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,

I'll be approaching a time when most people won't have a job.

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

Yeah. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Ever since we first started making label 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's going to result in either humanity being reduced to

be in atomatons themselves, unable to feed their families because they can't compete with

robots, or result in us being slaughtered by a 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

fears 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 occur, or assume they can't be walked back or their impact

cushioned if they start heading in a direction deemed undesirable in some ways.

...