (2:17)
Little do they know that they actually wanted to learn about robots. So what are we going to be talking about today? What's the topic of our discussion?

**John Danaher** (2:26)
Yeah, so we're going to talk about this book that I wrote a couple of years ago on Automation and Utopia, which is a very abstract philosophical look at the meaning of life in a post-work world. If robots take all our jobs away, what are we going to do with our time? Will we be able to find meaning and flourish?

**Chris Williamson** (2:46)
These sorts of questions are very common at the moment, I think. It seems like every other week someone's referring to when the robots take our jobs in a news article.

**John Danaher** (2:57)
Yeah, I mean, it's been a fairly persistent theme in popular media and academic discussions as well for the past decade or so. I'd say it really took off after the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent recession. Ironically, it was probably starting to ebb away a little bit more recently due to the uptick in the economy in the past couple of years, but I think COVID-19 has really kickstarted the discussion once more.

**Chris Williamson** (3:22)
An interesting thing I heard today on Ben shapiro's show was concerns about Joe Biden raising the US minimum wage to $15, encouraging many employers to replace workers with automation, precisely for that reason. If it costs X thousand, 10,000, hundreds of thousands of pounds to install the robot system, the more that you raise the minimum wage, the more and more that becomes competitive.

**John Danaher** (3:52)
Yeah, I mean, so I think like economics 101 would tell you if you raise the price of anything, if it raise the price of labor, you're going to make it less attractive for employers. There, I mean, I don't know exactly whether the rise in the minimum wage in the US to $15 would kickstart a wave of automation or whether we're in fact, in the midst of a wave anyway, that this is just a minor nudge along the path. There was an interesting World Economic Forum report a couple of months ago about the impact of COVID-19 on automation, which had a survey of business leaders around the world and the percentage of them that were looking to automate their workforces. I think it was about 41% of employers are looking to increase the amount of automation at the moment. And then I believe it's, again, somewhere in the 40% range of people who want to increase the amount of outsourcing of labor that they do.
And there's only a handful of employers that were actually looking to expand the workforce in the wake of COVID-19.