Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world create an astounding amount of free content for Facebook and Twitter and the like. It would be by far the largest sweatshop in the world except that even sweatshop laborers are paid a nominal amount. Sure, we get a degree of utility from such services, but we’ve essentially turned ourselves into unpaid volunteers for multibillion-dollar corporations. There is, perhaps, something evolutionary about such participation, the ants cooperating to piece together a colony, but from an economic standpoint, it’s a stunning turn of events, and it all pivots on the new technologies.

“When Robots Steal Our Jobs,” a BBC radio program about machines and automation being introduced into reliably white-collar fields like law and medicine, sums up this phenomenon really well with this fact: “Last year, we collectively spent nearly 500 million hours each day updating Facebook. That’s 25 times the amount of labor it took to build the Panama Canal. And we did it all for free.”

Andrew McAfee, co-author of The Second Machine Age, and David Graeber are among the voices heard. The latter thinks capitalism won’t survive automation, but perhaps they’ll be something worse (e.g., techno-fascism). 

One thing I feel sure about in the aforementioned intersection of AI and medicine is that robotics will be handling the majority of surgery at some point in the future. 

The show plays a clip of Woody Allen doing stand-up in San Francisco in 1968, addressing a fear that began to take hold that decade: “My father was fired. He was technologically unemployed. My father worked for the same firm for 12 years. They replaced him with a tiny gadget this big that does everything that my father does but does it much better. The depressing thing is that my mother ran out and bought one.”