Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory,

we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

To hear it and every episode early and ad-free, plus hours of bonus content,

check out go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

This episode is brought to you by Raycon.

As ever more jobs can be done with automate assistance or even entirely by robots,

are we approaching a time when most people won't have a job?

And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Ever since we first started making labor-saving devices, even before the term robots

started appearing in sci-fi around a century ago, people's opinions have been mixed on

whether more automation is a good thing or not, or if it is going to result in either

humanity being reduced to being in automaton's themselves,

unable to feed their families because they can't compete with robots, or result in us being

slaughtered by runaway robots, oppressed by a minority with control over robots, or going the

other direction with us being put into a utopia in which everyone is a lazy hedonistic slug whose

every whim is tended to

by robots, or freed from drudgery and the fields of basic survival to turn our eyes to grand

our goals and prizes. Today we are going to discuss these options and ask how probable each is

and what we can do to prevent an option or encourage it, mitigate it, or just

control it to a good end.

And we need to start by acknowledging that none of those concerns can be casually dismissed

as unlikely, but nor should we be convinced that they are inevitable, or even where they might

...