I thought to get started

there is a question of

what exactly a robot is in 2014.

The first, what modernly are robots, from 1961.

The Unimate on the left there,

which was in a GM factory in New Jersey.

And these robots followed a series of actions

repeatedly, again and again without sensing

the external environment.

At my current company called Rethink

we have been building a different sort

of industrial robot that is aware

of it's environment, is safe to be close with,

and a line worker not only can be up close with it,

but a line worker can figure out how

to train it to do some task in just a few minutes.

We've seen this sort of thing with Amazon.

The robots going at the shelves

and bringing the shelves to the human picker

and the human picker reaches in

and does the grab and the packing.

I think this is a new sort of robot

that we're going to see more of

by making the robot be tools

that ordinary workers can use.

Are they first going to hit in an

already battered labor sector?

Traditional employment in manufacturing?

That's yesterday's news.

That's been going on for 30+ years.

I think it's more likely to hit

in the part of the work force as you say

that's already been fairly hardly hit

by technology and automation.

It's kind of the lower end of the middle class

is where the real job loss,

the real wage compression has happened.

I think that's likely to continue

because what a lot of lower middle class

workers do is some kind of work

in the physical world.

They're home health aids,

they're cooks, they're working

out there in the world.

Automation is coming to some of those jobs.

Yeah, but I'm worried we're not

gonna have enough robots, really.

Say again?

We're not gonna have enough robots.

There's a demographic inversion happening

where there's gonna be so many more

older people relative to the number

of younger people.

We've never had such a demographic change

in all of human history before.

So providing those services is gonna be

very very expensive.

If you had to guess what the impact

of that demographic change would be,

what would you say?

I think it's where at least a lot

of the low to mid scale jobs are gonna come

in the years ahead.

Just taking care of grandma.

With probably a robot arm that helps

lift her or turn her or do the work

that's hard to do.

But I'm with Rod.

It's going to be a big source

labor and it's not going to be

automated out of existence.

What's interesting is this vision

of it being a hybrid, of the robot

not as a substitute, but as an aid.

Yeah, I see it as people

and robots working together more and more.

The thing that I have really liked most

is when Baxter's gone into some factories

the workers have seen it operating

and then have come to whoever is in charge of Baxter

and said Can we get Baxter to do this job that I hate?

One little plastics factory,

regrinding the misformed parts,

they have to put on a mask.

It's a dirt, dusty job.

They've got a Baxter doing that

24 hours a day now.

That was the election of the people in the factory.

Up until now technology has done

at least as good a job of

creating jobs and creating work

all up and down the income spectrum

as it's done of destroying jobs.

It's been a really happy balance so far.

I personally think that balance might be

about to change.

But that's not gospel at all.

People have been saying that for about 200 years.

It hasn't happened yet.

We thought the PC was gonna eliminate office jobs.

That was one of the things.

It didn't eliminate office jobs.

It changed what office workers did.

Over the long term--

It did.

It eliminated office jobs.

But that wasn't in the first two years.

But the hype cycle was way, way ahead of that.

If you had bought stock in paper companies

at the time we were talking about paperless companies

you'd be owning Wire, you wouldn't just be reading it.

(man on left laughs)

(piano)

(object whooshing through the air)