97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2020

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines are everywhere, most of us are still working pretty hard. But maybe that’s about to change. Futurists like John Danaher believe that society is finally on the brink of making a transition to a world in which work would be optional, rather than mandatory — and he thinks that’s a very good thing. It will take some adjusting, personally as well as economically, but he envisions a future in which human creativity and artistic impulse can flourish in a world free of the demands of working for a living. We talk about what that would entail, whether it’s realistic, and what comes next.

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John Danaher received an LLM degree from Trinity College Dublin and a Ph.D. from University College, Cork. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research is situated at the overlap of legal studies and philosophy, and frequently involves questions of technology, automation, and the future. He is the coeditor of Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, and author of the recent book Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work. He writes frequently for publications such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Irish Times, and is the host of his own podcast, Philosophical Disquisitions.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. If you were following the
0:06.1	Presidential primary campaign here in the United States here in 2020
0:11.1	One of the most unusual candidates was Andrew Yang who had a set of very specific
0:16.2	Interesting messages that we don't usually hear in presidential campaigns. He was very concerned at particular about the
0:22.6	Oncoming wave of automation that is going to change the nature of the workforce and so his idea was that robots or
0:31.6	Automated technologies more generally would gradually replace people's jobs and therefore we had to provide a universal basic income to let people live and
0:41.0	Forish in a world that had much less work in it. So aside from what economic policy you think is the best idea
0:48.3	This question of whether or not automation really will replace people's jobs is a very important one
0:54.4	So that's what we're going to discuss today our guest is John Danner who's a senior lecturer in the law school at the National University of Ireland and his
1:02.8	interests are in the intersection of law,
1:05.4	neuroscience, technology, especially artificial intelligence and so forth. John has his own podcast called philosophical
1:12.4	Disquisitions that you can find a link to in the blog post and he's written a book called
1:17.6	Automation and Utopia human flourishing in a world without work so to put it very
1:23.5	Simplistically we'll get into more details in the podcast of course, but basically John says yes
1:29.0	Automation is coming. Yes, it's going to put us all out of work and yes
1:33.3	That is awesome because once we don't need to work we can do all these other wonderful things and so the question is well
1:39.1	What are these wonderful things will we really do them will we feel fulfilled without a job to go to nine to five?
1:46.2	Is there some moral hazard associated with not being a working person with having all the leisure time you want?
1:53.0	So John tries to make the argument that it's actually kind of the good thing that you might expect naively
1:58.6	You're still allowed to work you could do things
2:01.0	But we'll have a much better society and much better individual lives when we can choose what work to do what work not to do
2:08.5	It's extremely thought-provoking and very futuristic in a down to earth way
	...

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