Waching daily Jul 7 2017

(slow rhythmic jazz music)

- Capitalism, actually I think there's a consensus

on balancing the power of capitalism

to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship and,

come up with different ideas and

have them compete in the marketplace,

while still having compassion for people.

Some people say "well oh, the right wants to do this

and the left wants to do this."

Actually if you look,

in any nation,

uh...

the right and the left are actually very close.

If you look at it from the perspective of human history.

Um...

The right wants to go a little more slowly,

in sort of building the social safety net,

the left is a little more aggressive

on that...

But if you look--say take American politics,

nobody is advocating "oh well lets just not have a social

safety net, let's undo social security and medicare."

And, nobody says that,

and if you look at the broad

movement, we're moving more towards

building a more comprehensive social safety net.

And one of the reasons for that is we can afford it.

Cause one of the great

movements in human history, and I believe its

fueled by information technology, is greater wealth.

The average wage today is eleven times greater per hour

than it was a century ago, in the United States and Europe.

So, why, we had no social safety net at all

until 1930s in the United States,

when social security was put in place.

Was that because people just weren't liberal enough

and we hadn't learned the value of these liberal programs?

No, it's just, there wasn't the money to do it.

Now, you know, social security is very basic.

If you look at the social safety net

that's in place now, it's very complex.

It's certainly not perfect, some parts of it

are highly respected, like if somebody collects

social security that's considered a perfectly

good thing to do, maybe foodstamps

are a little more controversial.

But they're very ubiquitous nonetheless.

And so, left and right,

and other political movements disagree

on the details of this, but if you really

look at it from the broad perspective

of history, we're moving in that direction

of...

enforcing entrepreneurship, so that we

have the new ideas that

fuel progress while...

taking care of people.

Certainly, in the developed countries

they don't want people just starving on the streets and,

if you go out, even a decade,

the ability to provide a very

high standard of living for everyone,

is going to be far more prominent than it is today.

3D printing will be able to print out

at low cost, all the physical things we need.

Vertical agriculture, which has profound benefits

in terms of producing food, and very inexpensively and very

high quality, and without chemicals, and done

without using the 40% of

vital real estate that now

is used by horizontal agriculture,

that's gonna provide very high quality, inexpensive food.

3D printing will print out modules that you can

snap together Lego style, to put together a building

is already being done,

there's been some exciting applications of that in Asia.

It's early, and they're really kind of demonstrations

but, that's gonna be very easy to do in

ten years from now,

people say "uh, but we're running out of space

we're really crowded together, there's no land."

To answer that, I invite people to take a train

across United States, Europe, China,

anywhere in the world, 95% of the land

is not used, there's plenty of space.

We've artificially congregated ourselves

and crowded ourselves,

as a communication technology.

So the city was an early communication technology,

so we could be together, and work and play together.

With the advent of virtual reality,

where you could be anywhere, already even with the

sort of crude forms we have, like video conferencing,

people are spreading out.

You know, my work group is all over the world and

it's not quite as good as being together

but it's getting there when we have

avatars both in virtual reality, and real reality,

that are really very realistic

representations of you, which I think

we'll get to within the next decade.

Our need to congregate into artificially

crowded spaces like cities is going to dissipate.

So, I mean already, the poor have amenities

that kings and queens did not have a century ago.

Like flush toilets, refrigerators, air conditioning

radio, television, computers

and

physical things we need, that we consider luxurious

will be, just like software entities.

So, you know, if you have access to the internet

you've got millions of songs at your disposal,

and documents and books and, you're incredibly wealthy.

I was very excited as a teenager

when I saved up thousands of dollars, which

took a long time, from my doing a paper route,

to buy an Encyclopedia Britannica.

So now, you've got a much better encyclopedia

and that's one of thousands of free information services.

A kid in Africa with their smart phone,

has access to more intelligent information

than the President of United States did, twenty years ago.

And some people say "yeah that's true

it's amazing, you know, in the

information world, but you can't eat information technology,

you can't wear it you can't live in it."

Well, all that's gonna change as well.

We'll print out clothing too, with 3D printers,

and it's gonna meet our physical needs.

So, we'll be able to meet the needs of everyone.

Not everyone has the wherewithal to

compete, I think our primary motivation

to compete with entrepreneurial ideas is

just the self satisfaction and actualization

that you get from being creative and,

increasingly work is moving in that direction.

You know, a century ago you were happy if

you had a back breaking job that

could put food on your family's table.

Increasingly, not everyone, but increasingly people

get gratification from their employment.

We're moving up Maslow's hierarchy.

I think that'll be the primary

motivation to work in the future.

But already 65% of jobs

in the United States and Europe are information jobs,

and...

you know, if I were an prescient futurist in 1900

I'd say, okay well 38% of you

work on farms, you probably work 14 hour days,

that's gonna be 2% by the year 2015.

And 25% of you work

on factory's, and that's gonna be 9%.

And people go "oh my god, we're gonna be out of work" and,

then I say, well don't worry we're

gonna invent new jobs, and they're

gonna be even more interesting.

And people say, "oh really what new jobs?"

And my answer would be, well I don't

know we haven't invented them yet.

That's actually not a good answer politically.

That's why this has been a politically difficult

issue, because people can see the jobs going away.

They don't see the new jobs, because

they haven't been invented yet.

If I were really prescient, I'd say

well the new jobs are gonna be creating apps

for mobile devices and trading things on Ebay

and creating websites and doing data analysis, and

and I'd also say that 20% of the

workforce is gonna be studying art

and music and poetry and astronomy.

Which is what happened, we had fifty-two thousand

college students in the United States

at the end of the 19th century.

We have twenty million today,

ten million who service them as faculty and staff.

That's thirty million people,

that's 20% of the American workforce.

And their studying poetry and art

and music and astronomy, and it's

considered a worthwhile thing to do.

So we are moving towards being creative as new work.