Robots are not taking your jobs yet

We Don't Know the Future

Josh Brown is a financial advisor, talking head on CNBC, and someone I follow on Twitter. He recently wrote a piece about robots taking over the world. In it, he argues one of the reasons the bull market continues apace is that we continue to invest in the companies (and the robots) that are displacing us. We're no longer scared about nuclear war with North Korea. We're more frightened that our jobs will soon become obselete. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this. I'm not nearly as worried as Josh is, because I think the premise that we can ever know what the future holds has been proven wrong time and time again.

Read any paper and you'll get a steady diet of the same stories. Robots are taking over our manufacturing jobs. Robots are going to deliver our products from Amazon. Robots are now making our investment decisions for us, and soon robots will analyze our chances at trial and perhaps even market our real estate for us. Robotos will be driving us everywhere and robots will be serving us at fast food restaurants. Also something something something blockchain bitcoin something (I have read so much about blockchain and still has no idea what it really is.)

All of the above may be true. I have a 5-month-old kid and I'm genuinely worried about his future. I have no idea if he should learn to code, or if coding will be obsolete by then. Should he learn Mandarin or Spanish? Will people still pursue liberal arts degrees, or will the need for teachers essentially be curtailed because so many colleges have shut down because they can't get their graduates any jobs? Will robots be driving us to a job, or will we live on a universal basic income and try and figure out the meaning of life in our spare time (we need meaningful work to be happy and satisfied so sitting around and pondering will not be good.)

One reason to temper this "robot take-over" fever is that we are absolutely horrible predictors of the future. Let's conservatively say humans have been walking the Earth for several hundred thousand years. For 99.9% of that time, we didn't even have the idea of a "future." The ancient Greeks went to Oracles to determine who would win a battle next week. They couldn't even begin to imagine what would happen next year (with the exception of trying to predict eclipses and the movements of the planets). With the advent of probability theory in the 16th century, we began to look at the future in a different way. It was the concept of gambling (we love incentives) that really made us focus on mathematical chances of something happening in the future. Complex probability was only born in the 1800's. This is, in the scheme of things, about 5 minutes ago. We're still terrible at this. We have no idea if the stock market is going to surge or crash, which is why humans have basically given up trying and flooded their retirement accounts with index funds instead of hand-picking stocks. We don't know if oil prices are going to go up or down (doesn't stop us from guessing all the time), and we foolishly try to predict who will win the Presidency every four years. We're idiots who keep repeating the same mistakes over and over, yet we think this time it's different.

I want you to do something for me: Think about any memory you had 15 years ago. Could be anything at all. Maybe you remember coming home, or maybe you remember playing football, or the birth of your kid. Whatever it is, just focus on yourself at that point in time. Now think about where you are literally right now. Could you possibly have imagined what your life is like today? Could you have imagined that you're working at "x" and you're sitting in this specific office, doing this specific type of work, reading this article on an electronic box that is connected to a thing that's connected to billions of other boxes through invisible beams in the air(!!!) that can tell you any piece of information from millions of different sources instantly. It's absurd. Imagine the concept of ordering a pizza from your phone without speaking to someone. Imagine the concept of a car pulling up and taking you somewhere and you paying this person without lifting your finger. You would think I was crazy if I explained this to you not 15 years ago. We have books beamed to us and we are connected to millions of people through websites and we can buy a house in pajamas. Yet, this is our reality now and we think nothing of it. We presume, however, that we'll know what life will be like 20 years from now. Cars will be autonomous and electric. Florida will be gone. Ariana Grande will be a distant memory. Who the hell knows? The point is, no one does.

The future has always frightened mankind. We don't control it and we don't know what it brings. Humans don't like that. We're engineered to survive and to deal with present risk, as opposed to preparing for future ones. I wouldn't be scared of robots any more than I'd be scared of running out of food. Either eventuality is just as likely (see chaos theory)

There are, of course, things we can do to hedge the risks we face. We used to have moats surrounding information. We'd have to pay someone to teach us Spanish or how to weld. Now we have YouTube and Dualingo. I can learn 190 languages for free. I can teach myself to code during the weekend without having to pay a dime. I can publish my own books and build my own website. The trick is to always add to the number of things you know. This may not assuage your fears or guard against any eventual robot overlord future, but it will give you some semblance of control, and having the confidence to know you'll be able to adapt and survive, no matter the cost. And, one more thing, relax a little more. Enjoy today as much as you can.