A conversation about the robots taking our job—and how various forces have been taking our jobs for a while, and personal experiences with jobs and robots.

Hey, rich.

Hey Paul.

You all right?

Proteus?

Pardon?

That's the name of the robot that replaced me at the factory.

robot?

Oh, it moves the boxes around and keeps track of stuff.

stuff.

It used to be like, I go in, I got my coffee, they'd be like, gotta get

everything from section A to section W.

Okay.

And now Proteus, does it

Robot replaced your job.

It really did, and it sucks.

suck.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Sorry to hear that.

I've seen the robot though.

I think I saw a report on it.

It's pretty cool.

It's a little cooler than you, so there's that.

But sorry to hear about this.

This is terrible.

I'm gonna have to go get another job.

Well, good luck.

So this is a story Rich that's been playing out since the fifties where

the robots started coming in, right.

if not earlier.

And we've sort of integrated it into society.

We're not surprised when it happens anymore.

happened.

New innovation shows up, threatens jobs.

People get angry.

Yeah.

And it used to be the unions would fight it and so on and so forth, but now it

seems like, yep, the new robots here and, uh, those jobs are going, that,

that, that is now kind of built in our society is like, well you're gonna have

to retrain cuz we prefer the robot driven economy because it's so much cheaper.

It's an old story at this point.

If you've ever watched like the, you know, those arm robots at like

the auto factory, it's pretty wild.

They're just moving around real quick, screwing things in and

they look like they look coed up.

They do.

They're real.

Yeah, they're kind of jittery.

do that one little run on the track into the bathroom.

They, they, they do a bump and they're like, okay, let's move some more

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's, it's kind of one, one, you know, the factory sort of

automation story is an old story.

hired someone, uh, to help me move once and they came and I, they

ran up and down the stairs with all the boxes and I said, wow, you're running

up and down the stairs with boxes.

That's a lot if you're doing that every day.

And he said, I love my job.

I run up and down the stairs, I put the boxes into the truck, I put them

in and I looked at them and I was like, you are addicted to methamphetamines.

Okay.

Here's the thing though, Paul.

Um, it's not only robots that have been replacing jobs, um, globalization,

other humans have been you.

It's easy to hate a robot.

I hate these robots.

It's soulless.

It's terrible.

Yeah.

But it's true.

Like so.

Well, I mean Okay.

Go all the way.

Go back to on the water.

You ever see on the waterfront?

I have seen

Okay.

The, when you're in the union, you get, you have your hook where you

lift things out of the cargo ship.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then can, nobody wants to go back to that.

Right.

We, we like containerized shipping cuz it gets us all of our, we get

our sea monkeys delivered to Walmart,

The march of innovation and technology is unrelenting.

Well, and it's a thing, right?

Everybody has a particular point of view and it's often a very, it's a

moral and principled point of view, and then you fast forward 20 years

and so, so we live in that world.

That's the world we live in.

And here we are and, and I'm, I'm talking to you on a Zoom podcast recording rig.

That is, I, I, I don't know where it was made, but I know where it was made.

If I can paraphrase, Paul Ford, welcome to the future.

Yeah.

Here we

This all reminds me of a little story.

Okay.

My dad was a very well respected diamond setter.

Your, your father, he's no longer with us.

no longer with us.

He was, uh, his, he had a craft

Okay.

and his craft was, uh, the ability to set diamonds

into settings, uh, a pendant ring.

Uh, and so, which meant a lot of like, Drilling and bending gold and bending,

you know, rare metals to set diamonds.

And if you've seen like really fancy diamonds, like, uh, fancy jewelry,

you'll see very intricate layouts

They, they have their own words like filigree, like all these,

it's a whole world, right?

And he was very good at it.

And in fact, the, the British Royal family, I'm sure not the

very top of the chain, but they have a very big collection.

So somebody like.

Of, of humans or diamonds?

levels down.

You know, they would send pieces that needed to either be

repaired or to have the, the, the gemstones replaced or whatever.

And he would, they would watch over him while he did this work.

work.

Very

successful career.

eighties.

is late seventies, early eighties.

And then the company he was working for, which is a large, um, jewelry

manufacturer, producer, said, we, we would love for you to go to,

Okay,

And train 50, 80 diamond setters.

Teach them your craft.

Oh,

and it threw him into a tailspin.

He was, he saw it as a threat.

and it was a threat.

It was an actual genuine threat.

And he, he held his craft sacred.

It's something that he'd perfected over many years.

You know, he, he, his skill, like many other skills, were skills

you kind of protected, like you didn't, it's like sharing a recipe.

You don't share the, the secret ingredient, right?

Like he, he took pride in the fact that he was doing things that a lot of

people wouldn't do, cuz if you broke the jewelry by the way you were in.

You're breaking very expensive things.

So he was good at it.

And, and so he refused to do it.

You know, I mean, this is, the history of the war, of,

of culture is filled with, um, you know, things like the, the

the

industry of Milan, if you sold in, if you sold textiles that were

manufactured elsewhere, they would set your factory on fire and the, in the 14

Sure, sure.

It's protection.

You're trying to protect.

It's protectionism is obviously a stigma of a term today, but they

were protecting what they viewed as their livelihood, as their, as

the status quo wasn't about power.

It was also about like families.

And so they're like, no, no, no, no, no.

We have to control this.

There's so many examples of this, like you can't call champ like sparkling

wine, champagne unless it comes out of a

Oh, or bourbon or, yeah.

Kentucky bourbon versus, you know,

is like that too

No, the French are just very particular about everything as.

Parmesan is Italian, but Yeah.

yeah.

No, well, but you know what I

mean, of course they are very particular.

Yes.

And look, people are trying to protect a brand, a status, a status quo here.

Well, I, you know, I think individuals have different

reactions to this whole thing.

Like if you're like a very pro-union person, you're like, absolutely,

we gotta stop these robots.

If you're a very, like, if you love fine food, you're like, oh

no, I really prefer the cheese to, to be labeled Exactly right.

And you might not be a really pro-union, but it's kind of, it's,

there's a spectrum of protectionism

for sure, for

humans, and I think everybody kind of goes somewhere onto that spectrum.

It's a, it's ultimately, in a funny way, it's always a conservative mindset.

We need to slow the change down.

We always feel like we need to slow the change

and it doesn't.

You can be really liberal and have a very conservative

mindset about change in labor.

You can be really, uh, conservative and be really excited about technological

change, but really believe that the cheese should stay the same, which is

actually almost like being pro-labor.

It's humans are funny.

Humans

are quite complicated.

In fact, when I hear a lot of the argument.

around the dangers of of, of, you know, I image generation and,

and, and chat g p t and whatnot.

It, to me, it, it sounds like it's coming from liberal voices, and I don't

mean that to stereotype or whatever.

Oh, it is,

it is, right.

is.

It's, it's people.

Well, I mean, look,

but fundamentally it's actually to try to maintain a status quo.

It's quite conservative.

It is.

It, look, this is what's tricky.

So you have people online who are making, let's say $500 a month selling pictures

of wizards that they draw on their.

their, on their

Because people want wizard avatars and wizard images and, okay,

That sounds fun.

That's cool.

And it's, it's, but it's a major source of income for them.

And maybe they have a health condition or maybe like all sorts

of reasons that this is a really important thing for them to do.

And they finally found it.

They found a way to pay some rent.

Yeah, with their, with their wizard pictures.

And

Probably something they enjoyed doing too.

a Absolutely.

The greatest thing that can happen in your life is when

your creative work gets aligned.

Now, someone can say, and let's say that that artist is named Squiggles.

That's their, their, you know, so now you can go to stable diffusion

or Dolly and say, please draw me a wizard in the style of squiggles.

Tell everyone what stable diffusion or dolly

These are AI image generation tools.

If you've heard about you, you tell them what you want them to

draw and they draw it for you, and they'll do it in certain styles.

Now, you could say, draw me a picture of the Washington Monument

and the style of Leonardo DaVinci.

No one's gonna get upset about that.

Okay, so you, you're typing words

you're typing words in, and you're getting pictures as a result.

And they look pretty good.

And it's, so, you're typing words in, it spins for a bit

and it, it spits out a completely.

A picture, an image that's never been seen before by anyone in the world?

No, but it,

it's generating art.

It has a style Okay.

That it can look like a photograph or an illustration.

And the style, it learns the styles from looking in pictures on the internet.

So squiggles has drawn all is is really well known for their wizard pictures.

Yeah.

And so the AI is pretty good at drawing those wizards in the style of squi.

Sometimes they'll have extra.

rooms.

Yep.

sometimes the wand will, will blur into their chest.

zoom out,

I'm zooming out.

Tech has shown up again.

There go the jobs chat.

G p t.

What is that?

That is a conversational, it's the equivalent of the art thing,

but for words, so you can say, write me, we did it once on this podcast.

Write me a podcast about two guys in Brooklyn.

It's pretty generic.

It's a little madlib still.

So instead of outputting an image, it outputs text.

But it can also, it's, that's interesting, right?

Cuz it can also output, uh, programming, it can output code

Whoa.

yeah.

That's some good stuff.

Now what, what has got people collectively kind of hot and

bothered about this is that.

It went into all of, let's say, all of GitHub and it indexed

all the code and GitHub.

Did it?

Uh, a lot of it.

Okay, so that's how it learned to

code.

That's where the code is, but it doesn't, it's no great respecter of

all the licenses in GitHub like it, so, so licensing is a big deal in code and

you say, this is G P L V3 or whatever.

ways you can use other people's code.

and it just went to town.

It's just like, now here's some code for you.

It's equivalent like, it's like stack overflow or it's just like,

and so, um, so Oh, oh, cut and paste.

All good.

Okay.

And so now there's this very tricky, like, is that fair use?

Is that there are peop there's

it's complicated.

They're working, I think there's a class action lawsuit underway.

Sure, sure, sure,

so there's a lot of people trying to figure this out.

I think in many ways, this is an old story, right?

Um, uh,

Tech

Finds ways to innovate and automate and whatnot.

And then the status quo, and which the status quo can oftentimes mean

someone's job or someone's livelihood is either threatened, um, uh, diminished.

So yeah, they still have the job, but it's no nowhere near as valuable as it

used to be, or just eliminated entirely.

Right?

Like, and so, um, that is the history of technology.

I, I do find, Comfort in the fact that if you look at technology, the

technology graph going upward, you also see prosperity generally going upward.

And I am talking about the western world for the, for the moment, but even China

and the Far East has seen an explosion of, of, of wealth and disparity.

Partially

or in many ways, in many cases.

Very prominently driven by technology.

Sure.

And so it's not like there's, you know, this kicked off of famine,

uh, because of a piece of tech.

Um, humans have been forced to adapt, but we've always been forced to adapt.

That's the history of humans.

Um, and so I, I think if we zoom back down to that artist.

That you're talking about?

Squiggles.

Squiggles.

Um, I do have some advice.

This is an advice podcast.

I would, I, I have some advice for, for

so, uh, what,

that in a minute.

Give some advice to squiggles.

squiggle.

I think if.

you

Humans are incredibly adapt, adaptable.

They're, you ever meet someone who's a really good writer, but they

actually happen to be like one of the funniest people you've ever met.

For

Examples.

You can, you're talking about me, I'm

talking about Paul Ford.

Um, you ever meet someone who's, uh, I have a dear, dear family member

who is, uh, manages an IT team, but is also a spectacular singer.

Like really, really just world class.

Yes.

And so humans are not monolithic in what they do.

You are not defined by your wizard drawings.

You're defined by a lot more than that.

You happen to have some artistic skill cuz somebody's given

you money for wizard drawings.

But if someone said, okay, you know what?

I wanna commission you to do the mural in my restaurant.

Okay.

And then you build, actually, ha, I know someone who

paints murals and he paints 'em for businesses and nonprofits and whatnot.

Um, makes a modest living, but he's happy and, and, and he, his

relationships are meaningful.

What I'm getting at here is that you sh if you, if you get too married to your

output, to the form of what you produce in a very static way, you're already

sort of viewing yourself as quite.

Uh, uh, I'll tell you what, chat if, if chat g p t is ever crushed by some

other startup or co or technology, I'll tell you what, it's not gonna do.

It's not gonna find another job.

job.

Sure.

It's just gonna get shut down, right.

And then we'll move on.

Humans are incredibly adaptable.

So, back to the story.

you, you think that that squiggles made a categorical error by

defining themselves in terms of their style and output as a wizard drawer?

stuff.

What?

In fact,

I, I wouldn't say error.

I'd say they, they limited the definition of who they are

and what they're capable of.

By just saying, I draw wizards for a living.

You know what's tricky here is that

here?

culturally you get into a zone where you go, this is who I am.

I'm a wizard drawer.

I am not part of the economy.

I make these wizards, people like them.

When

comes to creatives, it gets

gets real dicey.

It gets real dicey.

This

real tricky,

you know, like it, it is a very complicated conversation because

what happens, Is all people are in their worlds and they want to just keep

drawing their wizards until they don't.

And if you say to them, I'm very sorry, but we robots can draw wizards, now

you need to go do something else.

You've offended their soul.

Like you've really come at them at a level that's really deep.

Do

you.

Cast doubt on who they are.

That's right.

, that's a hell of a thing.

that, and then that

You are not a pilot.

You're like walking into the cockpit, Paul, who told you, you're a pilot.

You're not a

pilot.

You, you can't fly this

You can't fly this plane.

That's a devastating thing to hear.

Right?

And I, I do think, to me, I think the approach that might be

the healthiest is for squiggles to get into verified squiggles because I

think if there is a market where people are using robots to make avatars, Of

your, of the wizards and your style.

Yeah.

Then there you probably have more value going on in what you're doing than you're

able to to fully realize and so you should figure out how to do verified wizards.

I'm going to, I'm going to.

That's nice.

Have you ever seen footage of the guy like moving the sandbags

to like hold off the flood?

That's.

the finger?

Yeah.

clearly useless cuz there's just too much water coming.

Yeah.

Uh, I think they can head that off for a bit.

They can buy some time, but the truth is, if we look at history as an indicator,

You're kind of done and then you move on and you innovate in other ways, like

humans have been incredibly good at, I hate the term retrain by the way.

It's a terrible term.

It's like, we're gonna retrain you, meaning delete what you did and who you

are, and we'll put something else in.

We'll put new software in.

And that's not fair to that person because that, that, that skill, that

craft, that culture you grew up in, that defined who you are, should be viewed

in a more macro way and zoom out a bit.

You're more than just your wizard drawings.

You're an artist and you can do other things.

Again, creatives, it's a tricky conversation because you're now asking to,

to leave a, a realm of purity that they

Well, and it's also where their power is and their control.

Yes.

Right now, I will say, When I look at this stuff, I do think a lot of it is madlibs.

I don't think that the global desire for wizard drawings in the style of squiggles

is this like, eternal thing that will never be, I, I I think people get bored.

I really do.

I think you need humans to come up with stuff, and we want that connection.

connection.

I, I think we've seen it, right?

You know, I'll tell you, I had a job 20 years ago.

Okay.

And it was, I was writing copy about Yamaha synthesizers.

I thought you were gonna say Yamaha Motorcycles, but you're

That would've No, I'm, that's, I'm definitely not that cool.

So

marketing copy.

Oh yeah.

For like the websites and so on.

Okay.

Here's what a Yamaha synthesizer is.

It's, there might be 500 different skews.

There might be, um, which are Stanford apparently Shopkeeping units.

I thought that was cool.

I just learned that the other day.

Um, so 500 different skews, but each one has like a hundred different features

Mm.

and there might be five features different between each one.

Here's a good.

Arabic music, different tuning system by default.

Got it.

So we'll have the Arabic system built in.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I have to write a line of copy in the outline.

Look con uh, features Arabic tuning.

Right.

Okay.

I do a hundred or I actually do like 500 of those.

I put them in a database and then they get translated into 16

different languages and they get associated with the different skews.

it.

So snippets get glued together to define different products and

there's hundreds of combinations.

And it is like, it, it's content strategy

in it's purest form, right?

Like just,

Sounds like a terrible job.

I love that job.

Fair enough.

love that one because I, I like got the database going

and they were like, wow, you don't have to do this in a spreadsheet.

I'm like, nah, it's relational.

Let's do it in the database high five.

It was pretty cool.

That's great.

But I'm looking at chat G P T and I'm like, and all the translations

that are available now and so on.

And I'm like, that is,

not, you don't need a person to do all

You need a person to guide it.

You need a person to maybe write one or two little examples.

You need the info, but you know,

is that bad or good.

That chat, e p t is gonna take care of that personally.

I mean it, I like that job.

It was good, but it it, but I don't, I don't have a strong emotional

reaction to chat G p t doing it.

strong, I think you're a great example of the capacity.

To grow that we all have.

Yeah.

have, you didn't build a career as instruction manual guy

or marketing guy for synthesizers.

Uh, you sort of meandered if actually your career, we don't have to get

into your career, but your career is a lot of meandering and touching

different things and learning.

You're, you're driven by learning in many ways, right?

And so that you are a great example of, of how you shouldn't view.

Something like chat, G P T or stable diffusion as an existential threat

to what you're about because you can grow that wizard, that person

who's drawing really good wizards probably can draw a lot of really

good things and is probably has other skills tied to that that they can do.

Uh, and

that's not what they're saying on their Twitter account,

It's scary.

Change is scary.

People, people struggle with.

change,

Especially change that threatens part of your identity.

Sometimes the news is bad.

Yes.

Sometimes it just sucks.

Sometimes it sucks.

Yeah.

And I, I feel that as, as you know, whatever kind of capitalist we are,

like there's this obligation to be like, no, no, the economy's great.

It's gonna be good for you.

Now, sometimes it sucks, sometimes it sucks.

And, and I, I don't want to, I don't wanna like cast aside these

sentiments cuz it is, it's can suck.

It can really

What happened with Asad, we didn't even finish the story.

So Assad refused to take that gig.

No, he, he wasn't gonna go to India, wasn't gonna train people to do,

and he was eventually let go.

Not related to it, but mainly because they don't need the US staff to set

diamonds with the team in India.

It was a fraction of the cost and that was the end of that.

So his fear came true.

He knew where this was going.

Yeah.

He's like, it's the end.

He called it the end of his craft.

and, and what his point was that there, he viewed it as more than

like robotic, what he did, right?

He viewed it as like he took pride in the quality of what he was

doing.

He was interpreting what the materials were.

Really How,

was great at what he did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, uh, he had to figure something out.

I mean, threw him into a little bit of a depression initially, but then he figured

something out and then he, you know, we lived in New York City, the Diamond

District is in Manhattan on 47th Street.

He knew a lot of people there.

Went into a partnership with someone.

Uh, he became sort of something akin to like a, a B2B middle

man in the jewelry business.

Buy supplies of this buy.

Sometimes he would buy the raw materials and create the, the

product and then sell that.

He did all kinds of stuff.

He just kind of had to figure it out.

And he did well.

He did in many cases better afterwards than before.

And so

it's sad that his craft went outta the world.

That's sad.

It is sad that his crafts on another wall, but you know what,

what craft didn't exist at that time?

JavaScript.

Yeah.

right.

New crafts take hold in the world as well.

And, and there's a lot of like, I mean, boat building like by

hand isn't a thing, uh, anymore.

Uh, there was a day where you're a craft person making, but a lot it is, it is

sad because a little bit of, a little bit of, um, a little bit of culture

dies when a craft goes away, right?

Yeah.

Beyond just the individual experience of that wizard artist.

Right.

Often things that reach back a really long term.

Yes.

So, okay, so onward when Asad, he, he had to figure it out.

And, and that is, if there's one piece of advice I would

give to people who are sort of finding anxiety with all this stuff, it is that

you are not defined by your output.

You are be, there's more to you than that.

And the world, uh, is going to welcome those that adapt and grow.

Retrain fine if that's your, your plan.

A lot of times it's about the relationships you have, the reputation

you built, the skills that are underline, the skills that everyone sees.

Having, being a good artist means you have taste.

It means you have a good eye.

It means you have certain,

See, here's, here's what's wild cuz I made my living

as a writer for quite a while.

You are defined by your output.

Your Honor.

You're not,

oh, this is the thing, right?

I had to figure that out.

You got you, you

in most,

I realized that defining myself by my output was

dangerous and bad for my family.

Like I, I wasn't gonna be able to make enough money to give them a good life.

Well, you were a

writer.

I was a writer in 20.

In 20

and, and a very successful

I was doing great and I I was playing out the still, wasn't it?

No, I saw the endgame.

The endgame was me at age 54 fat calling a 27 year old editor

saying, can you get me that check?

I need to pay my healthcare.

Okay.

So you did something different.

You could have kept writing you.

You're an example of preempting that in fact, and saying, this can't be

the limit of what I can do in the

And I wanted, I wanted to hustle.

I wanted to sell.

I like it.

I like diving in that, that

You're fortunate to have that built in.

A lot of people don't.

I guess part of what I'm saying here is like I, I'm not gonna convince

someone to go into sales, right?

Yeah, I come from a line of salesman.

But I can tell people that they are more, I'm not telling

people Don't worry about it.

You'll figure it out.

I'm saying you're more than what you think you are today at this very moment.

And in fact, I actually what you're saying and this is the advice.

Worry about it.

it.

Worry about it.

Alright.

well that's it.

If I'm, anybody wants to get in touch with that,

If you wanna get in touch, uh, hello@zford.com and give us five

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Have a lovely day.