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Ooook! This was one of the more exhausting videos to finish. Took forever, we spent so much time on all sorts of details. Tried a few new animations, hope you like them! As I said in the last post, universal basic income is next. But we might do a shorter automation bonus video (shorter in this context means around 7 minutes...) because we had to cut three minutes of material from this video last week. Ok. I'll write another post in the next few days. For now we are just happy that this project is over. Long videos are great and all but they are much more draining. As always thank you so much for your support. We really mean it when we say it helps us doing this. We would never have been able to make this big of a video without patreon. 

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The Rise of the Machines – Why Automation is Different this Time

Automation in the Information Age is different. Books we used for this video: The Rise of the Robots: http://bit.ly/2sHcIqZ The Second Machine Age: http://bit.ly/2sjuOSt Support us on Patreon so we can make more videos (and get cool stuff in return): https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt?ty=h Robot Poster & Kurzgesagt merch here: http://bit.ly/1P1hQIH The music of the video here: Soundcloud: http://bit.ly/2sfwlJf Bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2r17DNc Facebook: http://bit.ly/2qW6bY4 – Study about job automation in the next two decades: http://bit.ly/1mj2qSJ THANKS A LOT TO OUR LOVELY PATRONS FOR SUPPORTING US: Brandon Eversole, Andrew Anglehart, Christian Ahlin, Kathleen Woolum, Estel Anahmias, Adam Schlender, Mike Luque, Encyclo, Stevie Taylor, Brent Yoder, Invisibleman, Jeff Lam, Christopher Hayes, Oliver Walker, gwendolyn bellermann, Matt Logan, Philip Chou, Brandon Young, Arlo Stewart, Thomas Hodnemyr, Viachaslau Hurmanau, Sam Cousins, Robin Hultgren, Jose Schroeder, Ched, Claustrophobya, Charles Wang, Dolan Dark, Casaro, Donglin Li, Sarah Thompson, Pamela Palmer, Fergal Harrington, Jonas Erath, Spencer, Zsuzsi Balai, Tyler Roberts, Allyssa Blalock, Robert Bishop, Carl-Johan Linde, Thomas Nielsen, Heather Pray, Marco Boneberger, Mehsotopes, Joe Johnston, ugo dubois, Keagan Boys, Miles Gard, Frantisek Sumsala, Scott, Tobias Theobald, Solar3ty Games, Nicholas Carr, K41N_of_2358, Daniel RodrÌguez, Pixlpit, Gytis Kirvela, Thomas Flanigan, Dwagon, Costin Graur, Mavis Everett, Kwiatkowski Robert, Huo Benpeng, Dan Gretton, Joshua Davison, Bryce Comp, Andrey Lipattsev, DEFECT DAVIS, Gurleen Saini, Andrew "FastLizard4" Adams, Isak Hietala, Leon Han, Sarah Johnson, Kieran Chakravorty, Hanna Khoury, Kimberly Martin, Jon Glass, Julius Wroblewski, Ben Zautner, Kester Falge, Juan Florez, Tad Moore Help us caption & translate this video! http://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel?c=UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q&tab=2 The Rise of the Machines – Why Automation is Different This time

Comments

Lines of Desire

As an automation specialist, this is really interesting. I'm really curious to see what you say about UBI though because the idea is sooooo unrealistic

Anonymous

Very interesting. Great animations and a very friendly way to explain things, for people new to the topic like me. I will be looking forward to the video that talks about how this could lead us to a new society or even work against inequity (following you from a country that sadly highligths in its inequity). Great job!

Anonymous

I am a developer. I think my job in future will be translating requirements into software specifications then press the generate button and check if the software is good.

Anonymous

First I just want to say how great you animations and videos are. But I must say there is, in my opinion, an excess of extreme intricacies and details. So much so, and with the snapshots going by so quickly I feel I can't admire everything and I miss a lot of waste work! Also I notices a lot of the animations hover and move, this is nice but I feel is somewhat unnecessary. I would rather see more video more often than overdone animations... Don't get me wrong I love this level of animation but I realize how much work it must take and I'd rather have you put that work into more content! Again great job! On question on the content: What about the rise of these hipster like jobs and want to return to more traditional ways? We could change how the economy work whenever we want no? Are we kind of talking about robot taking over?

ANTIcarrot

Obvious CGI bird is obvious. :P

Anonymous

Another book about this subject: Humans Need Not Apply by Jerry Kaplan. Just got done reading it and it follows much of the same logic with additional examples. RE: Basic Income, please talk about the GiveDirectly experiment in Kenya, I found it super interesting.

Anonymous

In your store, could you sell the books you use for reference?

Anonymous

"Jobs disappearing is bad"? This is taken as axiomatic, but this video, and by pretty much everyone in politics. Why? I certainly hope not to have a job when I'm 65... with any luck, before that. How to I plan to achieve such an incomprehensible feet? By investing my money. In other words, by *owning* those robots that are coming to take "my" job. Fortunately, we live in an unprecedented time in which it is actually possible for anyone with some surplus capital to do so... if only they could manage to have a bit of money left over at the end of the month. We need politicians who, rather than promising never-ending work for all humans, implement policies to encourage savings and investment. Only when we free our society of the oppression of the obsolete Protestant work ethic can we move towards a retirement age of 40, a 20-hour work week, and 24 weeks of vacation.

Anonymous

It makes me think of my job XD i'm making photorealistic 3D stuff (rendering 3D models with realistic textures)

Rob

Loved it, and I saw my bird! Woohoo! Keep up the great work, folks!

Rake

This video was fantastic, so colourful and kinetic. Thank you :)

Jeetix

Been thinking about this for a long time now, glad to see Kurzgesagt making a video on the topic :D Today it looks like this modern automation is taking over more jobs than what's sustainable unless we change. Automation lets companies run with less employees, and make the production of what ever more efficient. This results inn more money saved and a growth in income for the owners of the company. This development is not sustainable in the long run as Kurzgesagt pointed out there will also be less consumers, when people don't have an income. As I'm as well is involved in producing systems that takes over manual jobs, and at the same time see for myself that more and more people stands without a job over the years. I have been thinking. And I thought: Why not cut down on work hours without lowering peoples income? Basically; Instead of working 8 hours a day, cut it down to 6. but raise the hourly pay so that the monthly result will turn out the same. This gives everyone more spare time. I doubt this is something companies will do themselves, but isn't this why we have politicians? Who decided that a normal day of work should be 8 hours? Maybe it was necessary before, but today the circumstances are different and how many hours a normal workday should be needs to be re-considered. Most people I know today have to much to do and to little time to do it. we need 8 hours sleep, we work 8 hours and about 3 hours disappears into daily routine stuff like driving/riding the bus, waiting different places, eating, showering, feeding, etc. that leaves us with less than 6 hours every day to do what we desire. And probably even less as most people have other duties they need to do as well. I don't think more free time would harm us. Raise hourly pay and cut down the number of hours every human need to work, and I think this problem is as good as solved for now. If we don't do that, then the few who do have jobs will need to provide for everyone else in tax money.

Anonymous

Thank you for collect all these information into this video ^^.

Anonymous

birdman!!

Michael Finney

Keep up the wonderful work!

Kamen Astartes

Annnnd just joined the patreon. Keep up the great work👍

Anonymous

Another great video! I love your drawing style and the way you explain stuff. It's awesome :D

Michael Gehrmann

A little bit Dark, but as you said, more is coming. While I see the appeal of the universal basic income, i guess it will have to be combined with cultural changes in the perception of work, growth and prosperity. UBI is changing the definition of money from a placeholder, that is equivalent to the work put into a given task. While this isn't far from perfect, it's still the most universal tool we use for human interaction. When money is loosing it's tie to the physical product, there needs to be a replacement for that. The discussion about UBI is opening the interesting question of the goals of society. What do we want to achieve, and wich tasks to archive these goals do we value with wich mechanism? If not done right, UIB is actually creating the kind of capitalism that it tries to repel: It turns consuming into a job and money isn't anymore the placeholder for work. It's degraded to the briefing for the job of consumption: “Here's 20 bucks, spend them“ UIB is a hack for a error in current model of business. It's socialism 2.0. And while the Idea of socialism is appealing, it's execution is utterly fraud. Taking away the money from companies to distribute it to the people takes away the incentive for individual companies to improve their products, services and so on. It's centralizing business decisions to the state and looses the power of a huge majority of the workforce driving these decisions themselves and permanently seeking improvements. Instead of UIB I propose a change in the current evaluation of business success. We need a new key performance indicator of a success of a company. A combination of Products/Services produced and money spent. Uninvested profits needs to be seen as access money not spent and be is snuffed upon. If you have a successful company your business goal should be: a) Invest your profit, to improve your product or service b) Create services, driven by your company values, that are not for profit (e.g. Education Tools, free services, charity etc.). c) Spend your money of product and services for your employees and shareholders d) Invest into Research, Science, Education and local public services e) create a new product or service Money on the bank in a way needs to loose it's value over time. The current mechanism of inflation tries to mimic this effect, but is affects poorer people much harder and has no effect on people who don't have to worry about money anyway. And like UBU it's driven by the mechanism of universal groth. A make more, consume more, use more resources. Machines are a great way to do more with less resources. But we need to shift to a do better with the same amount or less resources. What is utterly missing is the definition of »better« outside the realm of simple money profit. The current model would fire the cleaning lady and replace it with a robot. The desirable model is turning the cleaning lady into a mistress over a horde of robots, who help her to spend more of her time on the details, that are currently an expensive bonus. We actually see this in web services. Neural Network Algorithms sometimes replace existing jobs. But more often it’s doing jobs, that had just none been done before. Nobody sit’s down the caption every youtube-video to make it accessible to deaf people. Nobody spends the time to translate every blog entry on this planet to every language out there. Nobody tags every photo you have ever taken so you find all photos of your grandpa, that you have taken in the last 10 years. Nobody digitizes every book out of print by hand, to make it available on the web. Or checks your master thesis for spelling errors and finally reads it to you aloud so you can check again. And nobody checks every plant on a field and says »well, this one is fine, but the one next to it needs harf a teaspoon of fertilizer«. These are the examples of »better« that we should strive for. You mention that you produce your videos with far less people than a classical TV Production. But would this video been produced at all without the technology. Would your company and your jobs even exist without the technology? In addition there is a shift of business model: Individuals, who value your great work, and pay for it on a monthly basis. These two factors have enabled you, to shift from a simple profit driven model to create a value driven company. Yes, the dangers you show in your video are real. But only, if we don’t evolve our current model of doing business. But in companies like yours, we actually see the grass root of an evolving way to work and consume. You created a new product, that wouldn’t have existed 15 Years ago. And we as consumers value it differently.

Anonymous

Automation also makes the stuff you need or want a lot cheaper. And I think most people will be able to create some sort of value to others (which is the important thing, not having a job). Post-scarcity world, coming up :)

ANTIcarrot

Another reason that NOW is different from THEN is that mechanical machines like steam shovels require regular maintenance, inspection and part replacement, all of which needs workers. Computers require no maintenance. A well built computer installed in an appropriate enviroment can work for decades with occasional fan replacement. Modern computer automation is simply more reliable than the older mechanical forms. That alone eliminates huge swathes of jobs.

Michael Gehrmann

Oh. I our system admins would disagree with you. Computers are fragiles beasts, and a server room full of them is factory of maintenance tasks for itself. Especially as soon you create robots, Machines that interact and manipulate with the physical work, the stresses on material and maintenance aren't that different from regular machines. The integrate mechanisches of an indigo digital printer might even be more fragile, than the simple mechanics of a printing press made from cast iron and lead letters. A machine from the 50s might still do it's job. Try to get a PC from the early 90s up and running.

Marek Kowalczyk

Sorry but this video is not based on solid economic theory but on Keynesian distortion thereof. Case in point: economy is NOT based on consumption but on production. Also, you're making the mistake of correlation with causation. I.e., you're implying the stalled growth in number of hours worked, diminishing value of college degree and falling wages are a result of automation. Have you looked at alternative explanations of these phenomena? How about applying the Austrian theory of the business cycles (von Mises, Rothbard et al.) to explain those phenomena? May I suggest spending more of your 900 hours on deeper research of such important topics rather than repeating the contents of NYT bestsellers. Inadvertently promoting misinformation on social and economic topics is really harmful to the intellectual posture of the society. With such a large audience you have a moral obligation not to misinform.

Anonymous

Hi, Guys! I was thinking about Artificial intelligence and... The Real risk of High automation is what is the limit to a Machine "fix" a problem in mankind without interfere in human Life. For example, this program automation can simply give a calculation that Men's interference has high probability to cause more injury on the work system them they can be dispensable or it is not more necessary.... How can we program these machines a Limit to this conclusion? 🤔