The value of your humanity in an automated future | Kevin Roose

51,700 views ・ 2021-03-24

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Transcriber: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Camille Martínez
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I was in my mid-20s the first time I realized
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that I could be replaced by a robot.
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At the time, I was working as a financial reporter
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covering Wall Street and the stock market,
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and one day, I heard about this new AI reporting app.
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Basically, you just feed in some data,
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like a corporate financial report or a database of real estate listings,
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and the app would automatically strip out all the important parts,
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plug it into a news story
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and publish it,
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with no human input required.
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Now, these AI reporting apps,
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they weren't going to win any Pulitzer Prizes,
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but they were shockingly effective.
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Major news organizations were already starting to use them,
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and one company said that its AI reporting app
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had been used to write 300 million news stories in a single year,
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which is slightly more than me
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and probably more than every human journalist on earth combined.
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For the last few years,
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I've been researching this coming wave of AI and automation,
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and I've learned that what happened to me that day
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is happening to workers in all kinds of industries,
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no matter how seemingly prestigious or high-paid their jobs are.
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Doctors are learning that machine learning algorithms
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can now diagnose certain types of cancers more accurately than they can.
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Lawyers are going up against legal AIs that can spot issues in contracts
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with better precision than them.
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Recently at Google, they ran an experiment with an AI that trains neural networks --
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essentially, a robot that makes other robots.
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And they found that these AI-trained neural networks
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were more accurate than the ones that their own human programmers had coded.
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But the most disturbing thing I learned in my research
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is that we've been preparing for this automated future
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in exactly the wrong way.
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For years, the conventional wisdom has been that if technology is the future,
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then we need to get as close to the technology as possible.
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We told people to learn to code and to study hard skills
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like data science, engineering and math,
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because all those soft skills people,
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those artists and writers and philosophers,
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they were just going to end up serving coffee to our robot overlords.
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But what I learned was that essentially the opposite is true.
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Rather than trying to compete with machines,
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we should be trying to improve our human skills,
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the kinds of things that only people can do,
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things involving compassion and critical thinking and moral courage.
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And when we do our jobs,
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we should be trying to do them as humanely as possible.
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For me, that meant putting more of myself in my work.
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I stopped writing formulaic corporate earnings stories,
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and I started writing things that revealed more of my personality.
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I started a financial poetry series.
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I wrote profiles of quirky and interesting people on Wall Street
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like the barber who cuts people's hair at Goldman Sachs.
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I even convinced my editor to let me live like a billionaire for a day,
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wearing a 30,000 dollar watch and driving around in a Rolls Royce,
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flying in a private jet.
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Tough job,
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but someone's got to do it.
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And I found that this new human approach to my job
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made me feel much more optimistic about my own future,
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because you can teach a robot to summarize the news
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or to write a headline that's going to get a lot of clicks
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from Google or Facebook,
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but you can't automate making someone laugh
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with a dumb limerick about the bond market
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or explaining what a collateralized debt obligation is to them
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without making them fall asleep.
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And as I researched more,
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I found so many more examples of people who had succeeded this way
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by refusing to compete with machines
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and instead making themselves more human.
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Take Rus.
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Rus Garofalo is my accountant.
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He helps me with my taxes every year,
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and as you can probably tell from the photo,
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Rus is not a traditional accountant.
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He's a former standup comedian,
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and he brings his comedic sensibility to his work.
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I swear, I've had more fun talking about itemized deductions with Rus
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than at actual comedy shows that I've paid real money to see.
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Rus knows that in the age of TurboTax,
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the only way for human accountants to stay relevant
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is bringing something to the table other than tax expertise.
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So he started a company called Brass Taxes.
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Get it?
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He hired a bunch of other funny and personable accountants,
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and he started looking for clients in creative industries
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who would appreciate the value of having a human being
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walk them through their taxes.
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Now, technically, I should be very worried about Rus,
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because tax preparation is a highly automation-prone industry.
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In fact, according to an Oxford University study,
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it has a 99 percent chance of being automated.
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But I'm not worried about Rus,
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because he's figured out a way to turn tax preparation from a chore
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into an entertaining human experience
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that lots of people, including me,
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are willing to pay for.
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Or take Mitsuru Kawai.
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Sixty years ago, Mitsuru started as a junior trainee
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at a Toyota factory in Japan.
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He made car parts by hand.
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And this was the 1960s,
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an era where the auto industry was undergoing
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a huge technological transformation.
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The first factory robots had started coming onto the assembly lines,
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and a lot of people were worried
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that auto workers were going to become obsolete.
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Mitsuru decided to focus on what, in Japanese, is called "monozukuri" --
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basically, human craftsmanship.
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He studied all the nuanced, intricate details of auto design,
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and he developed these kind of sixth-sense skills
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that few of his other colleagues had.
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He could listen to a machine and tell when it was about to break
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or look at a piece of metal and figure out what temperature it was
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just by what shade of orange it was glowing.
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Eventually, Mitsuru's bosses noticed that he had all these skills
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that his coworkers didn't,
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and they made him really valuable,
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because he could work alongside the robots filling in the gaps,
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doing the things that they couldn't do.
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He kept getting promoted and promoted,
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and just this year,
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Mitsuru Kawai was named Toyota's first-ever Chief Monozukuri Officer,
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in recognition of the 60 years that he spent teaching Toyota workers
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that even in a highly automated industry,
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their human skills still matter.
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Or take Marcus Books.
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Marcus Books is a small, independent, Black-owned bookstore
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in my hometown of Oakland, California.
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It's a pretty amazing place.
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It's the oldest Black-owned bookstore in America,
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and for 60 years,
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it's been introducing Oaklanders
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to the work of people like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou.
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But the most amazing thing about Marcus Books
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is that it's still here.
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So many independent bookstores have gone out of business
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in the last few decades
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because of Amazon or the internet.
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So how did Marcus Books do it?
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Well, it's not because they have the lowest prices
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or the slickest e-commerce setup or the most optimized supply chain.
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It's because Marcus Books is so much more than a bookstore.
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It's a community gathering place,
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where generations of Oaklanders have gone to learn and grow.
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It's a safe place
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where Black customers know that they're not going to be followed around
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or patted down by a security guard.
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As Blanche Richardson, one of the owners of Marcus Books, told me,
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"It just has good vibes."
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Earlier this year, Marcus Books temporarily closed,
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and like a lot of businesses, its future was uncertain.
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It was raising money through a GoFundMe page.
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And then George Floyd was killed.
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The streets filled with protests,
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and orders poured in to Marcus Books from all over the country --
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first, a hundred books a day,
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then 200,
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then 300.
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Today, they're selling five times as many books
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as they were before the pandemic,
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and their GoFundMe page has raised more than 250,000 dollars.
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And if you look at the comments on its GoFundMe page,
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you can see why Marcus Books has survived all these years.
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One person wrote that we have a duty to preserve gems like this
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in our community.
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Someone else said,
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"I've been going to Marcus Books since I was a child,
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and Blanche Richardson showed me many kindnesses."
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"Gems."
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"Kindnesses."
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Those aren't words about technology.
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They're not even words about books.
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They're words about people.
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The thing that saved Marcus Books
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was how they made their customers feel:
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an experience, not a transaction.
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If you, like me,
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sometimes worry about your own place in an automated future,
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you have a few options.
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You can try to compete with the machines.
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You can work long hours,
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you can turn yourself into a sleek, efficient productivity machine.
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Or you can focus on your humanity
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and doing the things that machines can't do,
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bringing all those human skills to bear
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on whatever your work is.
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If you're a doctor, you can work on your bedside manner
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so that your patients come to see you as their friend
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rather than just their medical provider.
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If you're a lawyer, you can work on your trial skills
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and your client interactions
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rather than just cranking out briefs and contracts all day.
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If you're a programmer,
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you can spend time with the people who actually use your products,
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figure out what their problems are and try to solve them,
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rather than just hitting next quarter's growth targets.
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That's how we become futureproof.
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Not by taking on the machines,
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but by excelling in the areas where humans have a natural advantage.
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By living and working more like humans,
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we can make ourselves impossible to replace.
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And the good news is that we don't have to learn a single line of code
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or deploy a single algorithm.
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In fact, you already have everything you need.
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Thank you.
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